In 1950, at just forty-two, Cesare Pavese took his own life, leaving behind a vast literary legacy. On 3 December 1938, he had written in his diary:

“When we read, we do not seek for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own –the place where we live– and the vibration allowing us to grasp new insights within ourselves.

What a great thing it is to realise that every effort to force is in vain! It is enough to let ourselves bloom, to follow it, to take it by the hand as if it were someone else, and to trust that we are more important than we think.” [1]

It seems unlikely to me that Pavese was the very first person to put into words what these paragraphs express. Just a few weeks ago, without recalling Pavese’s words, I myself wrote in an essay about holding my own hand. I cannot say how many times I have read his diary since my youth, but the reason these sentences struck me with such force on this occasion must lie in the first paragraph of the quotation: I verified Pavese’s words first against themselves. The second verification came with Every One Still Here[2], which I read around the same time as Pavese’s diary.

Everyone Still Here is Liadan Ní Chuinn’s first published work. Glancing at the author’s biographical note in the book, I saw only this: they were born in the north of Ireland in 1998. Nothing more. Naturally, I sought a little further into Ní Chuinn. Let me explain: the name on the book cover –and on the present page– is not the author’s real name. It is said that they identify as non-binary, and in the biographical note the gender-neutral pronoun they is used in reference to them. Yet I have not come across any statement from the author themself about their gender identity. There are no photos of them online. The very few interviews Ní Chuinn has granted exist only in written form. In those, not a trace of personal information can be found. It is clear that the author has chosen to remain entirely anonymous. (I leave my own guess about the reason for this stance to the end of this essay.)

Ní Chuinn’s book consists of six stories. In each, we read about the relationships and secrets within working-class families, the narratives of family histories. Children who feel unloved by their mothers, those who have lost their fathers, ties between siblings and cousins, bonds woven with uncles, grandmothers, and lovers’ families, adoption stories – every kind of family relations that one can imagine appears within these pages. For some time now, I have been telling my friends with whom I speak of literature how weary I have grown of family stories. How then did I fall so entirely under the spell of this book? How is it that Ní Chuinn’s words found their echo within me?

First of all, the manner Ní Chuinn, from the very first story, lays bare childhood, the time of our deepest sorrows, immediately draws the reader into the book. Perhaps I can make myself clearer by quoting the opening lines of that story, “We All Go”:

My parents were hijacked before I was born. It was just before, two nights prior. I think it's important. I don't know why.

These four brief, striking sentences signal to me the beginning of a story about a childhood full of hardship and a life that, like all of ours, will unfold in the shadow of that childhood. And that is exactly what happens. We witness the traces left on Jackie, the story’s main character, by his father, who fell ill and died when Jackie was a child. On one hand, we see Jackie years later as a medical student working with cadavers; on the other, we watch the young child watching closely the changes illness reshaping his father’s body. Throughout the story, we also encounter Jackie’s father’s favorite music, the games he played with his children, his communication (miscommunication) with his wife and children, as well as the arrest of Jackie’s uncles before his birth and the Northern Ireland Conflict.

Although Jackie’s family and my own were shaped by utterly different fates, “We All Go” carried me back to my own childhood, back to Diyarbakır. I first remembered being carried home in my parents’ arms before the nightly curfew took hold, their anxious urgency all around me, and then the fathers of classmates who had been killed in the city’s prisons. And from there my thoughts moved almost inevitably to Alejandro Zambra’s Ways of Going Home[3], and the stadium that two childhood characters, growing up in Pinochet’s Chile, recall with joy. One of those characters, Claudia, enjoyed a show at the stadium when she was four, while her parents experienced unbearable pain at the very same moment. Sitting in the Estadio Nacional –where tens of thousands were detained, tortured, and three thousand killed after the military coup– they could not comprehend the joy of those around them; they could only obsessively dwell on those who had been killed in the stadium. Jackie’s Northern Ireland, my Diyarbakır, and the Chile of Ways of Going Home converged in my mind. So, when I moved on to the second story, titled “Amalur”, which takes its title from the Basque word for Mother Earth, it was hardly surprising to encounter both details about the Basque Country and Musa Anter’s ironic words as to how a language can shake the foundations of the state.

Before turning to the later stories and other themes, I must return to “We All Go” the narrator, Jackie, speaks throughout in the briefest of sentences, yet as those sentences accumulate, the meaning, depth, and force they generate become dizzying. Thanks to the story’s masterfully crafted, sophisticated structure, the reader moves effortlessly from one scene to scene, from one period to another,  from memory into dream. While Jackie’s family story unfolds, the traces of a time when thousands were tortured and killed are also followed. With its language, its structure, its plot, its characters, the truthfulness of its dialogue, and the power it exerts, this thirty-two-page story is so well made that to call Ní Chuinn’s craft weaving stitch by stitch would fall short. I can say, without almost any hesitation, that We All Go is the finest twenty-first century short story that I have read.

Another story in the book is “Russia,” is equally breathtaking. It follows a man adopted from Russia as he searches for his (step) sister, also adopted from Russia. In its Mesolithic and Neolithic galleries, alongside artifacts, the museum displays the bones of a young woman and her child from those eras, as well as a mummy and several skulls. One day, notes protesting the display of these human remains begin to appear, accompanied by flowers. The protests grow so intense that, at one point, the museum administrators and staff are at a loss for how to respond. Meanwhile, the protagonist consults a psychic in his parallel search for his sister. When they talk about the protests, “You are worried that it’s her. You are worried that she’s angry, that she’s trying to get at you, somehow. But you’re more worried that it’s not her,” the psychic says. What Russia reveals is how artificial the division between the personal and the social can be, showing how the dislocation felt by children torn from their countries through adoption can be read alongside the legacies of colonialism.

The story also evokes the unending pain born of oppression and the way the past persists in the present. In a street interview, an interviewee speaks of the display of human remains: “These people lived, they died, people buried them, begged that they would know peace,” they say, adding, “They haven’t gone anywhere. Every one is still here.” The book takes its title from these words: Every One Still Here. Only upon reaching the end did I realize that, with this title, the author was invoking not only the human remains displayed in the museum but also the civilians killed in Northern Ireland. Returning to the title, I recalled a passage in Ian McEwan’s Nutshell describing the deaths of refugees in the heart of Europe in 2015.

“These are new times. Perhaps they’re ancient.”

“Russia” does not stop there. It goes a step further, showing how facts that bring shame and unease to some can be ordinary and unremarkable to others, like museum administrators. I grasped this fully a few days after finishing the book, when I came across a news article about three skulls held in the archives of the Museum of Natural History in Paris – in an instant of realisation that provided the third verification of Pavese’s words quoted at the start of this essay. According to the article, the heads of King Toera and two members of his court, decapitated during a massacre carried out by the French army in Madagascar in 1897 and later brought to Paris, had been returned in a formal ceremony to Madagascar.[4] During the ceremony, a French minister acknowledged that the skulls had entered national collections in circumstances that clearly violated human dignity and in the context of colonial violence. At a moment when no politician in the northern hemisphere has any right to speak of human dignity –least of all of colonial violence– so long as the devastation in Gaza endures, it was a sense of moral relief that prevailed at the ceremony during which the skulls were returned to the Malagasy.

By the time I reached the end of Every One Still Here –and I will come shortly to how it ends– it was clear that Ní Chuinn possessed a quality unlike any short story writer that I had read recently. With simple, short sentences they had written stories of striking sophistication and length. Along with the fragmented narration and the use of time unbound from linear sequence, shifting in leaps, there was a dazzling skill that rendered the boundaries between the dreams, memories and thoughts of the characters and the outside world porous. Thanks to this skill, their stories approached as closely as possible not only the functioning of the human mind but the intricate essence of life itself. They were multi-layered narratives, binding the personal to the political, and the political in turn to the human condition. Although the Good Friday Agreement, which initiated the peace process in Northern Ireland, was signed in 1998, the year of  the author’s birth – the suffering endured in Northern Ireland from the 1960s through the 1990s felt as present and palpable as if it had been lived within their own lifetime. Displacement and estrangement, memory and its erasure, loss and mourning, all appeared like themes distilled from the life of a sage born in 1998 and passed on to us.

In an interview[5], the author explained that the distinctive voice in the stories was not entirely their own; noting that they loved listening to people; how people tell stories, how they speak and talk about themselves. I cannot say with certainty whether I grasped what sets Ní Chuinn apart –that Ní Chuinn isa genuine storyteller– while I later read that interview or whether it dawned on me gradually as I was reading the book itself. What I do know is this: after finishing the book, I found myself turning to Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Storyteller.”[6]

Benjamin’s storyteller is a figure on the verge of extinction in the modern age. In his essay, he argues that war, technology, information, and most crucially, in my view, the transformation of humanity’s relation to death have all contributed to the decline of storytelling. When he seeks to define the nature of true storytelling, he contrasts the story with information: information, he writes, lives only at that moment, it has to surrender to the moment completely, whereas the story does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. Turning to the short story, Benjamin claims that modern man has succeeded in abbreviating even storytelling. The short story, he notes, lacks the perfection as the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings and is therefore something other than the story. He reads the rise of the novel as a symptom of the decline of storytelling. For in Benjamin’s view, while the storyteller conveys experience –his own and that reported by others, his contemporaries as well as those who lived before him– the novelist isolates himself to produce texts that bear witness only to the profound perplexity of the living, texts that are completely devoid of counsel and do not contain wisdom.

There is a reason Benjamin, in speaking of the novel, turns to the living and their perplexity: Later in the essay he writes that death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell and that he has borrowed his authority from death.I take these words –sometimes described as mysterious[7] – to mean that no narrative can truly be considered a story unless it bears the shadow of death. I reach this conclusion both by recalling what Benjamin says of the novel and by reflecting on his claim that the material of the story is human life, which assumes a transmissible form only at the moment of death. Thus, a life finds its full expression only when complete. And yet, there is the storyteller: Giving voice to his own experience, and to the experience of the living and the dead alike.

Thus, it seems to me that Benjamin conceives the power of the story as inextinguishable, a power grounded in the storyteller’s ability to gather lives completed in death into wholeness and to convey them in their entirety. The genuine storyteller is the artisan who constructs a mosaic whose wholeness and meaning appear only when every fragment is set in its place. At the close of his essay, Benjamin formulates this “gift” in the following way:

… it is granted to him to reach back to a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience but no little of the experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to his own). His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to tell his entire life.

When I turn to Ní Chuinn, in the light of Walter Benjamin’s writings, I find that they write precisely the kind of stories Benjamin described—stories that have the capacity to preserve their strength and that remain capable of being told even years later.

They gather knowledge handed down from earlier generations, the tales overheard from strangers on a train, their observations of family relations and those of neighbours, the history of a country, the experiences of the oppressed and the exploited. Ní Chuinn binds these threads, distills the knowledge they hold, and passes it on. Just as Benjamin said, they are able to grasp back not only their own life but also those of others –above all of the dead– in their entirety, and to recount those lives in their entirety and in all their complexity. Their wish to remain anonymous, I believe, is itself a sign that they are a Benjaminian storyteller. With this stance Ní Chuinn seems to say, “Who I am is of no importance”, they call upon us to attend to their stories. For, as Benjamin writes, the storyteller is the person “who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of their story.”

All the stories in the book are set in Northern Ireland, but the final story, “Daisy Hill,” is the only one that explicitly centres on the events of Northern Ireland up to the late 1990s and what is still unfolding. Like the others, “Daisy Hill” begins as a family story, but with temporal dislocations and a steadily mounting tension, it turns into a narrative of violence in Northern Ireland. During a dispute between two cousins, Rowan and Shane, it becomes clear that the Northern Ireland conflict is what lies at the heart of their disagreement. Shane insists that all of it is over and that he is tired of his cousin’s obsession with history. Rowan then voices the spirit that marks all the stories in the book, both in form and in content, with the following words:

“How the fuck is it history?”

From there, the story builds wave upon wave of anger, felt to the bone, until its final sub-section, “The Truth.” In those nine pages, Ní Chuinn recounts, in the present tense, how dozens of civilians –many of them children– were killed by British soldiers in Northern Ireland. To the fury already pulsing through the story, mourning is added. Yet it is not the mourning of a distant past, for Ní Chuinn composes a threnody not only for the past but the present as well. In Pavese’s words, a threnody carrying the vibration through which the reader discovers the depths within and if we heed Benjamin, a threnody that presents to the dead the authority borrowed from death.[8]

In March 2025, after Every One Still Here appeared in Ireland, Ní Chuinn was asked in an interview which album they would take to a deserted island. Their answer was Mo Léan by Róis.[9] The music of Mo Léan reaches back to Ireland’s pre-Christian era. It revives the tradition of keening by women at funeral rites. Róis has given new life to keenings, carrying them into the present. Until Every One Still Here is read, or awating its publication in Turkish, listening to this album may be one of the few ways to sense a truth that is akin to the one in the book. [10]

NOTES

[1] Cesare Pavese, Il mestiere di vivere, Passerino Editore, 1952.

[2] Liadan Ní Chuinn, Every One Still Here, Granta Publications, 2025

[3] Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home, Granta Publications, 2013

[4] "La France restitue à Madagascar trois crânes de l’époque coloniale, dont celui présumé d’un roi décapité", Le Monde 

[5] Catherine Hearn, “An Interview with Liadan Ní Chuinn”, Tolka Journal 

[6] Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller – Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zorn, The Bodley Head (Penguin Random House), 2015

[7] Jonathon Sturgeon, “The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin review – a master thinker's fiction”, The Guardian;  Cressida Leyshon, “Ayşegül Savaş on Individuality, Agency, and Ideas of Home”, The New Yorker

[8] For reference, see another article in which the story titled “The Truth” is characterized as a threnody:  "Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn review – an extraordinary debut", The Guardian

[9] David Roy, "Or:La, voice notes and holidaying at home – three of Liadan Ní Chuinn’s favourite things", The Irish News

[10] Among the songs on the album, the one that spoke to me most was Cití.