276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Walk the Blue Fields

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

A man goes into a bar to drink away his sadness as his lover has left him. He dreams about her returning. Meanwhile, there is solace in beer talk. I will not rate these stories separately because I found each one to be special in its own way, which is rare in a short story collection. At the end of the book, Keegan includes a brief segment on the folklore, specific terminology and geography featured in some of the stories. I would recommend reading that part before reading the stories. Even more unsettling was “The Parting Gift”….involving incest and the uncomfortable acceptance in the way the story is told. In another good story, “The Forester’s Daughter,” a woman marries a simple man, initially resistant to marry him because she doesn’t love him, and so you know how this works out, in spite of the birth of children over the years.

There are tears there but she is too proud to blink and let one fall. If she blinked, he would take her hand and take her away from this place. This, at least, is what he tells himself. It's what she once wanted but two people hardly ever want the same thing at any given point in life. It is sometimes the hardest part of being human."Ana akım batı edebiyatı değil de -hani o "bireyin modern toplumdaki sıkışmışlığı ve varoluş sancılarını" anlatanları kastediyorum- daha kıyıdaki yaşamları, özellikle taşrayı anlatan öyküleri daha çok seviyorum.

Reading Irish-born Claire Keegan is like succumbing to a drug: eerie, hallucinogenic, time-stopping. Her simplest sentences envelop the brain (and all the senses) in a deep, fully dimensional dream . . . Each story is as substantive as a novel, and as breathtaking . . . Unforgettable.” — San Francisco Chronicle Keegan’s] . . . collections have drawn comparisons to William Trevor and Anton Chekhov . . . [She] crafts stories out of small details and insight . . . like poetry. . . . Claire Keegan is the real deal.”—Keith Donohue, “You Must Read This” NPR.com A forrester courts a woman who grudgingly marries him. This is a story of how a half-hearted marriage becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of heartache and grief. The penny pinching forrester brings a dog home as a gift for the daughter's birthday. That it is not really a gift has dire consequences. Secrets too are revealed. As usual, I loved the first and last stories, but I also liked the feminist strain in these stories--the unwanted visitor, the wayward priest, the unloving husband. I like the exploration of desire/lust as shaping lives, and the place of quirky Irish characters (reminded me a bit of Flannery O-Connor here) and the rich presence of Irish myth. the trees are tall and here the wind is strangely human. A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean.’The best stories here are so textured and moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it’s easy to imagine readers savoring them many years from now. And to imagine critics, far in the future, deploying lofty new terms to explain what it is that makes Keegan’s fiction work.”—Maud Newton, The New York Times Book Review

He’s not a terrible human being, necessarily, but he is gruff and selfish, maybe to be seen as a traditional (which is to say selfish, patriarchal) Irish male. He yells at her for her spending “my money on roses,” and so flowers play an important part in making meaning for her sad life.

Current Discussions

Marvellous — exact and icy and loving all at once.”— Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall Praise for Walk the Blue Fields:

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment