ReviewsReviews
SOME REVIEWS OF LATEST WORKS
FOX SWALLOW SCARECROW is a comic novel set in contemporary Dublin. Using as its model Anna Karenina, it takes a satirical look at the Irish literary scene during the affluent first decade of the 21st century, focusing on the story of a writer of children’s fiction: Anna Kelly Sweeney.
Extracts from reviews of
FOX SWALLOW SCARECROW (2007)
From The Irish Times, 10 November 2007
(Bernard O’Donoghue)
‘In Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s new novel, her familiar strengths are well in evidence: the linguistic precision conveying the social observations of her cool eye, and the unsettling way compassion emerges from behind the satirical edge. The opening chapters manifest a sweeping breeziness about the new Ireland that make you think of Flann O’Brien....Ni Dhuibhne’s pre-eminent technical gift – to evoke a character or mood unmistakably in three words – is dazzling. It is what enables her to develop this book from a social satire about literary Dublin into a serious, angry novel which is an emotional roller coaster...An Irish woman novelist has just won the Man Booker Prize; there is a very credible candidate here to etain the title.
From
The Sunday Tribune( 7 October 2007)
(Katrina Goldstone)
Confronted with a proof copy of Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow and unable to find the press blurb, I started to read it completely unaware of its literary genre. After a while the phrase ‘aboveaveragechicklit’ floated across my brain. Fine. Not exactly my cup of tea but this was a superior example of it, there were attempts at social critique, musings on 21st century Irish society, not terribly deep but what do you want from chicklit?...
But by the time the novel closes with several melodramatic events and a clever-clever final twist in the tail, a cack-handed reversal of the Anna Karenina ending, it’s hard not to wish that all the characters would fall under a tram. At least that would put them ... and us ... out of their misery.’
and also from
The Sunday Tribune (11 November 2007)
(Tom Widger)
A poke at literary publicity in 21st century Dublin is wonderfully packed with satirical potential and Ni Dhuibhne holds it up to savage scrutiny; she truly puts the ‘ire’ into satire.’
From
The Times Literary Supplement, December 2007
(Patricia Craig)
It’s a very good novel.
From The Irish Independent, 6th October 2007
(Brian Lynch)
Fox Swallow Scarecrow is a novel of contemporary manners. It describes a burgeoning subset of the native population: Secondary Arts Persons. To be a SAP you need to have a job in an arts-related body or in publishing, to be almost a writer (with an agent) and to spend your leisure time going to book launches... Cultural historians of the future will regard Fox Swallow Scarecrow as a goldmine of information about Celtic Tiger Ireland... Present day readers will find it an astute and acute novel.
From Dublin Confessions
(Aideen Fitzpatrick)
A modern Irish take on Anna Karenina seems a major undertaking and comes with the possibility of spectacular failure. Eilis Ni Dhuibhne does a beautiful job...What we have here is an intricate portrait of elitist Dublin society, written with both grace and precision.
***
Dún an Airgid (Cois Life 2008)
Dún an Airgid is a mystery novel, a whodunit. Set in an invented town, Dún an Airgid, a Utopian experiment, it takes an affectionate but satirical look at modern Irish life and mores, while exploring the adventures of Saoirse, the optimistic artist from South Dublin, and her partner, an Sáirsint Máirtín Ó Flaithearta, the stoical policeman from South Munster. A sequel to the prize winning best seller, Dúmharú sa Daingean, Dún an Airgid has also won an Oireachtas prize for light fiction.
From
Irish Times, 15 November 2008
(Micheál O Croinín)
A published author in both English and Irish, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has already ventured into detective fiction with Dunmharú sa Daingean (2000) in which Saoirse makes her first appearance. The tale in Dún an Airgid is briskly told in a style that is eminently accessible to young adult or adult learners of Irish. Connoisseurs of the whodunit may feel that more needed to be said about the circumstances of the murders and that some plot lines (the sale of artworks, for example) needed more development but Ní Dhuibhne excels in the art of persuasive storytelling. As an account of what goes wrong when the Celtic Cockaigne turns dark, it is very much a tale for our times.
***
SOME COMMENTS ON EARLIER WORKS
Blood and Water
“Here is a heightened world of sensual observation, delivered in a calm and credible tone, the voice of the storyteller being capable of attaining marvellous heights, never faltering through fear of the dark beneath the surface of these stories. The accuracy with which the surface is delineated allows the reader to probe with confidence the complications, both personal and political, that motivate these characters, for Ni Dhuibhne’s subject is contemporary Ireland, and that is a dark, complicated place. The strength of the collection lies in its humour…” (Frank McGuinness, Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1990)
“Perhaps it needs a certain zaniness to express the situation of women in Ireland at the moment, and the less outwardly realistic Eilis Ni Dhuibhne stories are, the more real seems their sense of increasingly unquiet desperation… In these stories there is a voice that is all Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’sown, one that is well worth listening to.”(Fintan O’Toole, Sunday Tribune, May 1990.) “Two stories by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne are eerie and impeccably constructed”(Hilary Mantel, Telegraph, 29.10. 1995Review of The Blackstaff Book of Short Stories.)
The Pale Gold of Alaska
‘Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s The Pale Gold of Alaska and other Stories is proof, if proof were needed, that the Irish short story is on the crest of an exciting new wave. Stories like “The Day Elvis Presley died show her mastery of the genre. Whether it’s the tale of an emigrant Irish girl in love with a Blackfoot Indian in the wilds of Montana or a mother on a Kerry beach convinced her son has drowned, there is in these stories the rare perfection of completeness.”(Caroline Walsh, Irish Times, 9 December 2000.)
“The shortlisting of Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s novel The Dancers Dancing for this year’s Orange Prize brought international recognition to an author who, over the past twelve years, has quietly published a sizeable body of writing in Ireland. While her earlier novel, The Bray House, received attention for its singular eco-critical and futuristic aspects, she has worked most consistently and successfully with short fiction. The Pale Gold of Alaska is her fourth volume of stories, and it continues, though with more stylistic calculation, her favoured demotic examination of commonplace lives and especially loves.”(John Kenny, Times Literary Supplement. 20 October 2000.)
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne is the most gifted young Irish writer. In The Pale Gold of Alaska her prose shimmers like poetry.(Edna O Brien, The Observer, 26 November 2000.)
“Beautifully written and full of humour, these are stories whose insights are never forced. The author’s last novel, The Dancers Dancing, has been shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize, and on the strength of these stories it is not hard to see why.”(Christina Konig, The Times, Oct 18, 2000.)
The Dancers Dancing
“This novel, like other recent irish writing, turns west to explore sexual and Irish identities. But rather than being a search for essential origins, Ni Dhuibhne’s narrative reveals the contingency of a historical moment. Language and landscape are layered but thye cannot fix what is preserved, only muddy it. As the narrator puts it, “you dig and dig and sometimes you do not recognize what you find… Orla too momentarily encounters a poetic otherworld romanticism, inevitably of a dark and savage, rather than a sentimental, tone. She recognizes that a trace of the unspeakable past is part of her personal history, but the fleeting knowledge is a narrative remnant to an ending that repudiates false cohesions. Ni Dhuibhne’s writing is marvellous, building layers of impression until a complex, vital and true-false picture of liberation is revealed.(Kathy Cremin, Irish Times, 7 August 1999).
‘Ni Dhuibhne once again displays her great gift for observing social nuances, and commenting obliquely but sardonically on the power structures which underwrite them. She also has a wonderful empathy for the manifold confusions and insecurities of early adolescence. .. when is the world going to discover Eilis Ni Dhuibhne?(Des Traynor, Books Ireland October 1999).
