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

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She wasn’t in the mood for sex. In her mind she was already gone, was facing her husband in the station. She felt clean and full and warm; all she wanted now was a good snooze on the train. But in the end she could think of no reason not to go and, yielding like a parting gift to him, said yes. I put my left hand between my legs —not—to masturbate - some type of protection comfort - maybe — over my underwear. Keegan does something rare in creating archives of unhappiness, showing the way one sorrow may reverberate with another, how pressure can activate the pain of an old bruise.’

This 1999 short story collection was Claire Keegan’s first book, and you can certainly sense the writer she has since become in Small Things Like These and Foster - the clarity of language and the small, often rural or small town interactions between people, the simmering under the surface, little-to-be-saidness of their relationships. She wasn’t, of course, quite there yet with her first book. Some of the stories felt too carefully composed for me, a writer’s exercise, the language or plot points noticeably selected by the author. A few are set in the southern US, and I felt Keegan’s pleasure in writing American English shone through a little too strongly and unnaturally (sometimes not quite right either - in ‘Burns,’ surely that should be a stove or a range, not a hob). 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." Keegan is measured and merciless as she dissects the silent acquiescence of a 1980s Irish town in the Church’s cruel treatment of unmarried mothers - and the cost of one man’s moral courage. 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’. Inside the laundry, one of the nuns suggests Furlong must be disappointed as he has five girls and ‘ no boy to carry on the name’. Furlong replies by saying: ‘ What have I against girls?’ […] ‘My own mother was a girl, once. And I dare say the same must be true of you and half of all belonging to us.’ Why is the feminist attitude expressed by Furlong unique for the time and community he lives in? (p. 66 - 67)

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Briena Staunton Visiting Fellowship Awarded to Claire Keegan". Claire Keegan Fiction Writing Courses. 29 July 2020. Keep going,” he said when she stopped on the landings. She giggled and climbed, giggled and climbed again, stopped at the top. 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? From the elements of this simple existence in an inconsequential town, Keegan has carved out a profoundly moving and universal story. There’s nothing preachy here, just the strange joy and anxiety of firmly resisting cruelty.’ She pictured the plant sprawled across the floor, the length of a grown man, its pot no bigger than a small saucepan, dried roots snarling up over the pot. A miracle it was still alive.

Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award Ceremony 2021". Ambassade de France en Irlande - French Embassy in Ireland. 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. Another memorable situation was viewed in Love in the Tall Grass , with Cordelia, unmarried and having a nine year affair with "The Doctor", who remained nameless throughout. Together, they will confront their past, the source of all their trouble, and stamp it out. That, at least, is the theory.’ It was December; she felt a certain closing on another year. She needed to do this before she got too old.”Other pieces luxuriate in stasis and their elements hang loose. A girl merely decides to jilt a guy. Two sisters recall being dandled on the knees of the serial killer Fred West, and their postman delivers fish and hanky-panky. The aesthetic here is always the appeal to the palpability of language itself. Suggestions of Heaney and Frost travel through the prose. Keegan might be said to subvert a conventional male expectation of linear logic extended to climax.

Claire Keegan is a real writer. Her will is impossible to resist. Her stories are pure. Their effect is cumulative. Their scope is stunning. Ms. Keegan is an enlightened being who in another age might’ve been a saint or a scientist, who happens to write with the force of a locomotive.”—Matthew Klam, author of Sam the Cat and Other Stories Instead, over Greek salad and grilled trout, the conversation somehow turned to the subject of hell. Aosdána elects 10 new members and announces Camille Souter as Saoi". The Arts Council. 9 May 2008 . Retrieved 25 January 2022.

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. 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. Gilmartin, Sarah (24 October 2021). "Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan: a timely and powerful book". The Irish Times . Retrieved 25 January 2022. He turned out to be a real talker, told her his life story, how he worked nights at the old folks’ home. How he lived alone, was an orphan, had no relations except a distant cousin he’d never met. There was no ring on his finger. Many of the stories are about desire, infidelity, regret, often cautionary tales. “Love in the Tall Grass,” is about a love affair, too, and a break-up with an open ending. I liked several, including “Sisters,” “Quare Name for a Boy,” with its writer returning to her Irish rural roots: