Book Review: This Explains Everything

This is von Sturmer at his best (he's been writing and publishing since the 80s), large as a landscape, a capacious consciousness unleashed for all humanity. He walks us beside his faltering father in New Zealand, then his uncle and his grandfather in early twentieth century Australia. The tales are tall but never false.

River and stone, leaf and frond, friend and relative all come under his purview like mountains and desert under the loving eye of a roving naturalist.

Houses are always in motion, changing positions, crossing from suburb to suburb and from town to town. If you stepped onto your roof, you could study this migration; you could see that the houses around you are walking towards the horizon. . . . One day, when the world outside begins to roll past your window, you will know that your own house is departing, and that the journey will be unstable and even dangerous.

You cannot help but be moved by the linguistic certainty, the deeply personal of this twenty first century visionary. His Zen training explodes across the pages in an understated, unmentioned obeisance to the way things are.

My grandfather's dream of discovering mineral wealth ended abruptly by a dry rock-hole. . . . It was then, in that arid setting amid the buzzing of flies, that he admitted their mission had failed; there was no tin, there had never been any tin. The samples he had used to impress the Syndicate and their shareholders back in Perth were old ones, retained from his days in South America. All the time they had spent in the Kimberleys had been utterly wasted. . . . At that point my grandfather told my uncle that he reached for his revolver. Then he stopped. It wasn't worth it. Nothing was worth anything. Both men sat down by the rock-hole for a while without exchanging another word.

His travels are wide and learned, yet humble and unpretentious. Once you put the book down you will slowly realize the titular truth: this explains everything.

Here's a box of beehive matches
Strike one, you'll go up in
Flames
Our life on this earth is so
Limited
But good products never
Change
Change
Good products never change

Von Sturmer has created a classic that will fertilize thought far beyond the borders of his island nation in the South Pacific. For maximum impact, the book could be read at a single sitting should the reader be blessed with a long, long attention span.

Dale Johnson

Dale Johnson has published prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, in New Zealand and the USA. He and his wife live and work in Auckland and one daughter lives in Wellington while the other lives in Auckland. He specialized in Postcolonial and Postmodern literature for his Masters thesis at University of Auckland.

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