Mairtin O Cadhain's novel Cre na Cille (Graveyard Soil) won the Oireachtas literary competition in 1947. Recognized almost immediately as a classic, the book, set among the dead in a Conamara graveyard, was serialized in the Irish Press between February and September of 1949, the same year it was published in Dublin by Sairseal agus O Marcaigh. O Cadhain, responding to suggestions that he was inspired by Dostoevsky, claimed that his inspiration actually came from a throwaway comment he heard after digging a grave for an elderly resident of An Cnocan Glas (1) in the winter of 1944-5 The novel's chief protagonist appears to be a woman, Caitriona Phaidin, who has died and entered the graveyard only to discover that even there she will not find the peace she expected. Instead, she joins a cacophonic and multi-voiced argument between the many local villagers (and some strangers) who have preceded her. From the news she brings, the information we hear from the already-dead, and fresher input from those who follow her, we piece together the fragments of multiple narratives, some concerning the real-time goings-on in the graveyard and the village, and some concerning earlier events that the dead are doomed to replay and reanalyze for eternity.
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