{"id":350,"date":"2021-03-03T09:44:15","date_gmt":"2021-03-03T09:44:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/?p=350"},"modified":"2021-03-03T09:44:15","modified_gmt":"2021-03-03T09:44:15","slug":"minor-monuments-by-ian-maleney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/2021\/03\/03\/minor-monuments-by-ian-maleney\/","title":{"rendered":"“Minor Monuments” by Ian Maleney"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Minor Monuments<\/em> is a collection of personal essays by Dublin-based writer Ian Maleney. They\u2019re all set around his family\u2019s small farm on the edge of a bog a few miles from the River Shannon. They explore issues around belonging, place, home, memory and nature and weave together Maleney\u2019s personal experience with his musings on literature, art and, most frequently, sound. Maleney uses sound recordings to capture and explore the landscape of his childhood. Interspersed throughout the essays is the story of his grandfather, John Joe\u2019s diagnosis and experience with Alzheimer\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI wanted to listen hard to his final emergence; to capture his life in the last stage of becoming \u2013 to record the person still forming even as he began, contrapuntally, to unravel.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Minor Monuments<\/em> follows John Joe right through to his death and funeral. As the older man slowly loses his memories and connections to the landscape, Maleney is questioning his own sense of belonging and how he\u2019s come to think of his home. He spends as much time as he can with John Joe, documenting his stories and paying careful attention to how he interacts with the world around him. At several points in the book, I had the sense that I was encountering a kind of teacher\/disciple scenario, with Maleney patiently waiting for his grandfather\u2019s lived inheritance to pass on to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA wake like John Joe\u2019s is not just an opportunity to remember these people and their stories, but also a chance to share and build on those memories, to pass them on and to bind them closer to the people who are living out their own stories in the same place.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prose is neat and sparse but imbued with warmth. It\u2019s like reading someone\u2019s meandering thoughts as they pick their way through a difficult time. It\u2019s impossible not to imagine the two men -one old, one young- sat together companionably, their very different world experiences stretching between them, their mutual fondness apparent throughout. This is such a gentle book. It\u2019s deeply respectful and extremely attentive, as you might expect from a writer used to recording sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also deeply appreciated the portrayal of a rural, working man with dementia. It\u2019s rare to see this character portrayed in literature and yet I frequently come across older men and women, like John Joe, who develop dementia whilst living in farmhouses and on land that\u2019s been in their family for generations. For these people, a move to residential care can be nothing short of earthshattering. They are intrinsically bound to their land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love this book. It was my favourite non-fiction read of 2019 and I\u2019ve pressed it upon many people since then. Maleney writes with honesty and tenderness, always holding his grandfather as an equal. There\u2019s an awful lot of wisdom in both what he writes and how he writes it. These essays are rich with humility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Minor Monuments was published by Tramp Press in 2019<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Minor Monuments is a collection of personal essays by Dublin-based writer Ian Maleney. They\u2019re all set around his family\u2019s small farm on the edge of a bog a few miles from the River Shannon. They explore issues around belonging, place, home, memory and nature and weave together Maleney\u2019s personal experience with his musings on literature, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,5,78,6,49,9,79],"class_list":["post-350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-alzheimers","tag-carers","tag-essays","tag-family","tag-irish","tag-man","tag-rural"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":351,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions\/351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/dementiafiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}