Many Irish Times readers will have come across the Blasket Islands seanchaí Peig Sayers before — some, no doubt, against their will. Her first memoir, Peig, was introduced to the school curriculum in the 1960s, and was apparently so despised that her photograph was ripped from the book’s cover, stuck on classroom walls and used for target practice.
In other words, sufficient time has now elapsed that the life in Ireland that Peig describes, and the mystical, Celtic-Christian mind that she herself evinces, appear strange enough to be genuinely captivating.
These, like many of Peig’s stories, often start in the middle or at the end. They then might meander back to some sort of a beginning, before stopping, suddenly, with no discernible conclusion, or definitive moral purpose. Maybe, at a push, they could be called quixotic , but there is something continual, something rolling about Peig’s tellings, that reacquaints the reader with the entirely separate oral tradition from whence they came.
Loved this Book.
Loved that story at school!