Short stories
Immanuel's Land: Stories
Immanuel's Land
Maurice Duggan · 1956
Synopsis
Stories, several of which follow the Lenihans, a family of Irish immigrants in Auckland: boys roughly treated in a Catholic boarding school, a day at the races when the parents remain indifferent to a fatal accident, children who refuse a stepmother after their mother's death. Another piece describes, almost without plot, the plains of the Hauraki. Voyage, a diary in three parts, follows a crossing to England, a holiday in Italy and a stay in Spain.
Context
It is its author's first collection; most of the texts in it were written in Europe, in London above all. The stories of the Lenihans, in a rigorous, spare prose, show the influence of the great Irish short-story writer James Joyce and have been compared with the stories that his compatriot Katherine Mansfield devoted to a single family, the Burnells. The book was reprinted in 1981 in his collected stories.
Who it is for
A slim volume, never translated into French. The prose is finely wrought, and the travel diary differs from the family stories.
Prizes and reception
Hubert Church Prize for prose in 1957; the collection established his place in the nation's letters, and Voyage was admired for its lyrical power.