Novel
Potiki
Patricia Grace · 1986
Synopsis
In a small Māori coastal community, Hemi and Roimata raise, with their children James, Tangimoana and Manu, the young Toko, born disabled to a mother with an intellectual disability and an unknown father, who has visions of what is to come. The slaughterhouse closes, Hemi loses his job, and the family turns to its land, to fishing and to the stories of the ancestors. Developers then want to open a road to a seaside resort, which would destroy the cemetery and the meeting house; the community refuses to sell.
Context
The book was written in 1985, during the Victoria University writing fellowship, and appeared the following year from Penguin in New Zealand. Its author refused to add a glossary: Maori was not to be treated as a foreign language in its own country; Publishers Weekly held this against her. Some accused her of racism towards the Pakeha, which she rejected. Translated into seven languages, it appeared in French from Arléa in 1993, then in a new translation in Pirae in 2021; Penguin brought it into its classics in 2020.
Who it is for
About two hundred and forty pages in French. Several narrators take turns, and the story advances in a spiral rather than in a straight line.
Prizes and reception
Fiction prize at the New Zealand Book Awards in 1987, LiBeraturpreis in Frankfurt in 1994; more than twenty-five thousand copies sold in 1998.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.