Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Mannequin Makers
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1983
WEBSITE: http://www.craigcliff.com
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: New Zealander
http://thecraigcliff.blogspot.com/; father of one.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1983; married; children.
EDUCATION:International Institute of Modern Letters, M.A., c. 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Commonwealth Story Prize, judge, 2012; Dominion Post, New Zealand, columnist; University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, Robert Burns Fellow, beginning 2017. Has also worked for the State Treasury in Australia, and as a public servant in Wellington, New Zealand.
AWARDS:Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, 2011, for A Man Melting.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Craig Cliff earned his master’s degree at the International Institute of Modern Letters, where he studied creative writing. Cliff continued writing after graduation, and he also began a career in state bureaucracy. Cliff has additionally worked as a columnist for the Dominion Post, and as a judge for the Commonwealth Story Prize. He was named Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago in 2017. Cliff’s first book, the short story collection A Man Melting was published in 2010, and it won the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book the following year. Cliff’s second book, the novel The Mannequin Makers, followed in 2013.
Cliff discussed writing in both short and long form on his personal Website, explaining: “I’ve always written short fiction. It’s a natural progression to start with the shorter form and work your way up to the longer, if that’s your goal. I mostly read novels when I was younger (Douglas Coupland, Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk), so that’s what I grew up wanting to write. Tastes change, of course, and eventually I found an appreciation for subtlety (though I still love me some Vonnegut). After finishing my M.A., I really wanted to keep writing, but didn’t have the reserves of energy needed to start another novel. So I returned to short fiction.”
The Mannequin Makers is set in New Zealand in the early 1900s, and the plot pivots and the historical figure of bodybuilder Eugen Sandow. The story opens, however, on woodcarver Colton Kemp, a man who makes mannequins for a living. Colton’s wife dies in childbirth, leaving him to raise fraternal twins, Avis and Eugen, on his own. Largely unable to cope with parenting, and nurturing a strange obsession for Sandow, Colton decides to train his children to perform as human mannequins. The twins grow up on a strict regimen of diet and exercise, they have little contact with the outside world, and they are forced to stay still for hours.
Sharing his inspiration for the novel on the Qwillery website, Cliff remarked: “I had a bunch of ideas – a father raising his children to be living mannequins, a shipwreck in the Southern Ocean, something centred on Eugen Sandow – that I didn’t know would or could fit together, but they had three things in common. They needed to happen in the past. They seemed so far beyond my own experience and what I’d written previously (a.k.a. A CHALLENGE). And they felt like the sorts of scenarios or characters I’d encountered in the kinds of books I devoured as a kid . . . The more I looked into department stores and clipper ships and physical culture, the more connections I found and the harder it became to not take up the challenge.”
The Mannequin Makers was first published in New Zealand, and it was republished in the United States four years later. As a Publishers Weekly contributor noted, “New Zealander Cliff makes a stunning American debut.” A Kirkus Reviews columnist was also positive, asserting: “Despite this unconventional structure, the book’s plot is tight, the senses of time and place are strong, and Cliff’s core themes resonate throughout.” Commenting on the author’s use of point of view in the online Chicago Review of Books, Aram Mrjoian advised: “Told in four parts, the novel demonstrates Cliff’s impressive ability to switch between multiple points of view. Part two, ‘A Mannequin’s Tale,’ told in diary entries from Kemp’s teenage daughter, Avis, examines the rigid physical routine and mental preparation she and her twin brother Eugen must endure.” Mrjoian went on to announce that “Cliff . . . altogether offers a quirky voice that falls outside of much American commercial fiction. This esotericism, along with determined prose, clever bits of timeless social critique, and an eye for setting, makes The Mannequin Makers a pleasurable read.”
Another positive assessment for the novel appeared in the online Los Angeles Review of Books, and columnist Heidi North felt that, “to this New Zealand writer, Mannequin Makers feels like a very New Zealand novel in its obsession with the cruelty of the elements and the unrelenting beauty and bleakness of the landscape. Like the young ‘mannequins’ Avis and Eugen, the landscape too bears the unmistakable marks of colonization. . . . But labeling Mannequin Makers a ‘New Zealand novel’ is not meant to ghettoize it. It is a strikingly vivid tale full of startling yet believable twists anchored by the compassionate portrayal of lives overrun with obsession and the drive for perfection. It is an original and gripping read, a rich book by an accomplished writer.” Charlotte Graham-McLay, writing in the New York Times Online, was also impressed, and she found that “the distance Cliff explores best is the at times unbreachable one that divides people. In Kemp’s mannequins, Cliff illuminates the difference between human beings, dummies of carved wood and the wretches caught in between: people of flesh and blood who look and behave as if they were made of stone.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2017, review of The Mannequin Makers.
Publishers Weekly, October 2, 2017, review of The Mannequin Makers.
ONLINE
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (January 5, 2018), Aram Mrjoian, review of The Mannequin Makers.
Craig Cliff Website, http://www.craigcliff.com (March 15, 2018).
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (February 24, 2018), Heidi North, review of The Mannequin Makers.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (January 26, 2018), Charlotte Graham-McLay, review of The Mannequin Makers.
New Zealand Herald Online, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/ (February 8, 2011), review of A Man Melting.
Qwillery, http://qwillery.blogspot.com/ (March 15, 2018), author interview.
Short Review, http://www.theshortreview.com/ (March 4, 2018), review of A Man Melting.
About Craig
Standard author bio written in the third person
Craig Cliff is the author of the novel The Mannequin Makers, and the story collection A Man Melting, which won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. In addition to fiction, Craig has published poetry, essays and reviews, been a newspaper columnist and judged poetry and short story competitions. His work has been translated into German, Spanish and Romanian and he participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program in 2013. As of 2017, he resides in Dunedin as the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago.
Bonus Q&A with myself
What are you working on at the moment?
I'm writing a novel about fatherhood, Hollywood and a levitating saint.
Your last novel came out in New Zealand in 2013. What gives?
I remember getting comments back from my editor for The Mannequin Makers while my wife was in labour with our first child, so it’s very easy for me to measure the time it has taken to finish this next book. Time enough for that baby to grow past my hip and be ready to start school.
My son joined the family in 2015.
Until this year, I was working full-time to help support the family.
Is it your dream to be a full-time writer?
That depends. I've loved my time in Dunedin as the Robert Burns Fellow, which means I can write full-time, though there has been no end of interesting distractions. But when the university stops paying me, I’ll still have bills to pay, mouths to feed.
I actually enjoy my other life in the bowels of the bureaucracy (I work for the Ministry of Education). I think I'm good at it. It's nice to use a different part of my brain, to collaborate on projects and deal with other people (and harvest their lives for material for my fiction), to have a beer on Friday and toast a good week's work. You don't really get that as a writer.
I've made the choice to live in New Zealand, have a family and a mortgage and be a writer. I can have it all, just not all at once or all the time.
You attended the International Institute of Modern Letters MA programme back in 2006. Is that when you wrote the stories in A Man Melting?
No. I actually tried to write a novel that year — a great experience but I think it was a mistake to try and write a novel from go to whoa in eight months. Too many decisions were made for the sake of expedience that then became so integral to the fabric of the novel that it was beyond fixing (though I spent another year trying!). The manuscript now sits in my bottom drawer along with the novel I tried to write when I was twenty-one.
So when did you turn your attention to short fiction?
I've always written short fiction. It's a natural progression to start with the shorter form and work your way up to the longer, if that's your goal. I mostly read novels when I was younger (Douglas Coupland, Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk), so that's what I grew up wanting to write. Tastes change, of course, and eventually I found an appreciation for subtlety (though I still love me some Vonnegut). After finishing my MA, I really wanted to keep writing, but didn't have the reserves of energy needed to start another novel. So I returned to short fiction.
The first two stories I wrote after doing my MA were 'Copies' (which has since been included in three anthologies) and 'Another Language' (which won the novice section of the 2007 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards). Something clearly clicked and things began to fall into place.
In 2008, while living in Edinburgh, I tried to write one million words in 366 days (it was a leap year). I only wrote 800,737 words, but it was a very successful failure. Almost every story in A Man Melting was written or revised during that year.
Your novel, The Mannequin Makers, is quite different to your short stories. For one, it's historical. Was it a deliberate choice to go in a different direction?
Yes and no. After finishing the stories in A Man Melting, I started working on a novel that took a character from one of these stories and spent more time with him. I plugged away at this project for quite a while, but always seemed to get bogged down. The novel was set in the present and focused on a dude about my age, with experiences not dissimilar to mine.
When I finally gave up on this novel, I decided that the next thing I worked on would either be set in the past or the future. The future seemed too easy - I could just make things up - and I thought doing research would help me feel like a proper writer. So I chose to focus on two ideas that I'd been kicking around for a while that needed to take place in the past and devote the next two or three years to them.
Having said this, I don't think The Mannequin Makers is a million miles away from my short stories. I was on a panel discussion at a writers festival once about 'Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary'. I do that a little bit (like in my story 'Evolution, Eh?'), but more often I think I'm finding the ordinary in the extraordinary. In a story like 'The Skeptic's Kid', the extraordinary (extinct animals begin reappearing all around the world) is there front and centre, but the story is ultimately more concerned about the relationship of the young narrator and his mother. Same goes with The Mannequin Makers, which could be described as high concept - a window dresser raises his children to be living mannequins - but is secretly (not-so-secretly, now) more interested in what it's like to stand very still for a long time.
Interview with Craig Cliff
The Short Review: How long did it take you to write all the stories in your collection?
Craig Cliff: The oldest story in the collection was started in 2005 and the newest one finished in 2009, but most of the serious work took place in 2008 when I set myself the goal of writing a million words (and I fell 199,263 short).
TSR: Did you have a collection in mind when you were writing them?
CC: Not for a long time. There was a part of me that knew I was accumulating quite a pile of stories, but it wasn’t until midway through 2008 that I started pulling stories together to see if they could work as a book. When Random House New Zealand accepted my manuscript they suggested adding another story or two so I wrote Unnatural Selection, which closes the collection. That story picks up a number of threads from earlier in the collection, such as travel, emigration, evolution, office work, memory and childhood, but this was the only story written with any thought about how it might sit with its neighbours.
TSR: How did you choose which stories to include and in what order?
CC: When I started thinking seriously about putting a collection together I had about thirty-five stories to choose from. My first criterion was quality and I was able to dismiss a dozen stories (even a couple that had been previously published) quite quickly. Then it was a matter of fit. At the time I had a menial desk job in Edinburgh and spent hours playing around with the order of the stories in an excel spreadsheet, looking at the settings, subject matter, narrative voice. I noticed that certain elements kept popping up in different stories and started to organise the collection around these repetitions, so the story about a boy who tries to find out if it is possible to stutter in one language but not in another is followed by another story about foreign languages. I also had to be careful not to put stories that were too similar close together, so the two stories that feature the bumbling Noah "Rusty" Kissick are far enough apart that you’re pleased to see him again, but not so far that you’ve completely forgotten him.
TSR: What does the word "story" mean to you?
CC: A story is the easiest way to communicate a complex idea (one which the author is poorly qualified to discuss). A good story finds a wormhole into the reader’s own experience by a series of white lies, misdirection and dumb luck.
TSR: Do you have a reader in mind when you write stories?
CC: Not really. I’ll normally have a sense of the type of story I’m about to write (depressing navel-gazer; light-hearted piss-take; life story in five pages) but try not to think too much about a particular type of reader. Ideally, the same reader will appreciate my navel-gazing and my piss-taking – though for different reasons.
TSR: Is there anything you'd like to ask someone who has read your collection, anything at all?
CC: Did you enjoy it? (If they answer in the affirmative, I’d then remind them how books make great gifts.)
TSR: How does it feel knowing that people are buying your book?
CC: People are buying my book? *faints*
TSR: What are you working on now?
CC: I have been working on a novel for the last two years and have written two whole chapters. I’ve chucked it in a dozen times and returned to write short stories and poetry, but I always seem to limp back to the novel. I’ve also started writing a column for the local newspaper here in Wellington and am trying very hard to write about things that actually happen rather than resorting to fictional improvements.
TSR: What are the three most recent short story collections you've read?
CC: A mixture of new and old, all great in their own way: Legend of a suicide by David Vann, Self-help by Lorrie Moore and You are now entering the human heart by Janet Frame.
CraigCliff.com
Craig Cliff was born in Palmerston North in 1983. Since then he has accumulated three university degrees, experienced office life in Australia and Scotland, swum in piranha-infested waters, slept at 4,200 metres above sea level, tried to write a million words in one year and learnt there's not much to do in Liechtenstein. His short stories have been published in New Zealand and Australia; one of them made it into The Best New Zealand Short Stories edited by Owen Marshall.
Interview with
Craig Cliff
by Julie Green
You've travelled quite a bit – you seem to be an adventurer of the world, but also an explorer of your mind and its possibilities. Could you explain how this affects your writing?
All the stories in my first book were written in the midst of two fairly solid years of travelling, so it's only natural that elements of travel made their way into some stories (and my bio).
I think it would be hard to write about characters from my generation without them having travelled, being about to travel or resenting the fact they haven't travelled. We tend to look upon travel as a way of hitting refresh in our lives, but it never truly does.
In a technical sense, travel is useful in short fiction as it takes characters out of their comfort zones and allows whatever crisis was brewing back home to come to the fore, all in a couple of pages.
I understand you spent some time living and working in Queensland – what is your connection to the place?
I moved to Brisbane with my partner when we were both twenty-one and fresh out of university. My first full-time job was working for the State Treasury. I was responsible for keeping ministers up-to-date on everything that was happening at the sea-ports and airports up and down the coast, so I got to travel to Bundaberg, Mackay, Cairns and Townsville quite often and learnt a lot about the state that way.
All up, we spent three and a bit years in Queensland, flying back to New Zealand for Christmas, weddings and funerals and not really seeing enough of the rest of Australia, so we quit our jobs and started travelling.
Your story in this edition, 'Offshore Service' provides a detailed look at a small helicopter delivery crew that services coal ships in the port of Mackay – is this something you've had personal experience with?
I first learnt about the queues of coal ships waiting off the coast of Mackay when working in Brisbane. At the time I thought: that's a good setting for a story. But I've never been on a coal ship or even flown in a helicopter. When I finally got around to writing the story this year I spoke to a couple of guys at a helicopter outfit here in Wellington. One of them had done some marine pilot transfers in Queensland, so that was really useful.
The protagonist, Matt, starts with a sense of enchantment about working in the mines and then meeting an 'offshore whore.' Is this quest for enchantment something we look for when we travel and is it realistic?
I don't think Matt would describe it as 'enchantment' so much as 'adventure'. There's a part of him that's always thinking about what everyone back home will think. He's trying to prove something to them. He certainly proves something by the end of the story, though it's not what he intended when he first left home.
I think most people do something similar when they travel. There's always a part of you that's thinking, 'I can't wait to tell the people at work about how good this Piña Colada is'. The good thing about this mindset is that even when something is disenchanting, you can still rub it in people's faces ('Don't bother going to Costa Rica. It's a rip off!' etc).
Matt eventually returns to his family and homeland, and his sister asks when he's going to grow up. Have you ever been asked this question?
I don't think so. People might have said it behind my back when I was chasing the dream of becoming a writer, but never to my face.
Your book A Man Melting won the 2011 Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book, and it is a collection of short stories. Do you find yourself moving between the short fiction form and the novel?
I've been working on a novel this year but haven't been completely faithful to it, making time to write 'Offshore Service' and a couple of other stories. Short stories are great because you can often write a first draft on the one burst of inspiration. A novel is a much longer haul. Writing a short story for me is a way of surfacing to take a breath before diving back into the novel.
Your online bio mentions some of the authors you enjoyed reading when you were younger – Douglas Coupland, Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk. Are there any women authors whose stories you enjoy, and what are you reading now?
Absolutely. Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of my favourite books and I love Lorrie Moore, Janet Frame, Alice Munro. I recently enjoyed Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad and Maile Meloy's Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.
Right now I'm reading some Dickens, The Oxford Book of the Sea edited by Jonathan Raban, and I'm about to start Stephanie Vaughn's short story collection Sweet Talk.
From Griffith Review Edition 34: The Annual Fiction Edition © Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Interview with Craig Cliff, Author of The Mannequin Makers
Please welcome Craig Cliff to The Qwillery as part of the of the 2017 Debut Author Challenge Interviews. The Mannequin Makers is published on December 12th by Milkweed Editions.
TQ: Welcome to The Qwillery. When and why did you start writing?
Craig: Thanks for having me.
I’ve always written. Being alone and making things up — being the boss of the page — was a kind of powertrip. Somewhere between the ages of 16 and 21 I got serious about writing for an audience, though it took at least another five years for maturity caught up to ambition.
TQ: Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?
Craig: A total hybrid. I’ve tried both. I have the abandoned manuscripts to prove it.
Nowadays I won’t start writing until I have some sort of schematic that shows how all the elements fit together (for The Mannequin Makers this was a PowerPoint slide with lots of colored boxes and arrows). Something with the shape of the novel, some key events, but still a lot of questions to answer. And once I start, I’m free to go in other directions.
TQ: What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?
Craig: With novels, it is sustaining everything -- my energy, the narrative voice, the reader’s interest – over what is usually two or three years of work.
TQ: What has influenced / influences your writing?
Craig: I never take off my novelist’s hat, so everything I consume - books, movies, video games, the aggravations of social media – winds up shaping my own work. Even the worst book has some redeeming feature, be it a lesson in what NOT to do, a new way out of an old bind, or a turn of phrase that unlocks something I’d felt but not yet been able to say.
TQ: Describe The Mannequin Makers in 140 characters or less.
Craig: A father raises his twins to perform as the perfect mannequins and trump his rival, a former figurehead carver and castaway.
TQ: Tell us something about The Mannequin Makers that is not found in the book description.
Craig: Eugen Sandow, the strongman who appears in early on in the novel and whose influence is felt through rest of the story, actually did tour New Zealand in 1902-03, I just made him perform an extra show. He was a fascinating dude. The first body-builder, in many respects. You can watch him flex in one of Thomas Edison’s first films on YouTube.
TQ: What inspired you to write The Mannequin Makers?
Craig: I had a bunch of ideas – a father raising his children to be living mannequins, a shipwreck in the Southern Ocean, something centred on Eugen Sandow - that I didn’t know would or could fit together, but they had three things in common. They needed to happen in the past. They seemed so far beyond my own experience and what I’d written previously (a.k.a. A CHALLENGE). And they felt like the sorts of scenarios or characters I’d encountered in the kinds of books I devoured as a kid: Dickens, Verne, Dumas. The more I looked into department stores and clipper ships and physical culture, the more connections I found and the harder it became to not take up the challenge.
TQ: What sort of research did you do for The Mannequin Makers?
Craig: I read. A lot. Books on all the stuff I just mentioned (and more), but also a lot of newspapers from the time period, which were thankfully all digitised and searchable online by the time I started. I travelled around the parts of the South Island here in New Zealand, where the novel opens and closes, but I didn’t go to other major settings – Scotland, Sydney, the sub-Antarctic islands - while writing the book. I made do with photos, maps, documentaries, first-hand accounts and my own imagination.
The highlight was being taken behind the scenes at our national museum and getting to touch items from the old castaway depot on Antipodes Island, like the “looter’s suit” that I later dressed one of my characters in.
TQ: Please tell us about the cover for The Mannequin Makers.
Craig: Covers are weird. This is the fourth cover for this book. The New Zealand and Australian editions are like a game of spot the difference and there’s a Romanian translation. The US one goes in a very different direction. I like how, once you read about ‘human mannequins’ on the back cover, those tools on the front seem more sinister. That’s kind of how the novel works too: things often appear sinister on second glance.
TQ: In The Mannequin Makers who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?
Craig: The easiest: Avis, who narrates the second part of the novel. For some reason her voice for me clicked early. Perhaps it was all the reading I’d been doing set in that time period. Perhaps it was the diary entry form and/or her extreme ignorance thanks to how she has been raised. After a few days of channelling this sixteen year old female from a hundred years ago, I started to worry it was coming too easily and I was, in fact, writing rubbish. And some of that first rush of words did need to be pared back. But it was still much less work than the other narrators.
The hardest was Eugen, Avis’ brother. He narrates the final section and is looking back on events that took place more than half a century before. He’s changed a lot since then (for starters: he’s learnt to read and write) but he hasn’t changed in other ways as well. It took a long time before I felt he was really talking when I saw his words on my screen.
TQ: Why have you chosen to include or not chosen to include social issues in The Mannequin Makers?
Craig: Any novel worth its salt has something to say about the time in which it is written. So even though the setting is historical, The Mannequin Makers talks about the place of art and artistry within a capitalist society, the dynamics of power and the power of empathy – issues and ideas that are still pressing today.
You can also read it as a manual in how not to raise your kids.
TQ: Which question about The Mannequin Makers do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!
Craig: Q: You liveblogged the day you attempted to write at least 6,376 words on the novel’s first draft. How much of those words made it into the final book? Would you ever do it again?
A: Quite a lot survived, actually. Maybe 75%? It’s not like I wrote a large but terrible scene that had to be cut the next day. Would I spend 16 hours straight while writing a first draft again? No way. It took me a week to recover. Better to write 1,000 good words every day until the end!
TQ: Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from The Mannequin Makers.
Craig: Since I mentioned my struggles to get Eugen’s voice right, how about the first few sentences from his section, to show what he ended up sounding like?
‘Every winter I’m surprised when the wattle blooms. This year even more so for the battering we took in May and June. But somehow the buds clung to their branches as the easterlies clobbered the coast and our waves, shunted on by the king tide, gouged the beach from Collaroy baths to North Narrabeen.’
TQ: What's next?
Craig: I’m working on a novel about fatherhood, Hollywood and a levitating Franciscan friar. It’s set in 2017 and 2019, but dips back into the seventeenth century, when San Giuseppe da Copertino was doing his thing.
TQ: Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.
The Mannequin Makers
Milkweed Editions, December 12, 2017
Trade Paperback and eBook, 336 pages
Playfully literate and strikingly original, an unforgettable debut novel about art, imitation, and obsession.
Excitement is rare in the small town of Marumaru, New Zealand. So when a young Maori man arrives on the morning train one day in 1903—announcing the imminent visit of a famous strongman—the entire town turns out to greet him, save one. Colton Kemp, a department store window-dresser, is at home, watching his beloved wife die in premature childbirth. Tormented by grief, he hatches a plan to make his name and thwart his rival, the silent and gifted Carpenter: over the next sixteen years he will raise his newborn twins in secrecy and isolation, to become human mannequins in the world’s most lifelike window display.
From this moment of calamity emerges a work of masterful storytelling, at once wildly entertaining and formally ambitious. The novel leaps fearlessly from the epistolary to the castaway narrative to the picaresque, as Kemp’s plot goes awry and as he, his children, and the Carpenter converge in the New Zealand hinterland.
The Mannequin Makers is an adventure-filled and thoroughly delightful yarn, introducing one of international literature’s most promising young talents to American audiences.
Amazon : Barnes and Noble : Book Depository : Books-A-Million : IndieBound
Google Play : Kobo
About Craig
Craig Cliff is the author of The Mannequin Makers, a novel, and A Man Melting, a collection of short stories, which won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Both were previously published in New Zealand. In 2012 he was a judge for the inaugural Commonwealth Story Prize, and he is the recipient of a Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. He writes a column for the Dominion Post about his double life as a writer and public servant in Wellington, New Zealand.
Website ~ Twitter @Craig_Cliff ~ Blog
The Mannequin Makers
Publishers Weekly.
264.40 (Oct. 2, 2017): p114.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Mannequin Makers
Craig Cliff. Milkweed (PGW, dist), $16 trade paper (336p)
ISBN 978-1-57131-127-6
New Zealander Cliff makes a stunning American debut with a story about obsession gone horribly wrong.
At the beginning of the 20th century, wood carver Colton Kemp, who lives in the small town of Marumaru
and carves mannequins for store windows, has just become the widower father of twins after his wife died
during childbirth. Kemp is inspired by Eugen Sandow, the real-life German father of modern bodybuilding,
to raise his children to become mannequins to thwart his rival, known as "the Carpenter." Raised in isolation
and trained in the Sandow method of diet, exercise, and muscle control, the twins, Avis and Eugen, learn to
hold poses for hours, pr
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Cliff, Craig: THE MANNEQUIN
MAKERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Cliff, Craig THE MANNEQUIN MAKERS Milkweed (Adult Fiction) $16.00 9, 12 ISBN: 978-1-57131-
127-6
Competition between rival window dressers forms the foundation for this sprawling tragedy.Acclaimed
New Zealand short story writer Cliff's harrowing debut novel (and first book to be published in the U.S.)
opens outside Marumaru on Dec. 31, 1902. Window dresser Colton Kemp is carving a mannequin for use in
his next display when his wife goes into labor. She gives birth to fraternal twins before dying of
complications. A shellshocked Kemp leaves his sister-in-law to deal with the aftermath and walks to town.
There, he catches a performance by strongman Eugen Sandow, whose perfect form and muscle control give
Kemp an idea. Come December 1918, siblings Avis and Eugen have never left the family farm. According
to their father, New Zealanders keep children sequestered until their 16th birthdays, at which point they're
presented to society via "the window." Remaining perfectly still during a series of tableaux "is a test of
fortitude, grace, dedication and mental strength" that allows people to assess their suitability as mates.
When the curtain goes up at Donaldson's department store, Colton Kemp's lifelike new mannequins wow
the public. Only Kemp's rival, Gabriel Doig, suspects the horrifying truth, and his reaction significantly
impacts the lives of everyone involved. Cliff's short-fiction background looms large: each of the tale's four
sections takes place in a different era, features a different point-of-view character, and unfolds in a unique
manner. Despite this unconventional structure, the book's plot is tight, the senses of time and place are
strong, and Cliff's core themes resonate throughout. A grim and glorious meditation on the cruelty of fate.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Cliff, Craig: THE MANNEQUIN MAKERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497199734/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6115333b.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497199734
New Zealand Gets Creepy in ‘The Mannequin Makers’
BY ARAM MRJOIAN
JANUARY 5, 2018
No two waffles are uniform, and yet the word waffle creates an image that is immediately recognizable. We might quibble over whether our respective images of waffles are square or round, but the basic understanding is uncontested.
This is perhaps one reason mannequins are uncanny objects. These dummies often strive to resemble ideal (and unrealistic) aesthetic preferences of the human form. A mannequin is by nature an impostor, a false reflection in plain clothing, a chiseled block modeling the garments of sentient beings.
In his latest novel, the good-humored The Mannequin Makers, Craig Cliff appears well aware of the absurd ways in which we pose to fit certain impractical societal expectations. Indeed, mannequins become central to the rural town of Marumaru, New Zealand.
The novel begins in 1903, on the eve of a legendary strongman, Sandow, coming to Marumaru to perform. Sandow relies on an extreme routine of physical fitness that he believes would result in the same level of strength and definition for anyone with the will power to follow his example. His performance is an unexpected treat for the townsfolk, who usually find entertainment in the rivalry of two department store window-dressers, Colton Kemp and an older mute Scotsman known as The Carpenter. For Kemp, their competition lacks cordiality. It’s clear The Carpenter’s artistic skill fills him with envy, leading to myopic resentment. At times, the narrative voice falls into free indirect discourse to heighten Kemp’s mania.
“It was not a competition between two stores but between Colton Kemp and The Carpenter, ever since the day the silent sod strolled into town. Kemp had never heard him talk, though Big Jim Raymond swore The Carpenter congratulated him upon his re-election in September. What sort of affectation was it not to speak when spoken to?”
Before Sandow arrives, Kemp’s family is struck by tragedy, as his wife dies giving childbirth to twins. Fascinated by Sandow’s strength and determined to best The Carpenter, Kemp hides his children from the people of Marumaru, raising them under the belief that they must perform as mannequins in the store window on their sixteenth birthday to earn a desirable marriage proposal.
Told in four parts, the novel demonstrates Cliff’s impressive ability to switch between multiple points of view. Part two, “A Mannequin’s Tale,” told in diary entries from Kemp’s teenage daughter, Avis, examines the rigid physical routine and mental preparation she and her twin brother Eugen must endure to hold unflinching tableaus in the window. Her section is more conversational and confessional than the others. Avis and Eugen fully believe their father’s fictional explanation of how society functions, but despite her obedient confinement, Avis’s desire for freedom is clear.
“Three more nights to pass until the window. I am tempted to lay down my pen and go to bed (it has just gone seven in the evenings) to hasten our coming out, that moment when I can see and be seen. The first thing I will do once my fate has been arranged and I can step down from the window is run to the sea.”
With passages like this one, Cliff hints that Kemp’s plan is destined for failure. Avis is too smart and adventurous to not see the disparities between her father’s stories and what is happening outside the window. Avis is well-read, and her bookish curiosity grants additional energy to her diary entries, even though she is confined in dull spaces for many of them. Later in the novel, Eugen’s narration is equally engaging, intentionally blunt and a bit conceited.
However, where Cliff falters is with The Carpenter, who has a lengthy and tedious backstory. The Carpenter’s contributions to the overall arc of the novel, while full of rich descriptions of setting, are sluggish and expositional. The majority of his life story weighs down the middle third of the novel, which significantly slows the pacing and leaves the main plotline floating in the doldrums. There is much to enjoy in his biography, but at times it is exhaustive and overindulgent.
Cliff, who lives in New Zealand, altogether offers a quirky voice that falls outside of much American commercial fiction. This esotericism, along with determined prose, clever bits of timeless social critique, and an eye for setting, makes The Mannequin Makers a pleasurable read.
FICTION
The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff
Milkweed Editions
Published in the U.S. December 12, 2017
Marooned by Obsession in Craig Cliff’s “The Mannequin Makers”
By Heidi North
25 0 0
FEBRUARY 24, 2018
VIOLENCE AND CRUELTY seethe beneath the surface of The Mannequin Makers, the debut novel from New Zealand writer Craig Cliff (A Man Melting), and none of its main players are likely to escape unscathed. The story opens with blood and a sense of impending doom that never fades.
In Marumaru, a small town on the east coast of New Zealand, at the turn of the 20th century, mannequin maker Colton Kemp is caught in a bitter rivalry with the town’s only other mannequin maker, a sinister, mute man dressed in old-fashioned suits who’s known only as “The Carpenter.” Colton accidentally gouges a chunk of skin from his forefinger, and not long after, his wife Louisa bleeds to death after unexpectedly going into labor at the washing line. Louisa’s death leaves newborn twins Eugen and Avis in the care of the distraught Colton, who channels his grief into obsession. He keeps the children shut away from the world and trains them to become the perfect “mannequins.” Once they turn 16, they will be released from their confined world into “the window,” where they will be on storefront display.
Instantly, we are deep in Gothic horror: small-town New Zealand, hidden desires, lies, trapped children, an ominous rivalry, and mounting tension. What elevates the novel from other Gothic tales is the breadth of time it covers. The story ranges from 1859 to 1970, transporting readers from Scotland to New Zealand to Australia with stops in between.
Narratively, Mannequin Makers is an ambitious first novel. The story is structured with four interlinked parts, each of which is distinct and tightly crafted. The opening section, “Welcome to Marumaru,” details how Colton, inspired by real-life German bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, becomes obsessed with physical perfection. The second section, “A Mannequin’s Tale,” is told from the point of view of Avis through her diary entries. In Marumaru 15 years on, she details the twins’ life of isolation and intense physical training, which culminates in their performance in “the window.”
The third part, “The Carpenter’s Tale,” allows the mute Carpenter — real name Gabriel Doig — to tell the story of how he came to be in Marumaru. Beginning in Scotland in 1859, Gabriel learns the family trade practiced by his father and grandfather, eventually becoming a carver of ships’ figureheads in River Clyde. A grim voyage on a clipper ship in the late 1880s results in the frantic desperation of life as a castaway when he washes up on Antipodes Island, 400 miles from the nearest city, Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island. The novel’s final section, “The Mannequin Speaks,” takes place in the 1970s and is Eugen’s story. Through a lens distorted by time and blurry with regret, Eugen, now an aging lifesaver at Collaroy Beach in Sydney, Australia, fills in the chilling blanks of what became of Colton, Avis, and the Carpenter.
Colton’s story is the only one told using third-person narration, a distancing Cliff likely employed to assure readers that they are getting the full truth. The author’s intention may also have been to deny Colton the same sympathy readers are likely to feel for the other main characters, who get to narrate their own stories. As a result, the first-person narrators are naturally more compelling, but they’re also less reliable. This forces readers to piece together questionable information from multiple sources until a picture emerges of four imperfect human beings striving to do good but swerving off task, with terrible consequences. The novel ends on a note of touching, bittersweet acceptance of the perils of the human struggle.
The short stories in Cliff’s collection A Man Melting, which won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, have a wacky sense of the surreal, whereas The Mannequin Maker, his first novel and American debut, has a Gothic, less comedic edge. The sentence-level craft Cliff applied to his stories, however, is equally evident in the novel.
The intensity of the landscape is integral to the book’s plot. In the first three parts, the characters struggle uselessly against the impartial, brutal elements. Cliff has evidently done a large amount of historical research for this novel, but the prose is not weighed down by the details. Instead, readers are artfully immersed in the worlds Cliff conjures with such skill — the sawdust and sweat of mid-18th-century Scotland, the salt spray and sea-sickness of travel on the merciless open ocean, the crippling hunger and impending madness of life as a castaway with only a wooden figurehead for company. The author’s visceral descriptions of eating raw penguin flesh are not for the squeamish.
New Zealand is a set of islands, so the sea is always at the edges of the frame. The novel stakes a similar position, the sea ever present, a potent reminder of the vastness of the planet, of the inevitability of change, of the indifference of nature to our paltry lives and plans. Gabriel spends time at sea, then finds himself marooned by it. Avis and Eugen long to see the water, a mystical force they have heard about but have never been allowed to experience. And years later, Eugen will end up spending his adult years patrolling the waves, doing penance for his wrongs by keeping people safe.
Marumaru at the turn of the 20th century is a backwater town not yet touched by progress, so it’s tempting to see Colton’s barbaric actions against his children as a product of the time. However, Sydney’s Collaroy Beach in the ’70s, with its easy ebb and flow of surfers and dog walkers and sun-seekers, Eugen’s wandering eye taking in the young men flexing their tanned muscles and scantily clad girls on the sand, reminds us that humans’ lust for physical perfection remains unchanged. In transporting us to Australia for the final, modern part of his tale, Cliff keeps the New Zealand landscape firmly in the dark and bitter past, when life was one long battle for survival. In contrast, the contemporary setting of Collaroy Beach is all sunshine and relaxed ease — the darkness is all on the inside. By doing this, Cliff never breaks the magic by bringing in modern-day New Zealand, which readers may have found jarring.
To this New Zealand writer, Mannequin Makers feels like a very New Zealand novel in its obsession with the cruelty of the elements and the unrelenting beauty and bleakness of the landscape. Like the young “mannequins” Avis and Eugen, the landscape too bears the unmistakable marks of colonization. When Gabriel ends up a castaway, the land he encounters is uncompromisingly harsh. He must take it by force, much as he and the other characters — even the ones made of wood — were forcibly molded into something else.
But labeling Mannequin Makers a “New Zealand novel” is not meant to ghettoize it. It is a strikingly vivid tale full of startling yet believable twists anchored by the compassionate portrayal of lives overrun with obsession and the drive for perfection. It is an original and gripping read, a rich book by an accomplished writer.
¤
The short stories, poetry, and creative nonfiction of Auckland, New Zealand–based writer Heidi North has appeared widely in journals and anthologies in New Zealand and internationally. Her debut poetry collection Possibility of Flight was published in New Zealand in 2015.
A New Zealand Novel Full of
Taciturn Men and Wooden Dolls
By CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY JAN. 26, 2018
THE MANNEQUIN MAKERS
By Craig Cliff
325 pp. Milkweed Editions. Paper, $16.
Much has been written and sung about the way distance and the isolation it
breeds have shaped t
3/4/2018 A New Zealand Novel Full of Taciturn Men and Wooden Dolls - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/books/review/mannequin-makers-craig-cliff.html 2/3
But there is already an inkling that this will be more than another story about a
quiet man: Kemp is a carver of department store mannequins, and not an especially
good one. In another establishment across town, his rival, known as The Carpenter,
does not have Kemp’s imagination, but his mannequins are startlingly lifelike,
incurring Kemp’s bitter jealousy.
From there, the tale takes flight in a way that comes close to magic realism, with
the characters and events falling into a gothic swoon. In his grief over the loss of his
wife, Kemp commits an act so heinous that it sets in motion a story almost
Shakespearean in scope. To divulge more would spoil a rollicking plot, but it isn’t
revealing too much to say that Cliff’s background as a short story writer gives him a
rare skill with the minutiae of structure and characterization. The book is split into
four entwined narratives, each from a different point of view, with Kemp’s just the
first. A headstrong teenage girl and a man who cannot speak are rich standouts of
the book’s second and third acts; Cliff paints the 16-year-old girl as kind and resilient
while never overplaying her innocence. It’s one of several tightropes he steps onto
with quiet assurance.
Later, in mute, elderly Gabriel Doig, the reader is delivered an immensely
satisfying account of shipwreck and survival. That the tale is conveyed in writing to
another character, because Doig cannot speak, and that it arrives obviously laden
with Cliff’s own research of the historical context, could easily have resulted in
unwieldy storytelling. Instead, the book soars.
In the final section, another change of narrator and a jump forward to 1970s
Australia bring about the denouement. This is the only place Cliff seems to falter; he
has much to reveal about his new storyteller while also needing to wrangle a
sprawling plot. Events unspool perhaps a little slowly in the beginning of this section
and then rather too quickly toward the end, leaving the characters’ motivations, and
the truths we are eager to learn, somewhat occluded.
But this seems a small quibble in a book that makes grand promises and delivers on
most of them. At its heart, for all its talk of sailing ships and barren crags, the
distance Cliff explores best is the at times unbreachable one that divides people. In
Kemp’s mannequins, Cliff illuminates the difference between human beings,
3/4/2018 A New Zealand Novel Full of Taciturn Men and Wooden Dolls - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/books/review/mannequin-makers-craig-cliff.html 3/3
dummies of carved wood and the wretches caught in between: people of flesh and
blood who look and behave as if they were made of stone.
Charlotte Graham is a journalist based in New Zealand.
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A version of this review appears in print on January 27, 2018, on Page BR21 of the Sunday Book Review
with the headline: Window Dressing.
"My mother carries my father’s replacement wedding ring with her wherever she moves. Whatever the house, I know I could find this ring in the top drawer of her bedside cabinet in a pink clamshell earring case. But this is just the copy. It never had time to taper on the underside before it was plucked from my father’s finger."
Reviewed by Angela Readman
Craig Cliff won the Commonwealth Book Award in 2010 for his debut A Man Melting. The book earns it. The writing is fresh, bold and has a finesse that has a rare effect on the modern reader. Accustomed to skimming emails, squeezing a quick fiction into our coffee break, we read A Man Melting and feel we are in safe enough hands to slow down. There is enough in these stories, in terms of character, sense of place and what is at stake to, fully engage with. We can afford to forget where we are and take the time to take in every word.
The stories are mixed, in terms of length and genre, but are linked by the theme of evolution. Who and what are we becoming? These stories search to know.
The collection starts with a short story called Seeds, from which bigger issues and landscapes grow. Be it in New Zealand, England, Scotland, cities or small towns, the protagonists of the stories are cracked out of stasis and rut in the most unexpected, and entertaining, ways. In Facing Galapagos a man receives emails from Charles Darwin. In The Skeptics Kid, a family is defined and redefined by the discovery of species thought extinct. In Fat Camp, a longer story I couldn’t put down, a man works at a camp for obese children and taps into something crucial about his life.
As a reviewer, I wanted to be able to place a label on the collection as a whole, "realist", "magical realist," etc, but it didn’t seem possible with this collection. Some of the stories are realist in nature, others are not. A Man Melting melts the boundaries. As a reader, I couldn’t have cared less that A Man Melting, as a whole, refuses to limit itself to simple genre definition. It was simply a joy to read, though often collections that mix genres often make it harder for a reader to engage. Entering each story the reader can be unsure what’s expected of them. (For me, the eye with which I look at a story I know will be magical realist story is different to how I’d sit to read a more Carveresque work. Categories make it easier for a reader usually; we like to know what we’re about to read. ) Yet, A Man Melting is successful in managing to make its varied approaches work. It’s a feat achieved by the writing.
The descriptions and characters in the - technically - realist stories are unusual and so skillfully drawn they transform the ordinary. The writing itself feels as magical as the situation is in a magical realist story.
One of the most powerful stories in the book, Copies, is a great example. The story deals with the imperfect nature of memory and a narrator defining himself in relation to his father: an artist who specializes in photocopying great works of art until they take on a new form and meaning.
"He copied and copied his parents' wedding photo until it looked like two people facing away from each other. He copied and copied his fifth birthday party until it looked as if a mushroom cloud was exploding at the centre, and tombstones were gathered round the edges instead of party guests."
Cliff brilliantly utilizes heightened writing like this in his more realist stories. Conversely, the more fantastic stories in the collection are wry and firmly rooted in the real world. In the title story A Man Melting, the melting man is grounded in his office, clicking his mouse. The detail we can relate to works, as in the best magical realist stories, to send the theme home. Anyone of us, it feels, can melt at any time.
Cliff’s choices skillfully make the movement between genres in the book feel organic. Just as the subject of the book is evolution, it is not just life but the short story form itself that feels like it is evolving as boundaries blur and overlap. What we think is a magical realist story may not turn out to be, and vice versa. In Cliff’s world anything is possible at any time. The reader enters a story never sure what type of story it will be, replicating the uncertainty of the characters constantly thrown into flux. The book is clever like this in many ways, but the ease of the writing never tires the reader by making him or her feel the author is trying to be.
For me, one or two stories in the book, like Parisian Blue, weren’t as memorable as others, although still well executed, but this may be down to some stories in the book being so memorable they simply overshadow ones with a smaller scope. A Man Melting is still exceptional by any standards (and at 308 pages it’s a bargain, as long as two collections.) Cliff is a talent I look forward to seeing more work by. The book encapsulates what the best short story should do: resonate and hone how we see our world.
I often read a book and wonder who I’d recommend it to. The reader who loves magical realism and wacky scenarios? Or the fan of realist stories, full of character and place? A Man Melting is that rare collection I’d honestly recommend to both types of reader. There are stories here I’ll simply never forget.
Read a story from this collection in Sport 36
Angela Readman was commended in The Arvon International Poetry Competition. Her poetry collection Strip is with Salt. She secretly loves short stories. Her own stories have appeared in Southword, Crannog, Fractured West, Flash, Metazen and Pygmy Giant.
A Man Melting
by Craig Cliff
Random House New Zealand
2010
First Collection
Awards: Winner, 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, South East Asian and Pacific region.
Book Review: A Man Melting
8 Feb, 2011 5:00am 3 minutes to read
Book cover of A Man Melting by Craig Cliff. Photo / SuppliedBook cover of A Man Melting by Craig Cliff. Photo / Supplied
NZ Herald
By: Paula Green
A Man Melting by Craig Cliff
Random House $29.99
Craig Cliff's first collection of stories heralds the arrival of an electrifying new voice on the New Zealand writing scene. These stories are perfectly formed, standalone gems, but the collection also brings together satisfying harmonies as a whole.
Food metaphors are often used to talk about the pleasurable effect of reading good literature. With these stories I want to borrow from wine as they impart a delectable aftertaste and they don't stick to one grape type.
Some of the stories venture into a science fiction or fantasy realm while others present a grittier form of realism. All of them - fantasy or otherwise - exude an earthy bouquet. There is warmth, tenderness and strong links to human experience.
Cliff's imagination takes flight in the title story as we follow the drips of the melting man. It begins with a puddle and ends with the striking image of an emaciated man drinking from a straw in a paddling pool in his office.
In The Sceptic's Kid, the young boy is embarrassed by the constant television appearances of his mother denouncing alleged sightings of extinct animals. His beliefs are then tested by the arrival of a giant moa.
What makes all of the stories special is the way they rub up against each other in inspired overlaps. As Cliff puts it in Copies, "Life is a series of imperfect repetitions". Each one borrows an element from the previous story but that element becomes strangely, satisfyingly or poignantly different.
The echoes prod at you as you read and expand the way you appreciate each story.
In Manawatu a young man thinks of suicide for the first time in four years and then jumps off a balcony to feel the world come alive inside again. In the next piece, Copies, the father jumps off a tall building and leaves a gap for his grieving son to fill with memories.
The father had made art with a photocopier reproducing a famous painting time and time again until the original was barely discernible. This action is a key to Cliff's collection on a number of levels. The stories are imperfect copies of experience, of everything he has read, of the world.
This has got nothing to do with plagiarism and everything to do with the way life repeats itself at the level of human experience - love, birth, death, loss, uncertainty, fear, grief and so on.
Yet to see the stories solely as a chain of imperfect repetitions is to miss the fundamental core that weds humanity to strangeness and insight.
This finely crafted collection is like a good wine cellar - to be drunk now for zest and freshness and to be saved for later for enduring complexity and character.
Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.