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

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Together, they will confront their past, the source of all their trouble, and stamp it out. That, at least, is the theory.’ 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. It’s enough to allow her to contemplate giving up the creative writing teaching she has done for years. She currently has a fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge, as part of an exchange with Trinity, Dublin. “I really did spend a good deal of the last decade going deeply into how creative writing could be taught, and seeing what I could and couldn’t do there,” she says. “And I feel I’ve come out the other end of that now. I’ll probably just stay at my desk for the next decade.”

The Orwell Prizes 2022: Winners Announced | The Orwell Foundation". www.orwellfoundation.com . Retrieved 7 March 2023. The award-winning Antarctica, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001, and recipient of the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the William Trevor Prize, and the Martin Healy Award, is a haunting debut.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. As a boy, short on Christmas gifts, Furlong had longed for a particular jigsaw puzzle, which had a picture of a farm. Instead he was given a nailbrush, a hot-water bottle and a copy of A Christmas Carol. When one of his daughters, drawing up her list of presents, asks whether ‘Santy’ came to him as a child, he lies – thinking to boast – that yes, one year Santy brought him a jigsaw. ‘A jigsaw?’ she replies. ‘Was that all?’ The distance is enormous. In that case,” he said, “hell for me would be deserted; there’d be nobody there. Not even the devil. I’ve always taken heart in the fact that hell is populated; all my friends will be there.” He ground more pepper over his salad plate and tore the doughy heart out of the loaf. 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).

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. a b c d Boland, Rosita (23 June 2009). "Writer Claire Keegan wins €25,000 Davy Byrnes award". The Irish Times. 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.’ DENSE….with strange endings — unsettling and or intriguing endings - brilliant prose — and (for me) —AT LEAST not as excruciating devastating as the title story.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.

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!’ Discover the authors nominated for the Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award 2021". Ambassade de France en Irlande - French Embassy in Ireland. 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:

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I’ve always been interested in choosing well and putting what’s chosen to good use... I’m more interested in going in than going on.... Elegance, to me, is writing just enough... the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. She snuggled up against him, and they fell swiftly into sleep, the sweet sleep of children, and woke in darkness, hungry. After he visits the laundry, a woman who runs the cafe warns Furlong about what he has seen there: ‘ Tis no affair of mine, you understand, but you know you’d want to watch over what you’d say about what’s there?’. (p. 94) To what extent did the wider community seem to have knowledge of the real goings-on in the laundries? Do you think the villagers were complicit in the crimes? She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of hell, and then eternity.”

He got up. He went out and left her there, handcuffed to the headboard. The kitchen light came on. She smelled coffee, heard him breaking eggs. He came in with a tray and sat over her. The integrity of emotion Keegan achieves, her combination of male and female personas and perspectives is at times reminiscent of Raymond Carver or Annie Proulx.”— The Irish TimesOther 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. Indeed the next number of stories that follow generally feature women exercising agency, grabbing for independence, and making out okay. The middle stories “Quare Name For A Boy” and “Ride If You Dare” stand out in this regard. In the former a woman becomes pregnant from a short fling and after telling the man, realizes: Antarctica is her debut, a collection of stories first published in 1999. It is a little rough around the edges, true, but there are several moments of sheer brilliance - you are left in no doubt that this author has talent to burn. Keegan’s writing is so sharp you’ll swear you could cut your finger on it. Like a spider with words as her welcoming web, she grabs the reader with the rather soft writing and astonishing imagery only for them to discover they’re fully trapped in the glory of her creations too late to dodge the emotional blows that sneak up on you. Such is the case with the title story—which makes for one of the finest opening tales I’ve read in a long time—about a woman who heads to the city with the goal of having a brief affair with a stranger. While you have a general unease about the situation, it isn’t until you’ve let your guard down that the ending strikes with such sudden ferocity it practically leaves you gasping for breath. 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.”