Indirections: A Memoir 1909-1947
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Few literary lives illuminate an era quite like that of Charles Brasch, and Indirections: A Memoir 1909–1947 stands as a testament to one of New Zealand's most formidable cultural architects. This autobiography chronicles the first four decades of Brasch's life — from his privileged Dunedin upbringing through years of travel, intellectual awakening, and the turbulent decades of the mid-twentieth century — capturing the inner life of a man who would go on to found the landmark literary journal *Landfall*. With a title drawn from Shakespeare's Hamlet (By indirections find directions out), the memoir announces its own method: a circuitous, meditative approach to self-examination that mirrors the author's restrained yet deeply felt poetic sensibility. Brasch writes with an elegance that is at once confessional and carefully measured, presenting his personal history against the sweeping backdrop of New Zealand's cultural awakening and the gathering storm of World War II. The memoir situates itself at the intersection of private memory and national identity, arguing implicitly that to understand a country's literature is to understand those who chose to nurture it. For readers drawn to the literary history of the Southern Hemisphere or the memoir tradition of the modernist era, Indirections poses a quietly urgent question: what does it mean to build a culture from the ground up?
Author: Charles Brasch
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Few literary lives illuminate an era quite like that of Charles Brasch, and Indirections: A Memoir 1909–1947 stands as a testament to one of New Zealand's most formidable cultural architects. This autobiography chronicles the first four decades of Brasch's life — from his privileged Dunedin upbringing through years of travel, intellectual awakening, and the turbulent decades of the mid-twentieth century — capturing the inner life of a man who would go on to found the landmark literary journal *Landfall*. With a title drawn from Shakespeare's Hamlet (By indirections find directions out), the memoir announces its own method: a circuitous, meditative approach to self-examination that mirrors the author's restrained yet deeply felt poetic sensibility. Brasch writes with an elegance that is at once confessional and carefully measured, presenting his personal history against the sweeping backdrop of New Zealand's cultural awakening and the gathering storm of World War II. The memoir situates itself at the intersection of private memory and national identity, arguing implicitly that to understand a country's literature is to understand those who chose to nurture it. For readers drawn to the literary history of the Southern Hemisphere or the memoir tradition of the modernist era, Indirections poses a quietly urgent question: what does it mean to build a culture from the ground up?