A haunted and haunting book, short, but densely packed with metaphor and meaning. Ghostly black-and-white photographs of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and women treated for hysteria there in the 19th century, accompanied by case study notes and 'photographic service' cards recording the subjects’ symptoms, convey the impression that we are reading messages from the dead past. This is an illusion created by Casey’s skillful blend of fact and fiction. The case histories and service card texts are partly based on rough translations of primary sources, partly invented ... Yet the novel is poetic rather than polemic, elegantly written and filled with resonant imagery ... Casey crafts individual portraits and a collective monologue that show them as human beings with histories, desires, and, yes, bodies: their principal weapon in the battle to wrest some kind of recognition from the men who rule their lives ... Despite its often somber tone, City of Incurable Women is in the end affirmative and inspiring, a powerful demonstration of Maud Casey’s artistry.
A rigorous historical investigation and a thoughtful consideration of cultural context. Nevertheless, it is a novel ... Casey thinks about trauma in ways not dissimilar to how an academic historian might: as moments of pain and suffering to which human beings respond in unpredictable and sometimes creative ways. How Casey uses this information, however, differs from what historians would do: she uses the asylum records not as evidence but as an ignition for her prodigious imagination. In her novel, these women transcend the limits of the historical record — where they are all but silent and frozen — and become main characters fully alive in their complexity ... Casey’s subtle braiding of suffering and strength is the beating heart of this extraordinary work of imagination. The trauma her characters experience never becomes a pat explanation for personal difficulties or failures. Instead, these 'incurable women' create complex selves always in motion — full of pain but also power, pleasure, and above all mystery.
Literary, impressionistic ... The prose is stream-of-consciousness, and the brief chapters...are interspersed with artifacts of a sort—case notes, photographs of the denizens of the Salpêtrière, catalog cards for the photographs. Casey has pulled some information verbatim from actual artifacts...others she embellishes or creates entirely based on information from contemporary sources. The resulting episodic, indistinct sketches of these women occasionally coalesce into moments of devastating clarity that illustrate suffering, past trauma, paralysis, loneliness—and how it might feel to be poked and peered at like an interesting insect under glass, rather than treated as a human being.
Mixing truth and imagination, Casey reveals both the grim facts of the place...and the complexity of the women these doctors reduce to objects of study and repulsed fascination. Casey conjures a collective voice for these so-called hysterics, writing of their lives 'in the before' in a way that returns their subjectivity to them ... this short, enchantingly strange book feels animated by compassion ... These accounts haunt the reader with their subjects' strength of spirit, even amid their thwarted dreams and desires.
Maud Casey's compelling City of Incurable Women...might invite an expeditious single-sitting read. That sparseness obscures its intricate density: hardly straightforward narrative, City of Incurable Women is a fascinating, multi-layered interaction between Casey's pithy words on the page and history's virtual elision of the titular 'incurable women.' Readers may well want side-by-side access to sources of additional information for a more satisfying, enhanced experience ... With acute empathy, Casey is here as witness and scribe ... Maud Casey masterfully magnifies the stories of 'incurable' women in Paris's 19th-century Salpêtrière hospital.
Casey turns her lyrical prose back to fiction with this work inspired by the real stories of women in Paris’ Salpêtrière hospital ... Through thorough research and a cutting pen, Casey elevates these women back to their deserved place in history, bringing to life those who were reduced to mere photographs. Newcomers to Casey’s work might be daunted by these vignettes, which sometimes seem more stream of consciousness than cohesive narrative. The book isn’t for the fainthearted, but those interested in early medicine will find the stories of Charcot’s patients fascinating, and fans of Casey’s previous works will rejoice in the new one.
Enlightening ... The work, unshackled from traditional elements such as plot, characters, or earned endings, alternately reads like a prose poem, a fever dream, and a compendium of primary sources ... The first-person plural narration, meanwhile, blurs the women’s identities ... Illuminating illustrations and references to the real people who inspired the story add texture to a distressing account of a dark history, and Casey’s rich imaginative leaps make for tantalizing and affecting portraits. It defies convention and revels in searing, gorgeous language. In fact, this is worth reading twice.
Innovative ... These stories belong most closely to the tradition of ekphrastic poetry, poems written based on visual art and often written in the voice of a figure from the image. The results are most successful when the soaringly lyrical language illuminates, rather than overshadows, the women’s compelling experiences ... A strongly conceived, though inconsistently rendered, scrapbook from a dark chapter of the belle epoque.
