Published 27th August 2020 in paperback and ebook formats by Tramp Press.
From the cover of the book:
In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, famously referred to by Peter Levi, Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, as 'the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century.'
In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its echoes in her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story.
A Ghost in the Throat is a devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another's.
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What an absolute stunner of a novel this is - and one that try as I might, I cannot hope to do justice to with my simple review.
This book is a complex and unusual mix of auto-fiction (part fiction/part autobiographical) straight from our female narrator's soul (and by extension the author herself), and historical essay charting the research she passionately undertakes about female poet Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill - and her famous Irish poem of 17th century written to mourn her murdered husband, Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire (The Keen for Art O Laoghaire). It's enchanting, magical and thoroughly engrossing.
What keeps her going is her rediscovery of Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill's poem to her lost lover: taken in bites as she sits nursing her babes. But over the years, and after tragedy very nearly visits her family, she feels the connection with the poet, who was called Nelly by her family, grow stronger and she is compelled to find out all she can about her. This becomes an obsession that drives, sustains and inspires her, whilst allowing her to also dissect her own past and come to terms with where life has brought her now.
"When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries..."
This is a novel that deftly examines the reality of being a woman, wife and mother. All through the book we are reminded that "this is a female text" and this extends beyond the life of our young mother to all the women who have gone before, as the trail of clues she unearths lets her piece together as much as she can about Nelly and her family. And this is a trail that is very hard to follow, as the history of the women our narrator is so desperate to reveal has been all but erased and the clues have to be sought between the lines of the recorded deeds of their menfolk.
There are some beautiful and poignant themes explored here that are more than a little thought provoking. It shines a light on the mystical power of shared experience, and the fact that women so often pass on the details of their lives through the spoken word, so that the traces of their existence are so easily lost in the mists of time. It is a tragedy that the way history is recorded and preserved is so biased towards the truth and deeds of men. And yet, the echoes of our own mothers and the generations of women before them persist in the wisdom and tales that are passed down to us, their essence remains as we then pass them onto our own children. There is something rather lovely about the way we hold their lives inside us - even if the history books deny their contribution for the greater part.
I was also really struck by the notion that one's age and stage of life has so much influence on the how we experience, and process what we read - how very true this is - and impressed by the way Doireann Ni Ghriofa uses "female text" to honour womanhood: my favourite example being her use of this term to reference the care and love that went into a cardigan made by her own mother for her youngest child - the "text" being written into the very texture of the garment, if you will. Glorious!
Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill's keen to her lost love is thoughtfully included as an appendix for those of us who are unfamiliar with it, in both the original Irish, which was only recorded after being passed down through the tongues of women, and as a translation by Doireann Ni Ghriofa for those of us who sadly cannot read the original (how I wish I could). I recommend a reading of this poem both before you start and when you have finished this book - trust me, it will be worth it.
"This is a female text, which is also a caoineadh: a dirge and a drudge song, an anthem of praise, a chant and a keen, a lament and an echo, a chorus and a hymn. Join in."
This book is completely gorgeous and it will stay with me for a long, long time. It would be a really lovely one to listen to in an audio format, so I have my fingers crossed that this may happen at some time in the future.
Do yourself a huge favour and get yourself a copy from your favourite book retailer now.
Thank you to Turnaround Publisher Services for providing me with a copy of this book in return for an honest review.
About the author:
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual writer whose books explore birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Her latest poetry collection was chosen as a Book of the Year in both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. Doireann's awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA, 2018), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen s University, 2018), the Ostana Prize (Italy, 2018), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (2016), among others. A Ghost in the Throat is her prose debut.
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