By Claire Keegan
- Pub Date: 2017
- Genre: Short Stories
- Where I bought this book: The Bookery, Cincinnati
- Why I bought this book: I've been grabbing everything I find by this author
******
A strong collection of ordinary stories about ordinary Irish people going about their daily affairs, accepting their fate with its gloom and loneliness, but always hinting at and hoping for more.
It's full not of happy-go-lucky folks basking in the glory of the green fields of ole Ireland, but of a melancholy people frustrated by their limitations, squinting up at the sky hoping for a bit of the sun, but enduring the muddy fields and the rain soaking in their shoes.
Whether they are priest or farmer or soldier or mother, shopper or shopkeeper, Keegan gets inside their hearts and heads, exploring desires amidst exhilarated sadness. She shows lives full of abuse, conflict, and desolation. She pulls no punches, writing her stories with a gift for description and an eye for the pedestrian nature of daily life.
In the opening story, The Parting Gift, she tells a common tale -- a young woman emigrating to American, not with stars in her eyes, but a hope that no matter what happens there, her life will be better -- or at least different. In Keegan's descriptions, nothing is extraordinary in the girl's preparations, as her mother speaks to her from another room.
It's a scene played out in households throughout Ireland over the years, and Keegan, without sentimentality, captures it perfectly.
She has honed her craft well. In The Forester's Daughter, she tells of a man and his family trying to do well, but failing miserably, with instances of abuse, cruelty, and neglect taken as a matter of course.
In the title story, she writes about a priest examining his own life while consecrating the wedding of a well-to-do Irish couple. It's summed up by the priest's thinking that "Anytime promises are made in public, people cry."
No comments:
Post a Comment