Antarctica: ‘A genuine once-in-a-generation writer.’ THE TIMES

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webmaster, Arts Council (12 October 2019). "Writer-in-Residence/Fellowship Appointments 2019/2020". www.artscouncil.ie. Economic hardship is woven throughout the narrative of Small Things Like These. How does the author’s use of language and detailing evoke this sense within the novel? Instead, over Greek salad and grilled trout, the conversation somehow turned to the subject of hell. She doesn't vehicle any direct sociocultural messages or try to convert or moralize the reader but focuses instead on projecting a vision ( The Art of Fiction is the Art of Making Pictures: if you are not making pictures with your words, then you are using cerebral observations. The reader can’t see any of those.) and let the reader live it with her talent for finding the right word for the right moment and her dexterity with language in giving great importance to common details that other writers would dismiss simply because they happen every day. This makes Keegan's writing a breath of fresh air in the literary world.

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. As near to an epic as the collection contains, ‘The Forester’s Daughter’ is flanked by two slighter stories, ‘Dark Horses’ and ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’. The former, a Francis Mac Manus Award winner, is a brief and gutting tale of a man who has lost everything through his own intransigence and emotional ignorance. Brady, its protagonist, is a twenty-something farmhand, wallowing in self-hatred and self-denial after ‘the woman’ dispenses with his rural passive-aggressiveness. Rougher than any Macra na Feirme poster-boy, Brady is in many ways the prototypical Deegan, beset financially despite his deep, misguided love for country ways. Ironically, he could not be more different from the young man at the centre of ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’, a Harvard student spending his birthday at his millionaire stepfather’s apartment. Set on the Texas coast ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’ represents the only tonal misstep in the collection. Despite the display of Keegan’s usual poetic precision, the story seems out of place in a collection so resolutely Irish. A brief piece too, by the time we have adjusted to the American idiom and setting it is over, and we are immediately plunged into the 1940s Ireland of ‘Surrender’. I had read about two years ago both her novella ‘Small Things Like These’ and her short story (a rather long one) ‘The Forester’s Daughter’ and gave them both 5 stars too. I had her debut collection of short stories on my bookshelves for years....and realizing I had not read it read it over the last two days. She has been compared to William Trevor who was (and I think still is) a fave author of mine. And I do remember his stories are not a romp in the park...they tend to be on the melancholy/sad/depressing type (at least to me). But boy can he write! For those who know and follow her work, a new Claire Keegan book is as rare and precious as a diamond in a coalmine. There have been just four of them over 22 years, and all are small, sharp and brilliant. Fortunately for an author so sparing with her output, those who know and follow her include an international array of literary connoisseurs, and many of the children passing through the Irish school system. 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.In 1948, Seán O'Faoláin published a meticulous study of the craft of the short story in which he agonised over the many difficulties of getting it absolutely right. Some things you just have no control over,” he said, scratching his head. “She said I wouldn’t last a year without her. Boy, was she wrong.” He looked at her then, and smiled, a strange smile of victory. The second story, Passport Soup, is equally mesmerizing. A man named Frank Corso has lost – literally lost – his nine-year-old daughter, shattering his wife. The depths of unrelenting grief – and the eventual unveiling of what the title means – is devastating and authentic. 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. The French translation of Small Things Like These ( Ce genre de petites choses) has been shortlisted for two prestigious awards: the Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award [15] and the Grand Prix de L'Heroine Madame Figaro. [16] In March 2021, Keegan and her French translator, Jacqueline Odin, won the Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award. [17] Small Things Like These won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. [18] It was also shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and is the shortest book recognized in the history of the prize. [19]

Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for. (p. 33) Weariness, worry and repetition are imbued in the story and Furlong’s character seems like a man on the brink. What are the factors that have led to this?They retreated from the darkness of the woods, walked down Vicar’s Close, and emerged below the moat near the hotel. The seagulls were inland. They hovered above the waterfowl, swooping down and snapping up the bread a bunch of Americans were throwing to the swans. She collected her suitcase and walked the slippery streets to his place. The rooms were cold. Yesterday’s dirty dishes lay soaking in the sink, a rim of greasy water on the steel. Remnant daylight filtered through gaps between the curtains, but he did not turn a light on. From the title story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind—to sleep with another man— Antarctica draws you into a world of obsession, betrayal, and fragile relationships. In “Love in the Tall Grass,” Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date, with her lover, that has been nine years in the waiting. In “Passport Soup,” Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his nine-year-old daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief. 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. necessary to explore how he, the father, would carry this knowledge around with him on his rounds, through his days, through his life and how or if he could or would still regard himself as a good father. I’m not even sure if this man, Furlong, can regard himself as a good father after this novel ends - as he may have deprived his daughters of a decent education and may lose his business, may not be able to provide for his family. En conclusión, Antártida reúne cuentos que mezclan una prosa poética y sobria, que describe escenarios de una cotidianeidad pacífica, con un ambiente de nostalgia, pero principalmente con una tensión que crece desde la profundidad a medida que avanzamos las páginas. Y al llegar el clímax la realidad se muestra con toda rudeza, intensa y sin filtros. El resultado casi siempre sorprende, y al mismo tiempo sentimos una suerte de liberación, la misma que estaba oprimiendo al personaje, aun cuando eso signifique presenciar una tragedia, tanto simbólica como auténtica.

She snuggled up against him, and they fell swiftly into sleep, the sweet sleep of children, and woke in darkness, hungry. a b Armitstead, Claire (21 October 2021). "Claire Keegan: 'I think something needs to be as long as it needs to be' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 25 January 2022. 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 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.

There is a shift in attitude in the new novel towards two of Keegan’s most urgent subjects. A father takes centre stage as a good man and secrecy is shown up as a terrible thing – as a form of pernicious lying. This puts the novel in an interesting relation to Foster, where secrets are regarded more ambivalently – sometimes things should not be said – while one father is seen utterly to fail. Her examination of being an abandoned daughter is at its most intense here: Keegan joins E. Nesbit and Sylvia Plath in clinching on the cry ‘Daddy!’ The Orwell Prizes 2022: Winners Announced | The Orwell Foundation". www.orwellfoundation.com . Retrieved 7 March 2023.