Ni Ghriofa has created a fascinating literary territory that is entirely her own. In her new book, Said the Dead, a lyric fusion of biography, ghost story, memoir and poetry, she conjures fuller lives for several women named in the casebooks of a defunct asylum ... Its stirring aliveness comes from Ni Ghriofa’s writing, the compressed lyricism and depth of feeling she brings to every scene ... Extraordinary ... Vivid.
An intimately researched but also wildly imaginative study of lives (mostly female) lived and often concluded during the hospital’s first 70 years or so ... [An] extraordinary formal and ethical force.
Extraordinary stories ... Despite the urgency and power of the stories, and the overarching structure of Lucia’s time, what Said the Dead lacks in comparison to A Ghost in the Throat is engagement with the author’s own life ... Interesting.
Enthrallingly byzantine ... Not straightforward non-fiction, but something tricksier and more slippery ... Melancholy, strange and unsettling, but also richly evocative and affecting, reading Said the Dead feels like attending a seance and the spirits it conjures up linger long after you’ve turned the final page.
A haunted, intelligent and formally restless novel about women, institutions and the afterlife of erasure ... At moments, the richness of this method risks diffuseness and some readers may wish for firmer narrative grip. But to ask this book to move more conventionally would be to misunderstand what it is attempting ... This is an unsettling, memorable book.
While Ní Ghríofa’s new book, Said the Dead, is every bit as formally promiscuous as her first, the author has made several refinements to her style in the intervening years. The incessant chattering of ghosts feels like a feat of literary alchemy, and the time-fluid way that Ní Ghríofa dramatizes the hidden history of a women’s mental institution in Cork feels more akin to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando than to anything written by Sebald ... philosophical without being cold-hearted, immersed in history without being conservative, emotionally generous without being sentimental, and quietly furious without being didactical. Doireann Ní Ghríofa is surely one of our most important writers, and it does both her and us an immense disservice to tether her work to anything other than its own phenomenology.
[An] emotionally charged, genre-bending work of history and fiction ... Blending documented history with imaginative reconstruction, Ní Ghríofa reverently portrays women deprived of freedom and agency, caught between a burgeoning women’s rights movement and the quagmire of paternalism.
Stunning ... With incandescent prose, an inventive structure, and a haunting atmosphere in which both time and identity are permeable, this is not to be missed.
