Posts Tagged ‘Claire Keegan’

8 Feb

‘So Late in the Day’ by Claire Keegan – Stories of Women and Men

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘So Late in the Day’ by Claire Keegan   (2023)  –  118 pages

 

Note that the subtitle of this collection of three stories is “Stories of Women and Men”, not “Stories of Men and Women”. In each of these stories, the woman is the main protagonist and the man plays a peripheral though critical part. “Critical” is the operative word here.

“That was the problem with women falling out of love; the veil of romance fell away from their eyes, and they looked in and could read you.

But this one didn’t stop there.”

The man can only react to the woman’s lessened opinion of him.

“He had looked at her then and again saw something ugly about himself reflected back at him, in her gaze.”

The second story has a nice twist to it, a female writer retaliating. She is staying at the Boll House, the former home of the famous German author Heinrich Boll on Achill Island, to work on her new story. Heinrich Boll’s family left this house as a working residence for writers.

A German literary professor visits her at the house and she hopes he won’t interfere with her writing progress, However it turns out that he has been spying on her and is highly critical of her.

“You come to this house of Heinrich Boll and make cakes and go swimming with no clothes on.”

Our woman writer retaliates the best way she knows how. She puts him in her story and gives him “the long and painful death” in the story, which is the story title.

The first lines of the last story, “Antarctica”, are :

“Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man. That weekend she was determined to find out.”

I doubt there are very many readers who could stop reading after those opening sentences

It’s proving very difficult to criticize anything Claire Keegan writes, and I am not going to do it. These three stories are all fine. This is a very quick lively read.

 

Grade:   A

 

 

13 Dec

The Top 12 List of My Favorite Fiction that I Have Read in 2022 (Plus 1 More)

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

 

Here we go again. Another year is almost over, and here again is a list of my favorite books which I read this year. This year definitely has the most fiction by woman writers of any of my end-of-year lists. This appears to be a trend. Of the 53 Notable Books in the Fiction and Poetry category for 2022 in the New York Times recently, 38 books were written by women and 15 books were written by men.

Click on either the bold-faced title or the book cover image to see my original review for each work.

 

‘Trust’ br Hernan Diaz (2022) – Of all the fiction I read in 2022, ‘Trust’ is my favorite, no question. A rich person can buy the past he or she wants even if it is counter to the facts, if we let them. One of the features which make ‘Trust’ an outstanding novel is the smooth and effective way that Hernan Diaz handles four different sources so that we readers wind up with a full picture.

 

‘The Art of Losing’ by Alice Zeniter (2017) – Here is a multi-generational saga covering about sixty years of this Algerian, now French, family. In the last section, the granddaughter returns to Algeria. This is history made poignant and vivid.

 

 

 

‘Marigold and Rose’ By Louise Gluck (2022) – This very quick novella made me want to go further into the poetry of Nobel Prize winning Louise Gluck. That is one of my goals for the upcoming year.

 

 

 

 

‘Shrines of Gaiety’ by Kate Atkinson (2022) – Nightclub life in London in the 1920s is going strong. World War I is over, time to celebrate and enjoy living. ‘Shrines of Gaiety’ is a superior entertainment.

 

 

 

 

‘O Caledonia’ by Elspeth Barker (1991) – This deliberately humorous Gothic is a parody of the English family novel, a large family in which one girl child, Janet, just does not fit in.

 

 

 

 

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan (2010) – A father drives his young daughter to the farm of her aunt and uncle whom she hardly knows. They packed a suitcase for her, so she knows she will be staying but does not know for how long. Like Anton Chekhov, Claire Keegan understands that what your characters don’t say is sometimes more important than what they do say and what the author doesn’t write is sometimes more important than what the author does write.

 

‘When We Cease to Understand the World’ by Benjamin Labatut (2020) – The stories of these strange brilliant scientists and mathematicians are intriguing. Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzschild, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Karl Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein. These are the individuals who have created our modern world.Although all of the persons in this book are real people, and their circumstances have been well-documented, there are fictional flourishes in describing some of the incidents in the lives of these physics and chemistry geniuses that go beyond what the author could possibly know and thus this is a fiction based on real events.

 

‘Lolly Willowes’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926) – Here is a serious comedy about a single woman who finds a very unusual, definitely bizarre, and highly effective way to achieve her goal. And what is Laura’s goal? To keep her other family members and anyone else from interfering in her single life.

 

‘Intimacies’ by Katie Kitamura (2021) – Often the best style is one that does not call attention to itself and proceeds ahead in a reliable straightforward manner. This lucid style as well as the interesting story sold me on ‘Intimacies’.

 

 

 

‘Paradais’ by Fernanda Melchor (2021) – At first, this story of the two teen boys Fatboy and Polo seems quite comical, but it takes a dark, dark turn. Both Fatboy and Polo are sixteen years old. Having been a young guy myself at one time, I know that the author has nailed it, how a young guy’s mind works or doesn’t work. The two misfit teenagers Polo and Fatboy are as memorable a team as George and Lenny from ‘Of Mice and Men’.

 

‘The Shades’ by Evgenia Citkowitz (2018) – Here is a modern English Gothic fiction with cell phones. The individual sentences are clear, meaningful and well-written, and they held my interest throughout.

 

 

 

‘Black Cloud Rising’ by David Wright Falade (2022) – This is a rousing lively novel dealing with a little-mentioned aspect of the Civil War, a troop of black soldiers marching in the South of the United States during the Civil War freeing the slaves on the farms and plantations there. This is a dramatic stirring historical novel.

 

And one more…

‘The Maid’ by Nita Prose (2022) – And one final luxury hotel murder mystery told from the point of view of Molly, one of the maids at the hotel. It is the first novel by Nita Prose. This is not heavy-duty or demanding like some of my reading. I enjoyed this lighter fare and the engaging personality of Molly the Maid for a change.

 

 

Happy Reading!

 

14 Nov

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan – A Stay with Her Aunt and Uncle

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

 

‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan    (2010) – 92 pages

 

At the beginning of ‘Foster’, a young girl, perhaps 6 or 7 or 8, is being driven by her father to the farm home of her mother’s sister and her husband Kinsella. Her parents have packed a suitcase for her, so she knows she will be staying there for awhile. Her mother is expecting, so maybe that is why she will be staying with this couple she hardly knows.

“How long should they keep her? Can’t they keep her as long as they like?”

In a novella written from a child’s point of view, the author must make sure that the child doesn’t know any more than what that child would know. Of this Claire Keegan is keenly aware. We know that ‘Foster’ takes place in rural Ireland. We are not given any exact details as to when the story takes place. The story could easily have taken place during my childhood. It could have taken place during anyone’s childhood. The story has an eternal feel to it.

This aunt and uncle treat the girl well, and soon she starts to compare her life at this new place with her life at home. She has no idea of how long she will be staying. Perhaps it is permanent.

I won’t be revealing any more about this novella. This is a very quick read as opposed to some novellas which slow you down to savor.

On the cover of my copy of ‘Foster’, there is a quote from the author David Mitchell: “As good as Chekhov”. That still seems to me like an audacious thing to say. However Claire Keegan is a mighty fine writer. And she, like Anton Chekhov, understands that what your characters don’t say is sometimes more important than what they do say and what the author doesn’t write is sometimes more important than what the author does write.

 

Grade:   A

 

 

8 Mar

‘Small Things Like These’ by Claire Keegan – The Magdalene Laundries

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘Small Things Like These’ by Claire Keegan    (2021) – 114 pages

The main subject of ‘Small Things Like These’ is a Magdalene Laundry located in the small town of New Ross in Ireland in the year 1985. Magdalene Laundries were mostly Roman Catholic institutions that operated from the 18th century to the late 20th century, ostensibly to house and employ “fallen women”. They were often owned and operated by convents.

According to one of the girls working in this Magdalene Laundry:

Those were put in there because “they hadn’t a soul in the world to care for them. All their people did was leave them wild and then, when they got into trouble, they turned their backs.”

Many of the laundries were effectively operated as penitentiary workhouses. The young women locked up there had to work long hours, the heat in these laundries was often unbearable, and the women were subject to severe punishment. Most of the public outside figured it was OK since it was being run by the Church.

In a mass grave at the Donnybrook Cemetery in Dublin, Ireland, 155 unmarked tombs were found that touched off a scandal that exposed the horrific treatment of the inmates of these Magdalene laundries. The deaths of these women were shrouded in secrecy. The last Magdalene laundries closed in 1996.

‘Small Things Like These’ is about a husband and father with four small daughters who happens in 1985 to find out what is going on in one of these Magdalene Laundries. This man has a differing perspective than most, since his mother was left unmarried to raise him alone with the help of a kind employer.

This father is told to keep his nose out of the convent’s business:

“Tis no business of mine, as I’ve said, but surely you must know these nuns have a finger in every pie.”

Even though the events in the novel are said to take place in 1985, ‘Small Things Like These’ feels like it could have occurred a hundred years ago. The more things don’t change, the more they stay the same. Excuse me for the tautology.

Claire Keegan makes absolutely no concessions to modern attitudes or times; her scenes and her characters are almost Dickensian. Every scene, every remembrance, every sentence has a moral purpose. I’m not criticizing; it’s just that it’s an out-of-fashion way to write.

 

Grade:    A-