A forrester courts a woman who grudgingly marries him. This is a story of how a half-hearted marriage becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of heartache and grief. The penny pinching forrester brings a dog home as a gift for the daughter's birthday. That it is not really a gift has dire consequences. Secrets too are revealed. He has never understood the human compulsion for conversation: people, when they speak, say useless things that seldom if ever improve their lives. Their words make them sad. Why can't people stop talking and embrace each other? Walk the Blue Fields, the collection by young Irish writer Claire Keegan, was my first encounter with her work. I hope it won’t be the last. In story after story, Ms. Keegan works in a striking Celtic-slanted prose, bringing news of life in the Irish countryside and exposing hearts and hopes and dreams of a number of troubled country contemporaries.” –Alan Cheuse, The Dallas Morning News Keegan has been compared to Trevor and Chekhov in her skills and style. I'm not expert enough to make that comparison but will say that these stories are very successful. My favorite is the titled story. "Walk the Blue Fields", the story of a priest's meandering walk after officiating at a local wedding, the painful search he is on, the unexpected conclusion. Wonderfully written.

In her bedroom your mother is moving things around, opening and closing doors. You wonder what it will be like for her when you leave. Part of you doesn't care. She talks through the door.Such simple sentences. But, everything is carefully constructed and builds to the exact mood of the piece. It's a very brilliant short story - as good as one by Chekov.

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. Our narrator receives a phone call early the next morning, a visitor wishing to present himself - he's actually outside the cottage. Our un-named narrator puts him off until 8 p.m., and what follows are the small preparations and the ways in which she occupies the free time of her first day. But it is beautifully done. I think Keegan with-holds the woman's name, because it then becomes so easy for the reader to slip herself into the story. A small extract: He shrugs and goes into the room he shares with your father. You drag the suitcase downstairs. Your mother hasn't washed the dishes. She is standing there at the door with a bottle of holy water. She shakes some of this water on you. Some of it gets in your eyes. Eugene comes down with the car keys. 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.In these seven, perfect short stories Claire Keegan presents a timeless world where the neighbours gossip, the cows stand bawling at the gate, and "the farmer's days are numbered." The hurts she describes are so ancient and keen that we find ourselves scrabbling for a timeline, noting avocado starters, wondering when the petrol strike was, and when the Ford Cortina went out of circulation. Keegan’s evocative prose takes you so far into each story that your senses buzz afresh with them.” – The List The best stories here are so textured and moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it’s easy to imagine readers savoring them many years from now.”— New York Times Book Review

As with Antarctica, it is the rich psychological realism of Keegan’s characters which propels these stories beyond simple aesthetic splendour. The first story, ‘The Parting Gift’, is told through eerie, second-person narration which allows simultaneously for emotional intimacy and for cold, detached objectivity on the part of the reader. The story, describing a teenage girl about to leave her family and embrace a new life beyond the uncertainty of emigration, presents the unsettling domesticity of abuse in rural Ireland via an effective slow-burn in which the potentialities of the unnamed girl are undermined utterly by her shrinking emotional horizons. Her Leaving Cert inability ‘to explain that line about the dancer and the dance’ reflects her own situation, caught between a grotesque inseparability of home and horror. Can you see me living there with them until the end of their days? Could you see me bringing a woman in? What woman could stand it? I'd have no life.' 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. The Long and Painful Death is an amusing tale of a writer working at a fancy writing retreat in rural Ireland where she meets a local irate snob. The Parting Gift is a moving story of a young girl leaving behind an abusive childhood and escaping to a new, hopefully better, life.The land, which is a source of wealth and spirituality, also epitomizes duty, heritage and binding roots that imprison the main characters in the jail of their own resignation. And so they live with a conflicted sense of belonging that is naturally paired with alienation, which doggedly morphs them into natural exiles in their native country. Claire Keegan is known for Tardis-like narratives that are bigger on the inside . . . So Late in the Day illuminates misogyny across Irish society.” — Guardian (UK) Keegan’s precisely considered details about character, setting, memory, and dramatic moment create a story you will want to read again and again. Her deceptively simple language is pitch-perfect.”— Boston Globe

As near to an epic as the collection contains, ‘The Forester’s Daughter’ is flanked by two slighter stories, ‘Dark Horses’ and ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’. The former, a Francis Mac Manus Award winner, is a brief and gutting tale of a man who has lost everything through his own intransigence and emotional ignorance. Brady, its protagonist, is a twenty-something farmhand, wallowing in self-hatred and self-denial after ‘the woman’ dispenses with his rural passive-aggressiveness. Rougher than any Macra na Feirme poster-boy, Brady is in many ways the prototypical Deegan, beset financially despite his deep, misguided love for country ways. Ironically, he could not be more different from the young man at the centre of ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’, a Harvard student spending his birthday at his millionaire stepfather’s apartment. Set on the Texas coast ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’ represents the only tonal misstep in the collection. Despite the display of Keegan’s usual poetic precision, the story seems out of place in a collection so resolutely Irish. A brief piece too, by the time we have adjusted to the American idiom and setting it is over, and we are immediately plunged into the 1940s Ireland of ‘Surrender’. A book that makes you excited to discover everything its author has ever written… Absolutely beautiful.”— Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain It’s impossible to overstate the talent of this Irish writer. Her stories are neither happy nor sad; she taps into some unnamed emotion that is more true, more pure . . . Gift this perfect little triptych to everyone on your holiday list.” —The Center for Fiction Fragments of his time…cross his mind. How lovely it was to know her intimately. She said self-knowledge lay at the far side of speech. The purpose of conversation was to find out what, to some extent, you already knew. She believed that in every conversation, an invisible bowl existed. Talk was the art of placing decent words into the bowl and taking others out. In a loving conversation, you discovered yourself in the kindest possible way, and at the end the bowl was, once again, empty.’ - from ’Walk the Blue Fields

Customer reviews

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) Ana akım batı edebiyatı değil de -hani o "bireyin modern toplumdaki sıkışmışlığı ve varoluş sancılarını" anlatanları kastediyorum- daha kıyıdaki yaşamları, özellikle taşrayı anlatan öyküleri daha çok seviyorum.