Eggshells by Caitriona Lally: ‘priceless thoughts on words and the world’

I sometimes show up to my book club without my homework: I’ve decided I only have time for books worth every moment spent on them. From the first page of Eggshells, I knew it was worth its word count in gold.

Although Vivian Lawlor is mysterious, a strangeling, the backstory is not the point of this book. Nor is the outcome. Vivian does have an objective: to find a portal to the Other World where she might belong better. It’s just that, like her job-seeking, her portal-hunting is a part-time occupation. Conversely, her Attention Surplus Disorder focuses her with knockout concentration on what escapes most of us most of the time : language especially– the things we so vacantly say, the words we so thoughtlessly use – but also unexamined perspectives and obsessions (with business, for example). The only way of doing justice to the experience of reading this book would be to quote the bits that made me laugh out loud. But that would mean quoting from every single page: ‘She stares at me like I’m an unpicked scab’; ‘If I did go [to a fancy dress party] I’d dress up as a migraine’.

For whatever reason, Vivian’s main interest in life is language. She’s a word-magpie and most of her musings focus on names and expressions, such as the graffiti she collects from toilet doors and hoardings (like the iconic ‘I like scaldy mots’).

For Socrates, the unreflected or unexamined life is not worth living. Vivian is nothing if not reflected upon. True, she has never seen her reflection in a mirror and shuns all reflective surfaces . Since we never fully ‘see’ her from the outside, she is ‘all inside’ and in addition she herself is very inward. For example, instead of cultivating her appearance, she grows her own smell (of meat and underthings), refusing to wash it away. We know she’s a grey- or white-haired woman-child who doesn’t seem to have a past, though she surprises us by throwaway remarks about her schooldays or a trip to Paris with her great-aunt Maud.

Vivian almost says it herself: she’s like a little wet scaldy that has emerged as a grown woman from some sort of deep, traumatic fracture or freeze. She can take nothing for granted in language, is always searching for cues and clues. ‘We sit and drink in a silence that I hope is comfortable, but I’m not sure, so I start using my words in case it isn’t.’ She seems to be permanently walking on eggs, in relation not just to words but also to the things they’re supposed to name. Words like ‘friend’: ‘I almost drop the kettle. I am in a friendship. I am a friend and I have a friend and this friend will come to my funeral.’ But later she wonders about this same friend: ‘I’m not sure if I genuinely like her or if it’s the shape of her name that appeals to me.’ Just as she questions the meaning of the word ‘friend’, she also probes the set expression ‘to let yourself in’: ‘as if you needed permission to enter your own house’. Naturally, her sister, also called Vivian, with her ‘north-facing voice’, has no time for the scaldy: ‘My sister’s relationship with me is one prolonged sigh’.

Most of Vivian’s thoughts on words and the world are priceless but even as I’m doubled up, I’m wincing, because nobody should see things so clearly without the kind of protective epidermic layer that seems to have been (literally, by her father) burnt or scalded off her. Apparently, she has reached advanced adulthood without having lived as an adult and without having possessed anything of her own until her great-aunt Maud dies and leaves her the house. What better way to deprive a child of a life than to give you nothing and your sibling everything, even the same name as you?

What I love about Vivian is that she’s both a hardcore writer-artist-poet and a crone-child so original that she’s beyond real: not surreal, but extra-real.

Words, the names we put on things, are her obsession and this puts her at odds with a world where their chief purpose is to hide the truthor to sell untruths. Vivian counters this by inventing her own words : ‘I eye her, feary that she might…’, or the words ‘hoardroom’ and ‘egg-meat’; by poking at the fake expressiveness of others: ‘exchanging a grin’, ‘companionable silence’ – and by announcing some categorical excommunications: ‘Awning’ is’such an ugly gape of a word’ (‘pluice’ – not ‘ploose’ – is the suggested alternative) and the letter K is’ugly and overused’: imagine if brass plaques were common ‘placks’ … As for the anti-acquisitive lists, these are perfect prose poems; my favourite is the one of obsolete placenames like Siam. Of course, Vivian does buy some things, but anybody who can make a shopping list naming only blue edibles has not grasped what’s expected of consumers.

Vivian is perhaps searching for the portal that would take her back to the Other world, but maybe, unbeknownst to herself, she’s already found her ‘true place’ or home-from-home: in language: ‘“Reckon I might. “I’ve dropped my first pronoun: this is the start of things to come.’” The reason why her experience of Dublin is so intense and direct is not just because she paces and maps it (literally) but because she’s so attentive to its words, including its maimed placenames on blacked-out streetsigns: Eccles Street beckons because ‘I need to walk on a street that’s also a cake’. Her reading of the city isn’t just wordplay, though. The GPO is an ‘echoey Soviet building from a spynovelwithitsrailings and queues and grey-brownefficiency’. And in addition to the look of the place and its names, she registers the cadences of Dublin’s voices, the tones of the officials, taxidrivers and neighbours, none of whom can make a button of Vivian: ‘Are you for real?’

With her parallel perceptiveness, Vivian rescues much more than just contemporary Dublin. She also resuscitates some of the magic of language and life, showing the way words breathe or choke, the way the world can shrink your life or expand it, the way we act (busy, bored, important etc) and the way we judge and order things: ‘I fear the discounted books might be taunted by their full price peers’. Bypassing nothing, the opposite of a passer-by because she’s trying to figure everything out, and with the help of a notebook and without meaning to, she exposes vistas and ruts, portals and traps. Like one of the great Pat Kinevane’s poet-losers, especially the burned beauty in his play Underneath, she’s a modern-day flâneuse, overlooked but overlooking nothing, a seer, a gift of a character in a gift of a booque.

Mary Gallagher is an associate professor of French at UCD

Eggshells is published by Liberties Press, priced €12.99. Hodges Figgis is offering a 10 per cent discount to Book Club readers.