Walk the Blue Fields

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These magnificent stories are like a smoothly sanded wood surface, all paint stripped away to show the natural growth of the timber, the glowing colour of the tree's inner life, the bare truth without overblown decoration. Bauhaus, not Baroque. the trees are tall and here the wind is strangely human. A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean.’ There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.” ( from the story “Walk the Blue Fields”)

Women’s minds were made of glass: so clear and yet their thoughts broke easily, yielding to other glassy thoughts that were even harder. It was enough to attract a man and frighten him all at once. from - Surrender (after McGahern) Anlatılanlar çoğunlukla acı şeyler olsa da her öyküde bir umut var. Ya da kabullenişin verdiği rahatlık. Modern şehir insanı, en küçük sıkıntıda "bu benim başıma nasıl gelir?" duygusuyla çatışıp bir türlü huzura eremiyor ama bu öykülerin de işaret ettiği taşra insanlarında ya eyleme geçme dürtüsü ya da ağırbaşlı bir kabulleniş var. Visceral, simple and clear, Keegan’s prose refuses indulgence and sinks in deep, drenching bones and visions with calm instants of gazing across the fields, beyond the sharp cliffs and onto the unruly waters that dance with the same blue that tints the baluster of anciently painted skies.Eugene comes down wearing his Sunday clothes. He looks tired. He looks much the same as he always does. Marvellous — exact and icy and loving all at once.”— Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall Praise for Walk the Blue Fields: 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. Bu tür öykülerde hem yabancı hem tanıdık şeyler buluyorum. Bir öykü kişisinin "ayaksuyunu" dışarı dökmezse eve uğursuzluk geleceğine dair inancı bana tuhaf gelse de bu inancın arkasında tanıdık bir geçmiş görüyorum.

A trio of brilliantly polished stories . . . In Keegan’s expert hands, even a minor skirmish—between a pushy older man and the writer who grudgingly lets him interrupt her solitude at an artist’s residency—illuminates how the sexes so often seem to navigate the world on completely different operating systems.” — People Magazine, Book of the Week You go out and close the door. In the bathroom youwash your hands, your face, compose yourself once more. These stories are pure magic. They add, using grace, intelligence and an extraordinary ear for rhythm, to the distinguished tradition of the Irish short story. They deal with Ireland now, but have a sort of timeless edge to them, making Claire Keegan both an original and a canonical presence in Irish fiction.” –Colm Toibin, author of The Master and Mothers and SonsA man goes into a bar to drink away his sadness as his lover has left him. He dreams about her returning. Meanwhile, there is solace in beer talk. Now you stand on the landing trying to remember happiness, a good day, an evening, a kind word.’ - from ’The Parting Gift’ This is an quintessentially Irish book, peopled with women (young and old) who are angry with the men who are in --or not in -- their lives; sullen men who don't know what has happened to what they were hoping for; and children who see all that is happening in their homes and escape however they can. The settings are rural, the tales are somewhat contemporary but also occasionally almost folk tale in style.

A note-perfect short story is something a very few people can produce. The Irish writer Claire Keegan does it in her second collection of stories. . . . Immaculate structure, a lovely, easy flow of language, and a certain stony-eyed realism about human experience; she is very much part of an Irish tradition, but a unique craftswoman for all that.” –Hilary Mantel, New Statesman Keenly observed and surfaced are the depths of yearning known to everyone who cherishes hope for the future and the insidious grip the past continues to exert over the present. Despite this, evident too is the inward bent to flee, pull oneself up by the bootstraps, get up when one has stumbled, and keep moving forward even when there is no certainty of better days. The title story paints a variation on this emotional double-blind, this time for a priest officiating at the wedding of a woman with whom he has had a passionate affair. A priest might seem an anachronistic figure, but the respects (and disrespects) paid to the character represent a rural Ireland which still exists today. Indeed, while on the surface ‘Walk the Blue Fields’ appears to present us with a clash of the old and the new Irelands, closer examination reveals it to be quite a traditional story. The ‘Chinaman’s cures’ are a modern update of the Irish predilection for healers and bonesetters, while the story’s frank depiction of sexual jealousy merely externalises a recurrent theme of Irish fiction that has been couched for too long underneath unwieldy metaphors. For all of this, however, it is the brilliantly rendered dinner scene which makes ‘Walk the Blue Fields’ one of the gems of this collection, particularly in terms of the interplay among the wedding guests and in lines such as ‘the priest cuts into the lamb’, which betray a knowing irony in light of the character’s inability to uphold his oath of celibacy. A mini-masterpiece . . . There is nothing demonstrative about this prose, which is not spare but restrained, strategically discharging touches of eloquence only when needed, and not through a profusion of descriptive detail, but through choice adjectives and verbs that just stray from the literal . . . Keegan stands almost without rival.” — Irish Times (UK) In “So Late in the Day,” Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently; in “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions; and in “Antarctica,” a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.Keegan’s evocative prose takes you so far into each story that your senses buzz afresh with them.” – The List A collection of seven stories exploring themes of families, emotions, secrets, memories - not all of them welcome ones, and love that is taboo, morally, religiously as well as legally. I will not rate these stories separately because I found each one to be special in its own way, which is rare in a short story collection. At the end of the book, Keegan includes a brief segment on the folklore, specific terminology and geography featured in some of the stories. I would recommend reading that part before reading the stories. This is one of the most exceptional collections of short stories to be published by any Irish writer in recent years. Claire Keegan writes with the most extraordinary grace. Her words and images float. Many of the stories are unforgettable. This book will surely place her where she truly belongs: among the greatest practitioners of the short story form now writing.” –Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea Yerel çünkü İrlandalı, son kelimesine kadar hem de! Bu kadar yerel bir dil ile anlatılan bir o kadar evrensel! Kısa cümleler ve nefes alan her canlı hikayeye dahil tüm dağ taş ağaç deniz ve mavi tarlalar!