Carribay: 'Five women's lives intertwine across generations'
This week it’s mostly Irish authors, but also a revealing novel from a Belarusian author that’s worth reading.
Carribay, Linda Sherlock, Book Guild, €11.99
Set in the fictional northern village of Carribay, this story follows five women across the generations from the 1940s onwards. Norah Kielty grows up in poverty on a farm but has ambitions to train as a hairdresser. She is taken on in the local hairdressers, marries and gives birth to Bernie just as the Troubles begin to make their mark. Bernie moves to Manchester and carves her own life there, her daughter later falling for a country and western singer (we all have our flaws) and the novel ends up back in Carribay, where a wedding is being planned that will have consequences for more than the bride and groom.
What Now, Mr Wolf?, Eva Vezhnavets, Bullaun Press, €14.95
The Belarusian author of this book lost her battle with cancer last month and died on July 20, but she leaves behind a significant body of work, and this novel has been beautifully translated by Ella and Jim Dingley. It opens with protagonist Ryna, an alcoholic, attempting to open a bottle of wine in a train station in Warsaw. She has lost her job in a German care home and has just learned of her grandmother’s death. She’s travelling back to her home village in Belarus for the funeral.
When she finally reaches her destination and sits with her grandmother, much as we do at wakes here in Ireland, memories of her grandmother’s life come to Ryna, and through those, we learn of the dark history of Belarus, a place that rarely makes the news here. Grandmother Darafeya was a healer and an expert herbalist, who lived through two world wars and ‘nine different powers-that-be’ and witnessed many atrocities, especially those visited on the Jewish community in Belarus. This is a disturbing but unflinching story of witness, and makes for some uncomfortable, but essential, reading.
Anywhere But Here, Vicky Notaro, Penguin Sandycove, €15.99
Three women friends, all around the age of 40, take a break in Donegal to reassess their lives, where all three have reached some sort of crisis. Matilda is a TV presenter whose world caves in when she catches her husband in bed with another man. Sadie is a print journalist and realises she can no longer make a living in a profession that’s gasping in its final death rattle. Jess, a TV makeup artist who had twins as a very young woman, is finally seeing the cracks in her marriage as she prepares herself for empty nest syndrome.
For women who work in media, they live unusually charmed lives. This is Howth Road wealth, beach walks and dragging the dog around St Anne’s park. The author was a journalist in a previous life and surely knows that few, if any, people in media live so opulently, unless they’ve married money or come from it. And the Donegal getaway house, owned by somebody or other, isn’t a cottage but a massive architectural dream, smacking more of the Hamptons than the stony bogs of the Atlantic coast. This is high-gloss living. And even the glossies have life problems! As a piece of designer escapism, if that’s what you’re into, this novel is just the ticket.
Said the Dead, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Faber, €16.99
Doireann Ní Ghríofa gained access to records for the female patients in the city of Cork’s lunatic asylum in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the reading of those case notes produced this book – not a novel, a biography, or a memoir, but embraces all three to leave her reader – like the Reader in her book – profoundly haunted. It has, in other words, succeeded in its purpose and it’s a book you will not forget easily.
While Bressie and a few other souls fight to have names inscribed on the numbered graves in the grounds of Mullingar mental hospital, Ní Ghríofa’s book is written with a somewhat similar mission; to give names to the dead, so very many of them, and so many women especially, who have fallen through the cracks of social history. It’s also a loose account of the first woman in Ireland to work as a psychiatrist, Dr Lucia Fitzgerald, who worked tirelessly on behalf of her patients and whose notes on those patients illuminate their lives behind the hospital walls.
The author avoids the worst excesses of misery here, leaning instead towards compassion and a kind of understanding of the women in a work that deserves the same notoriety as her first novel, A Ghost in the Throat.
Other People’s Lives, Kathleen McMahon, Penguin Sandycove, €16.99
This is a gem of a novel about motherhood, friendship and the enormous burden of duty that’s entailed in running a home and family. Justine is a part-time counsellor and full-time housewife and mother, with two grown sons still at home and an older daughter living in London but returning home to get married. In addition to her own family, she takes care of her parents-in-law next door. Her own mother lives in a maisonette out the back and is frequently, in this novel, the voice of reason and common sense.
Justine’s lifelong best friend Iseult (also from next door, now living in Beirut) by contrast seems to live a charmed life. She has service staff for all the household chores, she’s dumped her disturbed adult son more or less in Justine’s lap, and all she does is read books. That’s an overly simplistic take on a complex and exquisitely wrought novel, a highlight of the year for this reader, and the lesson to be learned is this; women can’t have it all. Only a fool, or a very young woman, would believe in such codology.
Footnotes
Masters of Tradition is yet another trad music festival taking place this coming weekend in Cork. See westcorkmusic.ie for details.
Killyon Manor at Hill of Down is the venue for this year’s Another Love Story, a festival of music and art taking place in the grounds of the manor. See anotherlovestory.ie for details.