Minor Monuments

by Ian Maleney

Minor Monuments is a collection of essays about family, memory, and music. Mostly set in the rural Irish midlands, on a small family farm not far from the river Shannon. This book tracks the final years of Maleney's grandfather's life, and looks at his experience with Alzheimer's disease, as well as the experiences of the people closest to him.

Using his grandfather's memory loss as a spur, the essays ask what it means to call a place home how we establish ourselves in a place, and how we record our experiences of a place.

The nature of familial and social bonds, the way a relationship is altered by observing and recording it, the influence of tradition and history, the question of belonging - these are the questions which come up again and again.

Using episodes from his own life, and drawing on the works of artists like Pat Collins, Seamus Heaney, John Berger and Brian Eno, Maleney examines how certain ways of listening and looking might bring us closer to each other, or keep us apart.

Minor Monuments is a thought provoking and quietly devastating meditation on family, and how even the smallest story is no minor event.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir, Irish Literature, Ireland

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 28, 2019

Reviews

[Peter Boyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Irish writer Ian Maleney's debut - a collection of essays about family, memory and home. I was drawn to it because our backgrounds are so similar - like myself, he grew up in a house "down a dead-end bog road barely wide enough for a single car, a few miles from the nearest town." We both live in Dublin these days, but share a growing affinity to the rural Ireland of our youth. Maleney writes about the connection he feels towards Seamus Heaney's oeuvre, "which suggested that the place I came from could be the stuff of poetry and not just a blank and backward wilderness from which to escape" and I couldn't help nodding my head in agreement.

Maleney is a qualified sound engineer. Many of the essays are related to his recordings and his efforts to capture the atmospheres of everyday life: the tranquility of a city park, the wind blowing across an exposed, desolate bog. I am not quite as obsessional about sound and I must admit that my attention wavered through some of those pages. I preferred the pieces about his family, especially his poignant attempts to bond with grandfather John Joe, who suffered with Alzheimer's. The writing is solemn and precise, and Maleney comes across as a thoughtful, compassionate human being. I look forward to reading more of his work.

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

This young man possesses very fresh and thoughtful voice. His essays focus on transition and sound in all different conceptual meanings of these two words. The transitions from childhood to adulthood, from life to death, from thoughts into the written words. "Writing divides us from life, in a small but permanent way. We can come close to it again, very close sometimes, but we must always return to whatever shadow of life this is; our life reconstructed from memory, where we carry our truth around with us and display it for others." 

The sounds of emptiness, the wind, nature; the role different sounds plays in our life. He goes around with his recorder catching up the moments of the ordinary existence not to be repeated again ever. "Hearing is so constant, it locates is in a world more extensive even than sight, and yet it operates on a secondary level most of the time - somewhere beneath thought, fleshing out but rarely supplanting the visible world. Even at its most direct, sound suggests, it does not show. "

He wants to understand what was before him and what the future brings. And he wants to be a part of a community, not the part of a network. Also he writes about his rural roots; how much he is grateful to his parents and how far he has moved from the way they live. He writes about memory and how his grandad is losing it to the cruel Alzheimer. Some of his experiences are universal. But I was pleasantly surprised by the originality of his thoughts and his ability to put them into words: "To put something into words at all is to manufacture a distance, a partiality, which turns memory into history."

[Sarah]

"Mourning, Fanny Howe writes, teaches us to love without an object. I feel like listening teaches us the same thing."

The synopsis on Goodreads of Ian Malaney's debut essay collection describes it as a collection of essays on "family, memory and music", which (to be fair), it is - but I think it would be more accurate to say these essays focus on nature, sound recording (something Malaney is very passionate about) and his grandfather's decline and subsequent Alzheimer's diagnosis and death.

By their very nature these essays are incredibly personal, and I found them the most engaging when Malaney was on the topic of his grandfather and their relationship. The essays on sound recording were a bit of a miss for me and some of the ones on memory felt longer than they needed to be - but that probably comes down to personal preference more than anything else.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This remarkable book is Maleney's first. It is aa amazing achievement for someone under 30. The author grew up in the Irish midlands, famously considered boring, with "no there, there". When Maleney's grandfather developed dementia, he began going home often to help his Nana. He had (and still does) a girlfriend, and tiny, overpriced flat in Dublin, the city he fled to in order to get away from the farm.

His grandfather had worked for a couple of decades, later in his working life, for the Bord na Móna (the Turf Board) which had large operations in the midlands, cutting turf that was converted into electricity. The huge plants and the peat bogs have all been closed. The bogs have been recently criticized as a major source of greenhouse gases (https://www.theguardian.com/world/201...). As Maleney's grandfather John Joe slipped into dementia, he still talked about this work for the turf board as though it was still part of his daily routine. Their farm did not provide sufficient income to support the family, so this job was essential.

As Maleney cared for his grandfather, called in at times there were family emergencies and later as his grandfather needed round the clock care, he reflects on a range of topics. He initially studied sound engineering at university, but later found that his approach to the subject was incompatible with that of the musicians he knew. The most interesting aspect of this book for me was his description of the ways in which environmental sounds are an essential part of one's surroundings, but at the same time evade being captured. He describes the work of various sound artists he admires, making me desperate to see these exhibits for myself.

There were other chapters that did not interest me as much, perhaps because they were much denser. One explored in depth the nature of computers compared to human memory. Maleney is adept at writing about scientific themes, and relating them to his own life. However, I found the stories of his family, and the community in which they lived to be more compelling. Ireland is quickly losing memories of the older generations, and communities where people truly knew one another. Of course there were arguments, and there was gossip. There was a lack of privacy, and a lot of judgements of others' behavior. But there was support and community that has all but disappeared in places like Dublin.

This is a glimpse into one family, into contemporary Irish society, and the Ireland that is being lost. Highly recommended.

[Don Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minor Monuments collects a number of essays written by the author, and links them all to his family and upbringing, but mostly to his dearly departed grandfather. Ian gives us a wonderful insight into his upbringing, and his relationship with his family. Most of the stories here feel like they were poured onto the page, with the author expressing his emotions and reliving important parts of his life. This book gives us a great insight into life in the Irish midlands, and also the affect of Alzeimer’s disease on a family and friends.

This collection of 12 stories, for the most part, took my breath away. While there may have been one or two that didn’t grasp me as much as the others (they probably just went over my head) I thought that overall this was a wonderful collection. There were a few standouts for me though;

- "and the wind it tremendously blew" is a fascinating opening chapter that introduces us to the many elements that the book is built on. I loved the description of the bogland, and how it all linked back to his family and love of recording.
- "shelter" in which the author returns to his hometown to conduct an interview about Lough Boora Parklands, which slowly becomes a story about the area and his trips back there.
- "machine learning" is a little different, in that it focuses more on people vs machine – but ulimately comes back to whether or not were are the people we used to be when Alzeimer’s takes our memories. I loved this story.
- "this is how it was" where the author talks about photographs and what they represent. Beutifully written and possibly my favourite story in the book.

What it comes down to is that this collection of essays is an excellent piece of work. It is hard to come up with better praise than those that are already on the cover – but this is certainly a book that belongs in your collection. It packs a punch both emotionally and is incredibly engaging.

The essays are written brilliantly, and presented in such a way that it is easy to dip in and pick one to suit the mood. It will certainly be a book that I will read again.

Highly recommend.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and heart-wrenching, this one.

[Caroline Venables · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t want to get all gushy but this book is just beautiful. The cover says it is one of those books that will change you, and it really does. The use of language and the thought processes behind it really make you think, and make you fall in love with words, sounds and thoughts.

These are essays are so personal, drawing on his childhood and his relationship with his grandfather as their roles change. John Joe, his grandfather, has dementia and the essays show the deterioration and the effect this has on all those around him as well as personally.

I would recommend that everybody reads this book, there are so many adjectives I could use to describe it but I think everybody will get something different from it. The power of writing, the description of sound, the importance of nature and depth of feeling is overwhelming.

[T P Kennedy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting collection. Some excellent essays - heart felt and well crated. There are one or two that seem designed to display the author's depth of learning which appealed far less to me.

[eimear.reads]

Dnf 2019

[Sean Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely book.
Full of insights, compassion and love…
A really lovely book.

[Morgan Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not just to be read, but to be soaked in. Absolutely beautiful

[Rogue Male · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Family members can be really hard to read. They often deal with some injustice that the author wishes to set the record straight on, or they can be a whimsical recount of a particular episode and the memories and subsequent events that happened. And then you come across memoirs like this one that haven’t been written with a specific aim in mind. They contain and reveal so much about the joy and pain of life, love and family.

The first thing that Malaney did when taking his partner to the family home was to take her to the bog. It is not the smallest room in the house, but the bog that was past his grandparent’s house and over some very wet ground to the sheer wall of peat. It is not the most auspicious start, but it sets the tone of the book. The first chapter is about the sounds he hears when he is down there. Mostly, the sound of the wind, from the gentle breeze that barely can be heard to the howling gales that have come in from the Atlantic.

He begins to record there, taking his inspiration from Richard Skelton and Pat Collins and the way that they use sound in their art. Returning to Ireland after some time away he sees that his grandfather, John Joe is beginning to fade away. He starts to record his grandfather’s voice secretly. They are not high-quality recordings but they are what he will have to remember the sound of his voice.

He thinks that there must have been members of his family in the same spot for at least 200 years, but the written records are a little sketchy. The home he lived in and his grandparent’s house and land became the stamping ground with his brothers and cousins and the neighbour’s kids. It was a place that they could just be. They built huts, made music and became their own people. The family memories also draped over this landscape became part of his personal hinterland.

All of the chapters are like this; a sense of belonging to that place he grew up in regardless of where in the world he happens to be. He has chosen a career that is culturally rewarding, but sadly not financially so. His grandfather is admitted to hospital in Dublin and he is back in the country and gets to see him more often. He notes that he is fading away because of his dementia.

Some of these essays are fragmented, snatched as they float through his memories, and others are heartfelt, more considered pieces that he has taken a long time writing. I found this to be a very moving book. Not only is Maleney a quality writer, but he draws deeply from his emotions to convey all the feelings he has about life as he finds it.

He writes about this little patch of Ireland beautifully too, describing its bleakness in a beautiful, tender way.I found that the way he writes about death is not morbid:

‘Death was the removal of a person from the flow of time’

I had never thought about it in that way before, but it made complete sense.

If you want to read a different type of memoir, that might give you a different outlook on life after, then this is a great book to start with.

[Eibhlín · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I dream of my grandparents’ house now because it is the strongest shelter I have experienced against time’s many erosions.”

I adored this book of essays. The author weaves the thread of memory to link up narratives beautifully - through reflections on photographs of his grandparents, to critical and academic thoughts on Alzheimer’s disease, and the thinness of time during the wake of a loved one.

It articulates so many feelings I’ve been unable to say. The description of his grandparents’ house is one of the most moving depictions of home, family and nostalgia I’ve read.

It also really accurately captures the quarter-life dichotomy of feelings you’re faced with.

“The adult prospects of self-sacrifice, stability and security were clashing with a lingering adolescent desire to wander, to throw off all responsibility and pursue the gratification of the senses like some tragic belated caricature of an itinerant artist.”

[Roxani · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read lately on landscape, memory (and its loss), place (and its loss too), illness, and writing.

A favorite excerpt, among many: Almost every decent word I’ve written in my life has come out of this impulse to make explicit what would otherwise be hidden, overlooked, soon lost. I believe this also to be the root of whatever sadness I carry with me in life. I feel a terrible need to go beyond the places my family can go — to parse and interpret what they think, say and do; to locate their actions in a context that, for reasons more economic than personal, they cannot easily access. They have given me the tools to separate myself from them, to see them in a way in which they cannot see themselves. It is rare that these tools have made us feel closer.

[Weiling · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is great sadness to be an exile at home. It always involves displacement, and displacement can come in many forms. The change of built or political environment can make the context of home unrecognizable for the ones who never left and feel the center of the world shift elsewhere and they have fallen out of time. This temporal fallout characterizes much of post-Soviet memories. For the small household near the bog by the Shannon River in midland Ireland, where Ian Maleney was born and raised and had dreamed of leaving, displaced at once were grandpa’s memory due to Alzheimer's and Maleney’s own sense of belonging. In John Joe’s final months, the family rallied to take care of him while grandma also went in and out of the hospital. From being deployed to the hospital failing to deliver the calm John Joe needed to sitting in the kitchen, watching John Joe’s mind disintegrate, Maleney was absorbed into “the resonance between two different experiences of exile: the emigrant and the amnesiac.”

Witnessing losses and sadness first hand, Maleney contemplated his decision of pursuing a more exciting and cosmopolitan life in Dublin, which gave him a bachelor’s degree in sound engineering, a job as a freelance arts correspondent, and even a network of acquaintances. All this urban life could hardly be communicated, or “translated,” back to his home and folks comfortably nestled in the close knit community around the old Bord na Móna bog. Something crucial went missing in this pursuit, and Maleney wanted to chase it back, using the skills he learned in the city: writing and recording. But he soon realized that these skills acquired new meanings in an intimately beautiful and melancholy environment, to which their professional value in the city life did not transfer.

Recording prescribed scores could fit a studio that further fit in a prescribed industry, but it felt too mainstream and too narrow in front of the “minor monuments” of one’s native place. Guided by English musician-writer David Toop’s book Haunted Weather and Brian Eno’s ambient album Discreet Music, Maleney began to appreciate unregulated, chaotic ambient sounds recorded with cheap devices. It was in those sounds, and through the practice of patiently recording the environment without an assigned goal, that he learned to negotiate a transitory peace and position in the place he lived or called home. With that arose the monumental figure of Seamus Heaney, an unavoidable voice in contemporary Irish letters writing of the bog. “For me,” wrote Maleney, “Heaney’s success was evidence that the kind of inconsequential rural place I know best could still be worth writing about, and that the touchstones of my parochial upbringing could be made relevant, even telling.”

Recording, regardless of the sophistication of the device, is never an easy way of representing and remembering the environment and the fullness of the story. While the audio needs a verbal or visual narrative to complement it to make a story of listening or walking, it becomes more complicated to record human life. At the same time a precious and unique archive is created, the act of recording already transitions the recording person to a future where the recorded is no more. Is it better to not record everything so that we can be more present in the moment in which the dying one is still present? Is it the sensible and recordable trait of the loved one the most unreplicable gift of memory? What about that which cannot be registered in a machine, but whose palpability lies paradoxically in the dark room of memory where the photos of the moment are never to be developed and the sounds never to be played again? When we record, are we recording the person we are taking care of, or the company we provide them to be part of their last presence that takes place in a cozy familial room? What does recording make us, in the moment of care or saying goodbye, when we know this might be the last image, footage, or sound of “us” we can ever log? Can letting go of the tool also be a good means to remembering?

Watching John Joe fade away, memory gone before the body, Maleney noted that death was not a single point of ending, but multiple ones that sometimes happened at once, but in other times did not. If recording was a way to hold John Joe close to heart, writing was Maleney’s own salvage of his native connection to home that, he soon realized, did not draw him closer to the world his people came from and still inhabited. As soon as you write, you have always already pulled yourself from the place that was your entire world, because to put memory into words, however intimately and privately, “is to manufacture a distance.” Writing is the point of no return: “the road vanishes as you walk it.”

Maleney’s essays speak to all diasporic lives. They are especially close to the experiences of those who have tried to write about home, return home, and never leave again. “Home” departs from the gravity center of our world once we set out to search for a new life. Even when homecoming is physically and financially possible, we stay as a guest in our parents’ or grandparents’ house. The distance, however small, is unbridgeable. It is something that we will have to grow with, grapple with, and graft new relations with. Watching friends and relatives near and far arriving at John Joe’s funeral, and listening to his neighbors and former colleagues’ endless accounts of how he provided and cared for those around him, Maleney realized that the sweet comfort of coming home was “to be part of a community rather than a network.”

[SM]

Favorites: “Fidelity,” “The Blow-In,” and “See Ye In Church.”

[David O'Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honest and good. Exquisite sentences.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no sugar here, mostly salty tears and strong hard truths. It's a book of beautiful essays, all related together to create the picture of a life, a family, a sense of home and the sadness of loss. Ian Maleney has a voice that is clear, dry and honest but self-deprecating.

Often I hear people despair that so few of us even try to give voice to life's disconnections and incongruities, but here Maleney is at work, making connections, establishing a beachhead from which understanding, if not meaning, of life can be considered and expressed. He does this, as if looking through a microscope, or at times the back-end of a telescope, at his own childhood, his family's life rooted to land in the middle of the country, on the edge of the bog. He examines questions of memory, meaning and the loss of both in his grandfather's life. -- His grandfather was a towering figure, a man of personal power and charisma who gave strength to his family and his community. Maleney looks at his legacy as dementia takes him away and lays open the truth of his vulnerability, which the writer connects to his own vulnerability, with a sweetly compelling simplicity.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

lan Maleney's Minor Monuments, a book of essays and the latest Tramp Press publication, has a beautiful quietude to it that's difficult to explain; considering sound, landscapes, homescapes and illness, amongst other themes and topics, Maleney is always stunningly measured in his prose. Never erring from directness, he manages to find shining moments of humour even in the darkness, and considers his own life in relation - mutual, two-sided - to the world around him, and all the forms that "world" takes, the things and people and ideas inhabiting it. The essay 'Machine Learning', which begins as a contemplation of computers and Al and becomes, as if through trojan horse, a thoughtful essay on dementia, and easily amongst the strongest in the collection. The final essay, 'See Ye In Church', is the other lynchpin, bleak and loving as it is; Maleney lists his heartbreaking existential regrets as the Alzheimer's story reaches its inevitable conclusion. And these are the lines that struck me most: "I know that if you leave, you cannot return... The road vanishes as you walk it."

[✦denisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

minor monuments is such a quiet, beautiful little book. gut-wrenching, nostalgic, profound, and quietly heartbreaking. i didn’t expect it to stir so much in me, but every page left a mark. it’s full of soft reflections on memory, home, family, and the passage of time—reading it felt like sitting in silence with someone you love, just feeling the weight of everything unspoken.
⠀
ian maleney writes with tenderness and clarity. the way he captures his grandfather’s decline through alzheimer’s is raw and deeply human. the essays wander through sound, rural life, belonging—and even when they get abstract, his voice remains warm and grounded.
⠀
this is nonfiction that doesn’t shout. it hums. it lingers.

thank you Tramp Press for sending me a copy of this beautiful book.

[Marie O'Halloran · Rating 4 out of 5]

With an education in sound engineering, Ian Maleney is fascinated by silence and sound. He returns regularly to the rural area of his childhood, particularly because of the deteriorating health of his grandparents living close-by. He carries us along in his research into Alzheimer's, the illness to which his grandfather has succumbed. "In a world where recognition is the very material of life, to be denied it is to suffer a very painful existence indeed." I would recommend this book highly to anyone who has a relative with any form of dementia.

[Mary Carroll · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ian Maleney’s novel is a therapeutic read for any one experiencing the loss of a loved one. His honesty in depicting John Joe’s ebbing from life is informative and comforting. Set in the midlands, the silence, sounds and beauty of Boora Bog, the local and exotic interest of Clonmacnoise, rural community living combined with erudite and philosophical contemplation make Minor Monuments an uplifting and compulsory read.

[Hanorah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely collection of short stories and essays, not all of which I adored but many of which had beautiful passages. My favourites are The Blow-in and See Ya in Church, both of which capture Irish culture so well. The collection mostly focuses on an area of the bog in Offaly where the author grew up which is also where my mother was raised, and the author’s grandparents, who feature heavily, are buried in the same churchyard as my grandparents. Very familial in many ways.

[Dawn Coffey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very odd to be reading a book about a period of time you were about for, recognising apartments, stories etc but having no idea what else was going on in Ian's life.

It says it's essays but this is a lot more cohesive than that. Thoughtful, sensual, beautifully told, a real sense of place, and not just the house, the bog itself.

Great stuff

[Arjunvir Singh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best book I've read this year so far, just like Sally Rooney said, I loved every page. The writing is extremely beautiful and complex. Through sounds, relationships, and memories, Ian Maleney explores what it means to be alive, to be human and to be at home. Would one hundred per cent recommend.

[Sean Gorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an Irish man from the Midlands living abroad and having lived through a similar experience to the author, this book really resonated with me. Thats not to take away from the writing which is supurb throughout.

[Muireann · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an excellent collection of essays. It's about family and memory and growing up and I just loved it.

[Frank Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of essays, some of which I'll be returning to.
Excellent.

[Fiona O'Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great first collection- looking forward to more.