The BURIED Book Club discussion

New Zealand writer who is mainly known nowadays for her non-fiction work about education(she was a teacher) but she also wrote some novels, which no one appears to read.
Two of these novels (Spinster and Incense To Idols) were listed in Time magazine's 'best books of the year list and Spinster apparently reached the New York times best seller list in the US. They seem to have had favourable reviews internationally, but were received to mixed reactions in New Zealand. In the case of Spinster, "New Zealand critics found fault with the novel’s emotionalism and, the literary climate at the time being one of rigorous regionalism, its foreign protagonist." Spinster was also adapted into a film starring Shirley MacLaine, but i don't know if it's any good, Ashton-Warner didn't like that they changed her mid 40s protagonist into an attractive 20 something.
Incense to Idols was reacted to very negatively by NZ critics, and after this not much more attention was paid to her books in NZ: "Local critics lacked the vocabulary to deal with a novel like Incense to Idols. They misunderstood its comic aspects and were deeply shocked by the gruesome image of Germaine placing her miscarried foetus into a wine glass. They were resolute in their rejection of it."


She seems to have had a pretty love-hate relationship with New Zealand in general, when she got a few awards and things for her first book she only very reluctantly accepted them, and was convinced that the country had rejected her.

I read incense to Idols a few weeks ago and and I can see why it would have been seen negatively at the time, it's quite psychological(an outlier for NZ lit at the time, which was and sorta still is dominated by down to earth realism), keeping the reader in the head of the protagonist throughout, and she gets quite scathing about NZ society, there's a part where a character talks about how the country worships the 'suicidal cult of the average man'. But it's quite good, I was pretty impressed overall.

Here's a list of her fiction, I've left out the nonfiction stuff.
Spinster (1958)
Incense To Idols (1960)
Bell Call (1965)
Greenstone (1966)
Myself (1966)
O Children of the World (children's stories and songs so probably of limited interest,1974)
Stories from the River (published posthumously in 1986, not sure if it's a novel or short stories)

There's a few good sources on her online, a brief entry from the Oxford guide to New Zealand literature here: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/Writers...
and a more indepth biographical article here that talks a bit about critical response here, which i quoted up the page: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/schola...