Walk the Blue Fields

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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. Fragments of his time…cross his mind. How lovely it was to know her intimately. She said self-knowledge lay at the far side of speech. The purpose of conversation was to find out what, to some extent, you already knew. She believed that in every conversation, an invisible bowl existed. Talk was the art of placing decent words into the bowl and taking others out. In a loving conversation, you discovered yourself in the kindest possible way, and at the end the bowl was, once again, empty.’ - from ’Walk the Blue Fields In stories brimming with Gothic shadows and ancient hurts, Claire Keegan tells of “a rural world of silent men and wild women who, for the most part, make bad marriages, and vivid, uncomprehending children” (Anne Enright, The Guardian). In the never-before-published story “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll’s old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder, whose ulterior motives only emerge as the night progresses. In the title story, a priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage and, during the ceremony and the festivities that follow, battles his memories of a love affair with the bride that led him to question all to which he has dedicated his life; later that night, he finds an unlikely answer in the magical healing powers of a seer.Visceral, simple and clear, Keegan’s prose refuses indulgence and sinks in deep, drenching bones and visions with calm instants of gazing across the fields, beyond the sharp cliffs and onto the unruly waters that dance with the same blue that tints the baluster of anciently painted skies. 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. Claire Keegan’s brilliant debut collection, Antarctica , was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and earned her resounding accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Now she has delivered her next, much-anticipated book, Walk the Blue Fields , an unforgettable array of quietly wrenching stories about despair and desire in the timeless world of modern-day Ireland. In the never-before-published story “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll’s old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder, whose ulterior motives only emerge as the night progresses. In the title story, a priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage and, during the ceremony and the festivities that follow, battles his memories of a love affair with the bride that led him to question all to which he has dedicated his life; later that night, he finds an unlikely answer in the magical healing powers of a seer. Kitabı güzel yapan sadece bu değil elbette. Keegan'ın cümlelerindeki samimiyet ve hikaye kurmadaki üstün yeteneği insanı asıl etkileyen. Memleketine bakıp oradan güzel hikayeler devşiren şehirli bir yazar gibi değil de bu hikayelerle büyümüş modern bir yazar gördüm onda. Foster is exactly as sad as you imagine it would be, but more stunningly alive than you have any right to expect. Its language settles in your belly and then your bones only seconds after it has passed your eyes… Keegan’s world is lush and full, the details delicately made, ever more rewarding and engaging with every read… While the scale of her story is modest — this one small girl, this short stretch of time — the scope of what Keegan can hold inside of it — the ache of living, the flash of seeing finally what we don’t have, the mourning for all we’ll never be — is as big, brash and ambitious as a story might be.”— Los Angeles Times

Our narrator receives a phone call early the next morning, a visitor wishing to present himself - he's actually outside the cottage. Our un-named narrator puts him off until 8 p.m., and what follows are the small preparations and the ways in which she occupies the free time of her first day. But it is beautifully done. I think Keegan with-holds the woman's name, because it then becomes so easy for the reader to slip herself into the story. A small extract: There’s a line in Small Things Like These in which Furlong wonders if he and his wife would be better off if they had a bit of time to spare, “or would they just lose the run of themselves?” In a sense the story is an exploration of just that happening. Is Keegan herself worried about losing the run of herself? “Well, I’m sure that I will have some public events and some people to socialise with and horses to train and all kinds of other things to do,” she says. “I’m not somebody who finds it difficult to find or make work.” Yerel çünkü İrlandalı, son kelimesine kadar hem de! Bu kadar yerel bir dil ile anlatılan bir o kadar evrensel! Kısa cümleler ve nefes alan her canlı hikayeye dahil tüm dağ taş ağaç deniz ve mavi tarlalar! Can you see me living there with them until the end of their days? Could you see me bringing a woman in? What woman could stand it? I'd have no life.'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. The land, which is a source of wealth and spirituality, also epitomizes duty, heritage and binding roots that imprison the main characters in the jail of their own resignation. And so they live with a conflicted sense of belonging that is naturally paired with alienation, which doggedly morphs them into natural exiles in their native country. Antarctica is an appropriate title from these spare and chilly stories by the up-and-coming Irish writer Claire Keegan. . . . Keegan [is] an authentic talent with a gimlet eye and a distinctive voice.”— Boston Globe Keegan is the kind of writer whose spare, slippery work you want to reread . . . [her] sentences shape shift the second time ’round, twisting themselves into a more emotionally complicated story.” —NPR

Keegan writes with such grace and accuracy that it is impossible not to be drawn into each world she creates. Walk the Blue Fields is a superb collection in which each story is a treat; together, they are pure gold.” – Big Issue 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. Anlatılanlar çoğunlukla acı şeyler olsa da her öyküde bir umut var. Ya da kabullenişin verdiği rahatlık. Modern şehir insanı, en küçük sıkıntıda "bu benim başıma nasıl gelir?" duygusuyla çatışıp bir türlü huzura eremiyor ama bu öykülerin de işaret ettiği taşra insanlarında ya eyleme geçme dürtüsü ya da ağırbaşlı bir kabulleniş var. Both stories are well-written but I also didn’t feel anything strongly towards either of them. They’re not nearly as compelling as some of the others or seem to be about anything. There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.’ - from ’Walk the Blue FieldsTh descriptions and characterizations in these stories all have elements of tragedy …. sadness that can turn skin blue. Claire Keegan is known for Tardis-like narratives that are bigger on the inside . . . So Late in the Day illuminates misogyny across Irish society.” — Guardian (UK)

Balancing Keegan’s delicate, sparing prose and masterful ear for dialogue with a tale that is almost overwhelming in its tenderness, Foster is a heart-wrenching treasure of a book that only serves to confirm Keegan’s place as one of contemporary Irish literature’s leading lights.”— Vogue, The Best Books to Read this Fall Praise for Small Things Like These: This is an quintessentially Irish book, peopled with women (young and old) who are angry with the men who are in --or not in -- their lives; sullen men who don't know what has happened to what they were hoping for; and children who see all that is happening in their homes and escape however they can. The settings are rural, the tales are somewhat contemporary but also occasionally almost folk tale in style. urn:lcp:walkbluefields0000keeg_b1e2:epub:3728d8ca-cfc0-4ba7-951b-a3e71e306eda Foldoutcount 0 Identifier walkbluefields0000keeg_b1e2 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t41s54212 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780571233069 Please consider this gorgeous book about Ireland today if you're looking for a non gross and stereotyping way to celebrate the day!Keegan] is a superb stylist: every well-structured paragraph contains multitudes . . . Incredibly engrossing . . . She constructs her stories from a skeleton of inferences that rise, gloriously, to form complex urges, crimes, desires, rebellions and, crucially, universal truths. Each brief work is worth the wait: Keegan is something special.” — Sunday Times (UK) Bu tür öykülerde hem yabancı hem tanıdık şeyler buluyorum. Bir öykü kişisinin "ayaksuyunu" dışarı dökmezse eve uğursuzluk geleceğine dair inancı bana tuhaf gelse de bu inancın arkasında tanıdık bir geçmiş görüyorum. Tight, potent . . . [Keegan] has chosen her details carefully. Everything means something . . . Her details are so natural that readers might not immediately understand their significance. The stories grow richer with each read . . . [These stories] have new and powerful things to say about the ever-mystifying, ever-colliding worlds of contemporary Irish women and the men who stand in their way.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune Hope lurks somewhere in almost all [Keegan’s] stories. . . . You start out on the paths of these simple, rural lives, and not long into each, some bit of rage or unforgivable transgression bubbles up . . . Then the truly amazing happens: Life goes on, limps along, heads for some new chance at beauty.”— Los Angeles Times Book Review