BOOK REVIEW: On Archiving, the opening essay in Flora Feltham’s beautifully crafted debut collection of 13 essays, provides a fascinating glimpse into the work she carried out at the Alexander Turnbull Library. She spent most of her work day as an archivist “in the company of the dead”, tenderly caring for the past, “professionally responsible for pampering time’s debris”.
The collection digs deep into the archives of Feltham’s life in a courageous attempt to find meaning and understanding. She skilfully braids together disparate themes of marriage, mothers, fathers, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, grief and loss, weaving, archiving and the mutability of memory, all with a compassionate and insightful eye. Throughout the collection, Feltham shapes narratives from her astute observations about her daily life as an archivist, writer, wife, daughter, sister, friend and weaver.
Proust Yourself reflects the slipperiness of memory as Feltham tries to recall events in the early 2000s when her mother “had committed herself to an in-patient psychiatric facility in Dunedin”, leaving Feltham, then aged 16 and still at school, living at home alone with her slightly older brother Humphrey.
The essay Dekmantel Selectors refers to a music festival featuring top DJs at the Garden Resort in Tisno, Croatia, attended by Feltham with her husband, Pat, and a group of friends. This essay represents an intriguing anomaly in the collection. The careful, self-aware, kind and sensible woman personified in the other essays places herself in a situation that is all about losing control.
In Tisno, her friends’ first priority was acquiring a smorgasbord of drugs to keep everyone awake for the duration of the festival. Contact was made with Ivan, a local drug dealer. Each item in the smorgasbord of drugs on offer “was identified by an emoji: a horse for ketamine, glasses for speed, leaves for weed, a puffy white cloud for coke”. Payment was requested in cash with Croatian kuna. Flora envisaged Ivan: “Slick and leather-jacketed, silent and mean. He probably had a gun.”
Swigging mini vodkas, snorting K, topped up with bumps of speed, Flora and her friends could keep going for hours. “We couldn’t stop dancing even if we wanted to.” When she became jaded from being continuously high, feeling jumpy, wasted and perpetually awake dancing, “unable to face more nights of partying”, Feltham opted out of the drug taking. She had already “lost count of how many days in a row we’d been drunk or high, even before Croatia”.
One of the most impactful and moving essays is The Raw Material, an account of the author learning to weave, interlaced with a depiction of a painful interlude in her marriage. Looking “at the world through weaving eyes” was “to feel everything from the inside out”. A loose thread was tugged free from the fabric of Feltham’s marriage, exposing the “raw material”, when Pat confessed he’d kissed another woman. Her shock and his shame precipitated a marital crisis that forced the couple to confront the consequences of Pat’s apparent addiction to drugs and alcohol, and Flora’s responses. It’s a candid and gutsy account of some of the valuable insights the couple gleaned from a year’s worth of weekly counselling sessions.
Essays reporting on Feltham’s attendance at the New Zealand Federation of Meccano Modellers biennial convention with her father and at the Romance Writers of New Zealand conference are also standouts.
Feltham is a compassionate and inquiring chronicler of the quotidian details that contribute to building a life. With the exception of the essay set in Croatia, she doesn’t stray too far from home, finding fascination in a forensic exploration of the ordinary and the familiar.
Bad Archive by Flora Feltham (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35) is available now.
