| Dear Readers,
This is the first of what we hope might become a semi-regular feature from us; newsletters which linger a little longer on a particular book, or draw a thematic thread between a few different books which we think are worth considering together. Either way, the result will be a slightly more sustained piece of writing, which we hope will be interesting and might lead you to some books you would otherwise not have encountered. |
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| I recently finished reading Said the Dead, by Doireann Ni Ghriofa, which was so intensely affecting, and in such a particular way, that it spurred me to think about some of the books that might form a loose constellation around it.
Said the Dead is the second work of narrative non-fiction from Irish writer and poet, Doireann Ni Ghriofa. Like her first, A Ghost in the Throat, it exists somewhere in the nebulous territory between memoir and historical biography, with much use of poetic license. In both books, Ni Ghriofa is present, very present, as she explores the lives of (mostly, but not exclusively) women from earlier centuries.
Our Lady’s Hospital, in Cork, is in the process of being converted into flats. Years of history in the form of the psychiatric hospital are on the cusp of vanishing from the landscape. But in the city archives, the lives of the patients and those who treated them are safely ensconced in protective bureaucracy. A chance encounter brings Ni Ghriofa into the orbit of these people and this place. Once found, they will be a powerful draw upon her, demanding to be seen and heard. Her own life, and her obsession with the lives of these women (patients and doctors, both), is an integral part of Said the Dead. We feel it as readers, the pull being exerted on her, the desire to inhabit these other lives. We feel the guilt too, as she worries about taking time away from her own living family to haunt the pages of the archives, and stalk the ruins of the buildings, in search of people long dead. |
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| It is a joy and a relief that Said the Dead is as good as it is. A Ghost in the Throat was such a searingly brilliant book, such an intense and singular experience, that I worried it might be impossible to follow. Part of its singularity was down to the way Ni Ghriofa pulls genres into new shapes to suit her purpose. The book contains elements of memoir, biography, literary criticism, history, but doesn’t settle comfortably into any one of these categories. It is a book of obsession and longing; urges that don’t stay where they are told. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill lived in the eighteenth century, and wrote – in response to the murder of her husband – Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, a poem that echoes down through the centuries as a great howl of pain, lust, love and vengeance. It finds Ni Ghriofa in the 21st century where it latches onto her, or she onto it. An obsession takes hold, and the book traces this obsession through the dual lines of two lives, one in the present lived in lockstep with one several hundred years earlier. The shared bond encompasses the generative act of poetry as well as the sustaining act of care. It is Ni Ghriofa as mother, as well as Ni Ghriofa as poet, feeling the sense of kinship with her predecessor. These roles mixing until inseparable as the book draws us further and further in. |
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| Living vicariously, obsession, richly imagined worlds, narrating the lives of those long dead: these are the signposts to the constellation of books that I imagine orbiting Ni Ghriofa’s writing. |
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| My Life in Paris with Gertrude Stein published on April 16th, the latest creation from the fertile imagination of Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk, the Living Autobiography series, and August Blue, among others. It is one of a handful of really interesting books that I’ve read, published in the last few years, which narrate the lives of people now dead, but do so as fiction rather than biography. Like Ni Ghriofa, Levy mirrors the life of her subject (Gertrude Stein) with her own life – or rather, the life of an unnamed narrator – a writer who wonders, researches, recounts, speculates and reads very much like she might be Deborah Levy.
It is a novel of delightful imagination and generosity. The mirroring of the narrator’s own life with Stein’s adds an immediacy and a levity to balance the sense of near-awe that she feels toward Stein, a writer pushing through boundaries and flouting conventions. She meditates on how it must have felt to be bringing about something so jarringly different, so momentous, as the literary modernism Stein was engaged in creating. It works beautifully; pulling us playfully into the narrative in 2020s Paris and, from that vantage skipping, in the same city, through moments in the life of someone hugely significant who we know instinctively by name but might (in my case) in fact know precious little about. It left me wanting to read Gertrude Stein for the first time and certainly to read more Deborah Levy. |
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| Two other novels, published a few years ago now, also seemed to me to fall into this orbit. They both narrate the lives of people who are known to us (to a greater or lesser extent) by their reputations and their careers. They both involve people pushing against what is, thinking instead about what might be. There is risk involved in this pursuit, prices to be paid. |
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| When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West, follows the lives of some of the great mathematicians and scientists of the 20th century. Like Gertrude Stein, these people are living their work, they are trying to will into existence something utterly new, utterly different to what was before. There are successes and accidents. Some of these lives lead to monstrous inventions, some suffer monstrous psychological consequences to their determination to exist always at the cusp of what is not yet. This is a vastly different book to Levy’s, and yet there is something familiar in the pace. The fictionalising of lives already lived, with consequences already met, allows their respective authors to cover ground with a weightlessness, narratives hover and skip across space and time without the resistance of uncertainty – even as the drama is unfolding for us anew. |
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| After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. It begins in c. 630 BC with Sappho and from there, swoops forward to 1885, flitting then between people and times until Virginia Woolf in 1928. It is a far more fragmented book than any of the others discussed here. Its inhabitants, all pioneering women seeking creative, social and sexual freedom, appear to us in fleeting moments before another slide clicks in and we are suddenly later or earlier, in the same place or a different place, with the same women or different, or some of the same and some new. It is breathless in its motion and scope. These scores of narrative moments are held together by a line of shared purpose; resistance, friendship, & desire unites these women in their shared times or disparate, in lives lived together or not. This commonality is what coheres the book and what pulls us as readers through.
We meet Gertrude Stein here too, along with others more familiar and less. There are risks and prices to be paid here, too. And there are echoes of the same dedication to past lives lived that radiated from the pages of Said the Dead and A Ghost in the Throat. |
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| These are five books that I have loved. Some of them have been recommended in the shop dozens of times already, and the others will certainly be recommended dozens of times from now onward. All can be bought in store or from our website for home delivery or collection via the links.
Thanks for reading,
Tom |
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