The chill reaches to the bones of this debut collection of 15 stories by Keegan, an acclaimed young Irish writer whose precisely articulated, clear prose illuminates her native land.”— Publishers Weekly Briena Staunton Visiting Fellowship Awarded to Claire Keegan". Claire Keegan Fiction Writing Courses. 29 July 2020.

As with Antarctica, it is the rich psychological realism of Keegan’s characters which propels these stories beyond simple aesthetic splendour. The first story, ‘The Parting Gift’, is told through eerie, second-person narration which allows simultaneously for emotional intimacy and for cold, detached objectivity on the part of the reader. The story, describing a teenage girl about to leave her family and embrace a new life beyond the uncertainty of emigration, presents the unsettling domesticity of abuse in rural Ireland via an effective slow-burn in which the potentialities of the unnamed girl are undermined utterly by her shrinking emotional horizons. Her Leaving Cert inability ‘to explain that line about the dancer and the dance’ reflects her own situation, caught between a grotesque inseparability of home and horror. Her own stories are strangely timeless, tethered to chronology by the slenderest threads: only the most glancing of references tell you that Foster is set in the 1981 of the hunger strikes, and Small Things in the 1985 of Ireland’s young emigrating while the taoiseach signs an agreement with Thatcher that sends the northern Protestants into a spin. I thought it had echoes of the wistful longing of Joyce’s “Eveline,” who is kind of paralyzed by her circumstances. Then, there's the ending that Joyce could never have written--different times, less innocence--that is the thing many readers seem to have had the most impact in the whole collection, and I get that, but I felt a bit disappointed by its predictability.

Need Help?

Keep going,” he said when she stopped on the landings. She giggled and climbed, giggled and climbed again, stopped at the top. The characters in these unsettling tales are all damaged in some way. Broken marriages, grief, loneliness - these are some of the subjects that have emerged to upend their lives. Most of the stories are set in Ireland, and to be honest the few that take place elsewhere are a bit jarring. Keegan's writing feels much more natural and assured in her native land.

I put my left hand between my legs —not—to masturbate - some type of protection comfort - maybe — over my underwear. Being clearly a superior writer Claire Keegan has a unique, natural and original voice. The discovery of her short stories (advised by my GR friend s.penkevich) was a truly pleasant surprise. On the other - hand my absolute favourite, 'Sisters', set in Ireland, is completely real. It's what you might designate the perfect short story; a small list of characters, a glorious setting, a rivalry and a very satisfactory revenge, where the unattractive sister is able to restore to herself, what should be hers by right. My second favourite was 'Love in the Tall Grass', a love affair, a break-up and a promise made with a rather unusual and satisfying, but at the same time unresolved ending. Or go to the aesthetic appreciation of writing? This should be the easiest choice, or perhaps not, given the poor feeble words I managed to utter here.Or take another story - 'The Singing Cashier' - the elder girl, has lustful relations with the postman and sends her younger sibling out of the house on made-up errands, while she does the 'dirty'. Later in the story, news of a serial murder's house - just down the street, and the elder one makes a swift decision, knowing she has to protect her sister. It's real-life, a sudden jostling of priorities.

In the lobby, she sat in the telephone booth and called home. She asked about the children, the weather, asked her husband about his day, told him about the children’s gifts. She would return to untidy, cluttered rooms, dirty floors, cut knees, a hall with mountain bikes and roller skates. Questions. She hung up, became aware of a presence behind her, waiting. To submit to an analysis, Claire Keegan's "Antarctica" was, for me, a frustratingly complex task. Keegan's tales are at once simple and clear while being extremely complex in their implicit subliminal messages. And when we have a compact and coherent collection without any weakness, in my opinion, the task of producing a critique or review is all the more thorny and difficult to accomplish. The true figure of those held remains unknown but it is often said to be at least 10,000, though some have guessed the real figure may be as high as 30,000. Records from the laundries were deliberately destroyed, lost or made inaccessible by the church. While there, the women were forced to labour tirelessly, while suffering physical and mental abuse at the hands of the church. Small Things Like These has been described as historical fiction, yet the author disagrees with it being a novel about the Magdalene laundries ( Guardian interview, October 21), saying, ‘I think it’s a story about a man who was loved in his youth and can’t resist offering the same type of love to somebody else’. Discuss how Claire Keegan has allowed historical fiction and a deeper character study to intersect. Thinking of the women she’s known and their relationships with men, she knows she will not continue that pattern. “That part of my people ends with me,” she thinks. And she’s fine!

The Taoiseach had signed an agreement with Thatcher over The North, and the Unionists in Belfast were out marching with drums, protesting over Dublin having any say in their affairs. (p. 13) What was the political atmosphere of the time in Ireland? How did this impact communities such as the one which Bill Furlong lives in? If you decide to read it, I'll advise you to do it slowly, tasting and digesting word by word in the search of all those "pictures' Keegan paints with words. It is 1985, the year it became possible for people in Ireland to buy condoms and spermicides without a prescription. Bill Furlong, heading for forty, delivers coal and timber in the town where he grew up. An amiable husband and father, he is also a man whose mother was unmarried; he doesn’t know his (earthly) father. His past and present, his private life and the world outside his home are in continual, tacit debate. As in all Keegan’s fiction, this is not a shifting of tectonic plates but a swirl of different currents, which merge to give a constantly changing complexion. La otra característica en común que une a estos relatos es obviamente la autora. La prosa de Claire Keegan posee ciertos rasgos poéticos, pero es siempre concisa. Se detiene dónde cree que debe hacerlo y con razón. A eso hay que añadir que en todo momento se transmite una tensión latente, que no sabemos en qué momento ni cómo estallará. Detrás de esa calma de la vida rural se esconde alguna historia turbia, cruda y real. La melancolía por algo que no pudo ser o que se podía haber evitado se extiende hasta un punto que se torna retorcido, y Keegan no toma ningún reparo para decirlo. Lo suelta en el momento justo. Quizá el único cuento que se aleja un poco de esa perspectiva general es “Nombre raro para un niño”; incluso me pareció lindo. The writing is descriptive, creating vivid images, yet crisp and concise. The tone is often dark and melancholy, sometimes nostalgic. There are illicit meetings, coming of age stories, daughters and wives wanting to escape the chains of girlhood and womanhood, men grieving over past mistakes, men taking second chances. There are various settings ranging from old homesteads and farms to the seaside to the American south. There was even one story with a sprinkling of fresh snow, so I suppose I got my wintry landscape, even just briefly.

If the mother superior’s story is left untold, so is that of the girl found shivering in the coal shed. “I’m not saying she isn’t a person,’ says Keegan. “I’m saying that the book isn’t her story. And maybe that’s deeply appropriate, because so many women and girls were peripheral figures. They weren’t central. Not even to their own families, not even to their own parents.” Cigarette ash fell on the duvet, but they were too drunk to care. Drunk and careless and occupying the same bed on the same night. It was all so simple, really. Loud Christmas music started up in the apartment downstairs. A Gregorian chant, monks singing. They don’t know the half of it, don’t know the disguises I made for them, how I took 20 years off their hard-earned faces, washed the honey-blond rinses out of their hair, how I put them in another country and changed their names.”

Published to great critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, the iridescent stories in Claire Keegan's debut collection, Antarctica, have been acclaimed by The Observer to be "among the finest contemporary stories written recently in English." The nun at school told us it would last for all eternity,” she said, pulling the skin off her trout. “And when we asked how long eternity lasted, she said: `Think of all the sand in the world, all the beaches, all the sand quarries, the ocean beds, the deserts. Now imagine all that sand in an hourglass, like a gigantic egg timer. If one grain of sand drops every year, eternity is the length of time it takes for all the sand in the world to pass through that glass.’ Just think! That terrified us. We were very young.” The Claire Keegan train shows no sign of stopping. The masterful Small Things Like These was one of the best reviewed books of 2021. The Quiet Girl, an adaptation of her novel Foster and one of the best films of the last decade in my eyes, has shone an even greater spotlight on the work of this gifted Irish writer.