Exotic flavour in N.Z.

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 26

Exotic flavour in N.Z.

In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot. By GreviUe Texidor. Victoria University Press, 1987. 245 pp. $21.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Margaret Quigley) Greville Texidor and her third husband came to New Zealand as refugees in 1940 and after a meeting with Frank Sargeson she began, with his advice and encouragement, to write and publish serious fiction. She had led a varied and interesting life before her arrival in Auckland, having worked as a dancer in Paris and Buenos Aires, and fought in the Anarchist Militia during the Spanish Civil War. Her experiences, particularly those in Spain, give an autobiographical base to some of the stories in this volume. She lived in New Zealand for eight years only, departing in the late forties for Australia, and thereafter writing little. “The sad truth is” she wrote from New South Wales to Frank Sargeson, “that since you have given up being responsible for it I have never written another thing.” The work she did finish in New Zealand has long been out of print, and her name is familiar only through the autobiographies of Janet Frame and Frank Sargeson, so it is interesting to have collected here all her published and some previously unpublished

fiction. Kendrick Smithyman edited “In Fifteen Minutes” and has provided an introduction which traces her life and gives valuable insights into her work. The volume begins with her novella “These Dark Glasses” described by Frank Sargeson in Landfall as “one of the most beautiful prose works ever achieved in this country.” It ends with another “little novel,” "Goodbye Forever,” which is set in Auckland in the 1940 s and which gives a moving and sensitive portrayal of the disintegrating mental state of Lili, an Austrian refugee. In between these two striking pieces are a dozen short stories of various settings, length and excellence, some of which have been unnecessarily rescued from her unpublished manuscripts. A few are worthwhile — sharp, precise in observation, and achieving the effect they aim at. Others are less effective, and one or two lose themselves completely in a welter of images and emotions. Greville Texidor, “a surpassingly beautiful young woman,” provided an exotic and unusual flavour to the New Zealand literary scene in the 1940 s and this publication by Victoria University Press is a commendable venture which may reawaken interest in her work.