Translated from the Irish by Alan Titley.
Ó Cadhain's 1949 book is considered one of the best books written in the Irish language, and took 65 years to have a complete translation into English. The novel takes place in the graveyard outside of small Irish town. All of the characters are dead, and they spend their time telling each other old lies, revealing each others' old secrets, and re-visiting old, tightly held grievances. Caitriona Paudeen has died, as the novel opens, and she finds her potential rest disturbed by her closeness to the corpse of her son's mother-in-law, a woman she refers to as Toejam Nora.Nora and Caitriona spend the novel trading obscenity laced jabs, trying to convince their departed neighbors of the rightness of their cause, and to win them to their respective sides. The story is told almost totally in dialogue, with many voices clamoring all at once, and often no way of knowing who is talking. Not a book that takes an optimistic view of human interactions or of the afterlife.
An interesting, but slow-moving book. Not for those who like clean language as the recently deceased Irish are apparently fond of cursing colorfully and imaginatively.
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