Fionnáin reviewed Cacophony of Bone by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
A year worth remembering
3 stars
Kerri Ní Dochartaigh's first book, Thin Places was a marvel and a masterpiece that has enriched me in many ways, so it was always going to be hard to follow it with more of the same. And it's great to see that this book, Cacophony of Bone, took a less dreamlike and layered direction, instead choosing to experiment rather than rest on laurels. However, I think as an experiment it doesn't really work.
The book is split into twelve chapters. Each one is a month in the year 2020, a year that had a profound impact on so many of us, and also the year that Ní Dochartaigh became pregnant. I chose to read it month-by-month also, so that my body would be in a similar season to the author's as I read. The chapters all have a structure: (i) an overall thought on the month, entangling the personal …
Kerri Ní Dochartaigh's first book, Thin Places was a marvel and a masterpiece that has enriched me in many ways, so it was always going to be hard to follow it with more of the same. And it's great to see that this book, Cacophony of Bone, took a less dreamlike and layered direction, instead choosing to experiment rather than rest on laurels. However, I think as an experiment it doesn't really work.
The book is split into twelve chapters. Each one is a month in the year 2020, a year that had a profound impact on so many of us, and also the year that Ní Dochartaigh became pregnant. I chose to read it month-by-month also, so that my body would be in a similar season to the author's as I read. The chapters all have a structure: (i) an overall thought on the month, entangling the personal with folk history and contemporary culture, (ii) a diary-entry sequence, day-by-day, telling of things that happened that month, and (iii) a poetic reflection on these two. In each chapter, the third section was by far the strongest, and on some (September to November in particular) they were magnificent. In each, I found the second section pretty much unreadable, just a series of moments that would be better left to a research diary rather than included in a published book (I don't really care to know what someone read on Instagram or what Wikipedia hole they went down; while the personal is interesting, it is less so over twelve whole months). The result is a bit muddled, sometimes honest and thoughtful, and occasionally blindingly brilliant. If someone is a writer, this insight into process might be much more interesting to them. For me, I feel the experiment didn't quite work out.