[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: Gaelic
country: UK
year: 2008
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 17.9.14-21.9.14, 25.1.23-28.1.23
I love Màiri Anna NicDhòmhnaill’s Cleas Sgàthain. I first read it in 2014 and have been telling people since then that it’s one of my favorite Gaelic books, and it absolutely holds up. my only real criticism of it would be its occasionally dubious sexual politics (particularly re “Salome Sheòrais”), but that’s outweighed by how much I love the other things it’s doing.
the book follows twin sisters, Iseabail and Catrìona, who switch places for a week so that Iseabail, who had an allergic reaction to something at a salon that’s left her with an irritating rash, can make a good impression on her new coworkers at the English-language publishing company in London where she’s just been promoted. Catrìona, grudgingly, agrees to cover for her sister. in many ways Iseabail’s part is a pretty classic — well-executed — story about someone who lives in the big city (re)discovering the complexities of rural life: Iseabail quickly discovers that Catrìona’s life is, if anything, more complicated than her own, as she navigates Catrìona’s network of relationships in the community. I liked this part, for all that it’s a bit cliché!
the real standout, though, is Catrìona in the city: the new author her company is about to sign, one “Evander MacCrimmon”, turns out to be a guy born and raised in Glasgow leveraging all the racist and romanticized stereotypes about “the Celts” to sell his ~Celtic fantasy~ series, and the book is a sharp critique of the continued presence of the image of The Celt (as primitive, poetic, past) in contemporary culture and some of the ways it affects people who belong to real, living, present Celtic-language communities. it also strikingly ties this with both British racism and fantasy’s Orientalism through one of Catrìona/Iseabail’s coworkers, a woman of mixed Pakistani-Gaelic heritage who’s strategically concealing her Gaelic background because the company really just wants someone to validate/legitimize its books about ~the Mysterious East~. the magical Celt / the mysterious East: that’s the fantasy genre, baby.
there’s a lot of other stuff going on here, and I still can’t believe Moray Watson dismisses it as Gaelic “chick lit”.
moods: funny, lighthearted, wacky