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

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Briena Staunton Visiting Fellowship Awarded to Claire Keegan". Claire Keegan Fiction Writing Courses. 29 July 2020. The characters in these unsettling tales are all damaged in some way. Broken marriages, grief, loneliness - these are some of the subjects that have emerged to upend their lives. Most of the stories are set in Ireland, and to be honest the few that take place elsewhere are a bit jarring. Keegan's writing feels much more natural and assured in her native land.

Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer. The book ends at a point where many other authors would begin their novels’ second act. To what extent is Keegan deliberately asking the reader to create the rest of the story for themselves? What do you think happens to Bill Furlong next?

Read it is a supernaturally delicious and almost illicit feeling that assails us from her stories, sometimes touching, or chilling where anonymous characters, even possessed by a "savage" behaviour, manage to awaken in us a powerful empathy, to the point that you kind of sympathise with them. Coming to Keegan’s debut collection of stories after reading Small Things Like These and Foster—two gorgeously warm stories that have this strangely appealing ageless quality to them—I was surprised by their more modern, more easily recognizable sensibility. They are distinctly darker, edgier, sometimes sexy and often brutal or forbidding, and the language bonds them more clearly to our contemporary age. When Furlong first visits the local laundry to deliver some logs, a girl with roughly cut hair begs him to help and take her ‘as far as the river’. Furlong replies by showing his open, empty hands. What does Furlong mean by this gesture? (p. 41) DENSE….with strange endings — unsettling and or intriguing endings - brilliant prose — and (for me) —AT LEAST not as excruciating devastating as the title story.

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. 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.” I put my left hand between my legs —not—to masturbate - some type of protection comfort - maybe — over my underwear.

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urn:lcp:antarctica00keeg:epub:96cc5ad6-eb7b-4b44-92c6-421fe40e7dc8 Extramarc University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PZ) Foldoutcount 0 Identifier antarctica00keeg Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9087f39r Isbn 0871137798 Lccn 00049604 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.16 Openlibrary OL6789472M Openlibrary_edition I will learn fifteen types of wind and know the weight of tomorrow's rain by the rustle in the sycamores.” Her own stories are strangely timeless, tethered to chronology by the slenderest threads: only the most glancing of references tell you that Foster is set in the 1981 of the hunger strikes, and Small Things in the 1985 of Ireland’s young emigrating while the taoiseach signs an agreement with Thatcher that sends the northern Protestants into a spin. Surrender’ derives from John McGahern’s recollection of his father telling him how, before getting married, he brought two dozen oranges to a park bench and ate them in a row. Keegan recasts the senior McGahern as The Sergeant, a belligerent Garda officer and veteran of the independence struggle. None of his colleagues can compare with the men whom The Sergeant fought alongside against the British, and the dissatisfaction created by this infects every aspect of his life. Again, Keegan’s understanding of character results in a story where tiny, oblique moments are imbued with considerable meaning. The Sergeant, for example, derives a kind of mechanical comfort from inspecting his bicycle, a comfort which eventually replaces emotional engagement altogether. He must resist the urge to wind the chain until it seizes: the psychology of a man who can only give all or nothing, and can find no comfort on any middle-ground. His unwillingness to commit to a relationship is another facet of this, and the true fulcrum on which the story turns. Keegan’s ‘Surrender’ is more than a simple derivative of McGahern’s anecdote; it is a worthy and beautiful piece of art in itself, and one which speaks volumes in its silences alone. She pictured the plant sprawled across the floor, the length of a grown man, its pot no bigger than a small saucepan, dried roots snarling up over the pot. A miracle it was still alive.