RaveThe Stinging Fly (IRE)In A Ghost In The Throat, Doireann Ní Ghríofa reconstructs Ní Chonaill’s life, piecing together each instance she is marked as the mother, wife, or aunt of a man, until there is a thorough and brilliant picture. What starts out as an act of curiosity turns into a sort of pilgrimage for Ní Ghríofa, a means through which to understand and anchor her own life. The resulting text is a landmark in Irish writing ... Wilson has translated a number of classic works and in doing so has highlighted the importance of considering the effect, whether intentional or not, that a translator’s biases have on the text. Ní Ghríofa raises this issue in an Irish context with A Ghost In The Throat, showing the reader how essential it is to question the seeming objectivity of translation ... While Ní Ghríofa keeps the plates of motherhood and writing spinning, we follow her research through census documents, court records and newspaper archives, where women appear as appendages in the lives of men ... Ní Ghríofa writes with acute intricacy about the maternal body during and after pregnancy. For the reader, we see the importance, and intensity, of the beautiful moments just as much as the challenging ones ... One of Ní Ghríofa’s biggest accomplishments with this book is to explore the delicate and beautiful bond between mother and baby, as much for herself as for Ní Chonaill, while at the same time showing the cost that the deep attention of motherhood require ... It is exhilarating to read what Ní Ghríofa has done with the prose form, blending memoir, biography and auto-fiction to create a sprawling interrogation of self and of womanhood that is unlike anything else.
