Customer Reviews

Antarctica

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

To begin with, Keegan's title story is a killer, a dark classic. She's great, like the Irish all-stars (Roddy Doyle, Colm Toibin), but also some of our Americans, particularly contemporary masters like Edward P. Jones and Mary Hood, with whom she shares that that deep, rueful knowledge of place and people, and habit of telling stories that are rich as novels. Anyone who loves good short stories and/or Irish writers will appreciate Claire Keegan's Anarctica.

This collection of stories stumbled into my notice completely by accident. I am so glad that it did. If you are a fan of the short story, pick up Keegan's book! This is writing at its very best, in my opinion, and I anxiously await her next publication.

Some of these stories might be described as vignettes. Sharp and swift injections of reality, they are far ranging in setting and character. The collection is somewhat noir in tone, and takes the reader by surprise on every page. Well worth reading.

I was so happy to discover Claire Keegan just recently. I'm only sorry she has not written more. Like William Trevor, she can capture a life in a very few words. Wonderful and magical.

A collection of short stories about ordinary people living what appears to be ordinary lives written in the most extraordinary prose. Here is a new author blessed with abilities that are rare; a storyteller able to use words with astonishing clarity and surprise. Intelligent and challenging, the stories linger and are slow to fade.

Claire Keegan is a new find for me and I love her work. I had to put down the book for a couple of days after reading the opening and title story, "Antarctica." I was simply stunned by the way it wrapped up, though I started getting a sense about where it could be going, but it went way further than I anticipated. Keegan seems to be a writer somewhat in the O. Henry style who can wrap up with a perfectly plausible, though wholly unexpected resolution. Emily Dickinson described poetry as something that should blow your head off, and these short stories will did just that to me.

Some very well known writers endorse the sixteen short stories that form the debut of Ms. Claire Keegan entitled, "Antarctica". There are times these enthusiastic comments are a poor indicator of what the reader will find inside. This is not the case with Ms. Keegan's work. Not every story is memorable, however most of them are, and that is enough reason to look forward to what this writer may present readers in the future.

The collection's range is as diverse as the locales they unfold in. Ms. Keegan's talent is not limited to the land of her birth. She writes beautifully of Ireland, however she also writes as competently of Mississippi. Like all good writers she not only has an eye for detail and the ability to put what she sees on a page, she also has an ear for dialects that she can reproduce with equal skill.

Her stories range from the terribly sad when an event has unbalanced a person, to one who has been second all her life until she takes primacy with a set of scissors, and does so without harm. There are stories of misplaced guilt, respect for the past and those that remain as representatives of it. Her stories are not sentimental; they are uncluttered, and at times uncomfortably direct.

I doubt this is the last work we will see from this lady, and I look forward to reading her work again.