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

Product Information

Part of the joy in reading this was in noting how Keegan has gone from strength to strength in her writing. These stories were a great, addictive, read. I liked Foster even more, a seemingly flawless work. And Small Things Like These felt, and I’m not overstating it, like a miracle.

In "Antarctica," a married woman travels out of town to see what it's like to sleep with a man other than her husband. "Love in the Tall Grass" takes Cordelia down a coastal road on the last day of the twentieth century to keep a date with her lover that has been nine years in the waiting. "Stay Close to the Water's Edge" tells of a young Harvard student who is pitilessly humiliated by his homophobic stepfather on his birthday. Keegan's writing has a clear vision of unaffected truths and boldly explores a world where dreams, memory, and chance have crippling consequences for those involved. The stories are often dark and enveloped in a palpable atmosphere, and the reader feels that something "big" is going on in each of these carefully sculpted tales. It is the tale, simply told, of one ordinary middle-aged man - Bill Furlong - who in December 1985, in a small Irish town, slowly grasps the enormity of the local convent’s heartless treatment of unmarried mothers and their babies (one instance of what will soon be exposed as the scandal of the Magdalene laundries). We accompany Furlong, and we feel - and fear - for him as he realises what is happening, decides how he must in conscience act, and accepts what that action, in a small church-dominated town, will cost him, his wife and his children. These] stories ... show Keegan to be an authentic talent with a gimlet eye and a distinctive voice." -- Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe The true figure of those held remains unknown but it is often said to be at least 10,000, though some have guessed the real figure may be as high as 30,000. Records from the laundries were deliberately destroyed, lost or made inaccessible by the church. While there, the women were forced to labour tirelessly, while suffering physical and mental abuse at the hands of the church. 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.

Need Help?

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!’ And I won’t comfort you. I will not be the woman who shelters her man same as he’s a boy. That part of my people ends with me.’ Or take another story - 'The Singing Cashier' - the elder girl, has lustful relations with the postman and sends her younger sibling out of the house on made-up errands, while she does the 'dirty'. Later in the story, news of a serial murder's house - just down the street, and the elder one makes a swift decision, knowing she has to protect her sister. It's real-life, a sudden jostling of priorities. For a while the main message I was getting was one of conservative sexual ethics, one that warns of terrible consequences resulting from women straying outside the bounds of the straight and narrow, however justified she may feel in doing so. The collection opening title story especially gets this reading off and going. But then it seems to have rather been the imagining of the aforementioned worst possible scenarios at the start, something like “The Road” for female struggle against the patriarchy, and we then get an adolescent girl who declares, “It’s turning out that I’m taking no nonsense from anybody”, and she ends the story fine! Ah, what a relief. 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.

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. 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.

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.

At our current #MeToo moment, this might seem a heretical statement, but Keegan’s morally compromised characters are often themselves the victims of failed institutions. In The Parting Gift, that institution is the family: the girl’s mother and siblings colluded in her abuse. In Small Things Like These, it’s a society that allows itself to be dominated by the church. “And it wasn’t just the church, you know, it was in concert with the Irish state,” she points out. Irish author Claire Keegan nominated for prestigious Booker Prize". TheJournal. 7 September 2022 . Retrieved 9 September 2022. Confined for decades while starved of food and education, many became isolated from society and institutionalised. While there, many lost their own lives, as did their children. 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 Times

She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of hell, and then eternity.’ In the lobby, she sat in the telephone booth and called home. She asked about the children, the weather, asked her husband about his day, told him about the children’s gifts. She would return to untidy, cluttered rooms, dirty floors, cut knees, a hall with mountain bikes and roller skates. Questions. She hung up, became aware of a presence behind her, waiting. Furlong has steady work, but all around him people are in difficulty. Shipyards are closing, factories are announcing redundancies; shops and businesses are failing; the young are leaving the country. Customers are relieved to hand Furlong their Christmas cards rather than having to pay for stamps. One morning he sees, behind the priest’s house, ‘a young schoolboy drinking the milk out of the cat’s bowl’. The florist is boarding up her windows and asks for help as she hammers in the nails: a mercantile crucifixion.