The BURIED Book Club discussion

Graham Billing, a New Zealand author who started writing (non fiction initially) in the 60s and continued right through to his death in 2001. Quite well known and well regarded within the literary establishment in New Zealand from what I can tell(though most of what's been written on him doesn't appear to be on the internet , as I can only find scattered references to it), but no one seems to actually read him, here or elsewhere.

Here's a (possibly incomplete) bibliography of his fiction, I've left out his nonfiction stuff. A couple of these aren't on goodreads yet or have errors in titles that could use librarian correction.
Forbush and the Penguins (1965)
The Alpha Trip (1970) (this one's apparently a political thriller so probably not of much interest)
Statues (1971)
The Slipway(1974)
The Primal Therapy Of Tom Purslane (1980)
Changing Countries (1980) (poetry collection apparently)
The Chambered Nautilus (1993)
The Lifeboat (1997)
The Blue Lion(2002) (published posthumously)

Most of that info came from the New Zealand book council's page on him here, which is the most info on him anywhere on the internet: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/Writers...

There's a review of his last book The Blue Lion here, which also has some biographical info and brief reference to some of his earlier work: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/n...

Weirdly, Forbush and the Penguins was apparently adapted into a film starring John Hurt. It doesn't sound like it's worth tracking down though.

I have three of his books now(Forbush and the Penguins, Statues and The Chambered Nautilus), having bought them for a dollar each last week. I'm going to try and read them soon so should be able to talk about them in more detail wherever I do that. But from the very brief looks I had in them at pages the prose looked interesting.

I'm about halfway through The Chambered Nautilus and it's pretty cool and definitely of interest to this group. He like longish sentences and less use of commas than you would expect, and there's shifting perspectives in the story - it's being narrated by one character, but it frequently jumps back and forth in time to examine different events in the character's lives, and also backwards to the 19th century to the life of a person the narrator character is writing about. At one point the narrator is talking about what happened to his friend, and it shifts to extracts from the friend's diaries, with the narrator occasionally explaining things in brackets. There's also a lot of stuff about myths and beliefs and how they develop, we've had a James Frazer namedrop and a lot of references to ritually killed kings and other things.

I read The Chambered Nautilus and I liked it even though it was a bit rough in places. I'd be interested to see what a non new zealander would make of it. I'm not good at writing reviews but i wrote a thing here where I quote a memorable passage from it: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Intriguing! I wonder if his work turns up in book shops out here i the States. Thanks, he's on my radar now in any event.

there's a few copies listed on abebooks in the US, seems to be more of his early stuff which makes sense because I think at least some of it was published in Britain.

hello, i read The Slipway and it's very good. it's less ambitious than the chambered nautilus but better constructed i think. some of the same kind of myth/ritual stuff from the chambered nautilus shows up in this one too, although it's much less prominent. i also added a bunch of info to his author profile, it looks less barren now.

also, the other day i found this cool little anecdote about his later years, makes him sound a bit of a tragic figure really: http://davidmcgill.co.nz/blog/billing...