1This beautifully presented publication is the record of a colloquium held at the University of Verona in 2004. The plan was to bring together short story writers and critics and facilitate a conversation. The plan worked. The interviews here are excellent, not only highly readable but also displaying a genuine engagement between the interviewers and writers.The result is an active conversation that includes all the interviews and spills into the question sessions, which are usefully appended to the individual pieces. Bill Manhire, I think, would approve of the word conversation, the opposite of a monologue in which an authoritative figure delivers judgements ex cathedra. It is a term he has applied to the literary text to indicate the open exchange between different voices he believes should operate there.There is a Manhirish touch also to the attitude towards rules of inclusion in the book. Whether poet, Manhire, or novelist, Sia Figiel, is truly qualified to be included in a book on the short story is questionable, their inclusion calls into question the absence of more central practitioners such as Owen Marshall. Manhire himself cheerfully describes his presence in the book as a fraud. Figiel’s observation that she “kind of think[s] in short stories” is a little vague. Editor, Righetti, defends her inclusion on the basis that “the structure that connects South Pacific modes of oral storytelling to Western fiction justifies her inclusion”. I find this unconvincing as the argument applies equally to the novel; nevertheless, for me, the stretching of the boundaries of the category “short story writer” to include these two is one of the chief sources of the collection’s success. Claudio Gorlier’s conversation with Manhire provides, not so much a theoretical backbone for the volume as a body of observations and perceptions which open out the issues of genre, play, culture that run through the book. By settling on the notion of ‘transcendence of genres’ in Manhire’s own work, Gorlier and Manhire speak also to a general line of development in the short story as a form. Manhire seems curiously more comfortable with a European interviewer than he usually is on home ground. Here he is not at all cagey or guarded.

2There were points raised in each interview I would have liked to see directly carried across to the others so that their implications in the different national contexts might be teased out. Laurie Hergenhan’s remark to Frank Moorhouse about the “‘infrastructure’ of literature”—grants, fellowships, writing programmes, all the points at which creativity touches the institutional and the governmental—is especially germane to the New Zealand situation. Manhire has been the subject of a local revolt against the power of the university writing programme, the commodification of writers and writing, and the bogey of globalisation. No doubt, it was a relief for him not to have to engage with these topics in the pugnacious ways they have figured locally, but there was an opportunity to address them here in less provincial terms—and without the lapses into vituperation. Similarly, I felt there were opportunities to follow up the problems of culture in settler societies that might have been taken further by an extra effort to look sideways, from Australia to New Zealand and the Pacific, and vice versa. Kate Grenville’s remarks on contemporary Australia and Aboriginal history are especially apposite to settler societies. Manhire comments on the rather different New Zealand situation with admirable honesty and care and the issue of biculturalism is taken as well by Grace. Still, I wished for the comparison to be made explicit. In the Panel Discussion at the close of the volume, Grenville nicely takes up the issue of comparison, observing that Australia’s neighbours have moved “beyond an exhausted postmodern playfulness to engage with the postcolonial project”. Elaboration of the point was, no doubt, beyond the scope of the colloquium, but I hope that some among the culturally alert European postgraduates and critics who participated in the lively conversations that followed each interview will follow up the differences and overlaps indicated here.

3Sia Figiel does not participate in an interview, instead offering readings from her work. This is less successful for the reader than it no doubt was for the audience (who were allowed to view the famous tattoo), but in the conversations with that audience which follow her performance Figiel is wonderfully direct, transgressive and exuberant: “when you write a book that begins with ‘When I saw the insides of a woman’s vagina for the first time I was not alone’ – hey, you’ve got to walk with a gun”. Her reflections on the intermixture of native and English in the colonial period, which now offers “a treasure of richness”, are less racy but also full of suggestion for the postcolonial reader. A particular highlight of the book is Lydia Wevers’ interview with Patricia Grace. Grace can be a difficult subject for an interview. She is not a loquacious author, and tends to be guarded about what she has to say. With Wevers she is at times remarkably forthcoming and she moves outside her comfort zones. She observes the influence of Frank Sargeson and his grasp of the kiwi voice on her early determination to become a writer, but this is already familiar. When Wevers observes of her own response as a Pakeha New Zealander to Grace’s fiction that it teaches her “what it means to be Maori in a society which is constantly not thinking about what that means”, however, she prompts a response of real interest because it seems so unrehearsed.

4The critical essays are less captivating than the conversations, as one would expect. They tend to offer work in progress in the field rather than authoritative views. Pes’s thematically driven essay is limited by the familiarity of the terms employed: “the plight of women vis-a-vis a patriarchal society”. Daniela Carpi’s essay on Manhire’s South Pacific rightly describes the collection as “experiments” with the short story rather than the thing itself. Carpi is good at linking the stories’ method of construction and their techniques of provoking readerly involvement to hypertext, reader response and liminality. Still, I do not think that Manhire ever contemplates the notion that “poetry makes time stand still, and carries away the poet to a transcendent world grounded in beauty” without the more than a sliver of irony. Carla De Petris’s essay on George Egerton’s fluent and misattributed cultural identity I found a compelling piece of research. Marta Degani’s study of linguistic-cultural hybridity in Grace’s short fiction is very promising indeed both in its general cultural analysis and in its listings of specific kinds of language use in the fiction. My only problem with the book is the introduction. Angelo Righetti has done an admirable job in bringing together his speakers and designing both the colloquium and this book. But he would have been well advised to write a much less convoluted introduction to ease the reader’s passage into what follows. There are a few small mistakes as when iwi (tribe) is included in a list of Maori oral forms, korero and waiata. There are some rather odd and awkward phrases: “looks with peeled eyes at Witting’s representation of the seesaw relationships of men and women”. But to end on a carping note would do little justice to this stimulating record of what must have been a brilliantly conceived and executed event.