Trifecta

by Ian Wedde

Trifecta looks at the odds in the lives of the three children of Martin and Agnes Klepka. Martin was one of the refugees of Nazism who famously brought Modernist architecture and ‘real coffee’ to New Zealand. Many years after his early death from a heart attack, Klepka’s children are struggling in their different ways with the difficult legacy of their charismatic, overbearing father. Sandy, who was disliked by his father, is a cultural historian in the twilight of his career, disgraced, divorced and reduced to a .2 position at Auckland University. Veronica, who bored her father, is struggling with a failing art deco Napier tour company and an alcoholic husband. And Mick, Martin Klepka’s favorite, a gambling, methamphetamine and sex addict, is still living alone in the Red House, his father’s plagiarized masterpiece.

155 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 10, 2015

About the author

New Zealand poet, fiction writer, critic, and art curator.

Ian Wedde is the author of eight novels, fifteen collections of poetry, two collections of essays, and a number of anthologies and art monographs. His most recent novel is The Reed Warbler (2020), and The Little Ache – a German notebook, written while he was in Berlin to research The Reed Warbler, was published in July 2021. His memoir, The Grass Catcher: A Digression About Home, was published in 2014, and his Selected Poems in 2017. Decentred: Selected Essays 2004–2020 will be published in late 2022.

Ian is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships and grants. Among the most recent are the Meridian Energy Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship at Menton in France (2005), a Fulbright New Zealand Travel Award to the USA (2006), an Arts Foundation Laureate Award (2006), a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Auckland (2007), an ONZM (2010), and the Landfall Essay Prize (2010). In 2011–13 Wedde was New Zealand’s poet laureate. He was awarded the Creative New Zealand Writers’ Residency in Berlin 2013–14, and in 2014 the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement (poetry). He lives in Auckland.

Reviews

[Andrew Fisher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Firstly it's Ian Wedde not Weddes. And this can't be a complete review, because of some sort of printing/binding error at Printlink, skipping the second half of part 1 and repeating the first half of part 2. Anyway I'd call the book mostly comedy, very sarcastic, very New Zealand and similar to other stories set in New Zealand, even Katherine Mansfield. I grew up around and have lived in Wellington, so I'm very familiar with the Courtenay Place, Oriental Bay, Mt. Victoria region, the main focus of the story. I'm also an adult with two adult siblings though we're not quite as old as the three in this story. But I could imagine doing a similar thing with my siblings, being forced to meet up and confront the past over some big event. Even though it's a short book, I wouldn't say it's an easy read. It has a casual, comic feel like other New Zealand stories and is funny at times, but I'd read the siblings making sarcastic, mocking observations and not get what they meant a lot of the time, but didn't want to keep re-reading this stuff. You could say that the characters were a bit too clever and smug for me. I suppose they get a little less "clever" in the final part when things get a bit more real and serious.