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Who Occupies This House by Kathleen Hill: book review

 



Who Occupies This House (2010) is set in the same house, covering 100 years of family history, complete with photographs and illustrations.


The narrator begins this memoir seven years after her mother’s death. It is mostly about the house her mother and relatives lived in for almost a hundred years since 1912, two years after it was built. 


Her grandfather and grandmother Willie and Deirdre’s items are still in the house they rented on the day the Titanic sank. They bought the house in 1917. The narrator’s mother Kate bought the house in 1994. The narrator’s father and mother Bert and Kate’s objects are also still in the house. Objects of heritage, love, and everyday life: from photographs to books to cutlery … ‘poems cut from newspapers; articles, invitations, calling cards, train schedules, maps, menus, postcards …’


The short stories of the house and its inhabitants include her mother’s younger sister. The narrator writes about the history of the house and historical events that mark the passing of time. She writes about her relatives and the different roads they have taken.


But it is a past with missing pieces because the narrator never lived in the house. And now the narrator has to let it go. With her husband Martin and three daughters, she is faced with the sale of the family home.


Despite not living in the house, her despondency is palpable. Why does she feel this way? What memories will her daughters have of their heritage? What is her legacy? 


Compiled from letters, journals, documents and memories, this is an account of a house’s occupants. First Willie and Deirdre Carmody and relatives who left Ireland for America, then her mother and father – and her mother’s little diary. Happy times, tragic times. 


Overall, although there are poignant accounts, I found it rather disjointed as it is not chronological. Instead, it is more of a series of remembrances, crossing generations and people and history that does not necessary fill in the missing pieces, but confuses them. 









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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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