Reviews and Comments

I just finished this last night. If I get my thoughts about me, I'll write up my thoughts more completely, but to start, I'll just say: What a lovely book! To quote the author, it is a "female text". Undoubtedly true. It's also such a human text, full of 21st century struggles, longings, obsessions, and quiet successes as well as the same very human struggles, longings, obsessions, and quiet successes of people who lived and died hundreds of years ago.

In one sense, it's in the same universe topically as Jenny Odell's "Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock," a personal story of sorts that, in the end, has an immense warping effect on your perception of time ― both your own and everyone/thing else's.

In this book, the ghost is not only known ― a specific person ― but sought after. Where evidence is lacking in the historical record (and it is sadly lacking), imagination conspires with like personal circumstances to conjure an image which is undoubtedly wrong, but truer for the telling anyway.

Our author heroine upturns every stone for generations and finds little to grasp onto about the ghost. There are too few facts to attach to our spectre to literally "flesh" them out. As our writer wants so badly to tell us about the person and... can't. It's not on the tip of her tongue ― it's unknown and unknowable. Desire can't reveal the ghost to us. Our author wants to speak of the ghost with certainty, but is unable to.

In the end, the ghost speaks for herself via the poem/keen for her fallen husband: Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire in a new translation by our author/hero.

Reading this poem, the words of our ghost, after longing along with our author and tagging along to graveyards and libraries, imagining her daily life as a child, mother, sister, daughter, grandmother, lover, and person ― along with all the people she loved and who loved her ― we're left with such a profound resonance that echoes and reflects across time itself.

Recommended.

A few chapters in and this one feels more, I don't know, substantial (?) than "How to Do Nothing" -- which I enjoyed. There's probably something to do with reading this alongside "Poverty, by America" that's also influencing the depth I'm sensing here, but it's more than a meditation on "time" -- more of an interrogation of the history of time as a social construct. Some of the quotes and other tales unearthed (at least to me) such as the radius of the sound of a bell, and other wonderful oddities packed together so closely truly give rise to a deep and unsettling (but somehow calming) realization of what has been taken from us all (literally time, but not just the thing itself, but a more human conceptualization of the thing -- time -- itself.)

Paired with the book on Poverty, all of the cuts toward capitalism are deeper -- it stings worse.

Loving.