Walk the Blue Fields

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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. Claire Keegan’s brilliant debut collection, Antarctica, was named a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year and earned her resounding accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. She continues her outstanding work with this new collection of quietly wrenching stories of despair and desire in modern-day Ireland. Claire Keegan blends quirky humor with mystery and darkness in a voice that is quintessentially Irish, deep and untroubled at once, and weaves a meticulous gossamer of spare lives trapped by the common themes of land and past, which take chameleonic shapes in every story. 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.

Yolumun üzerindeki kitapçının vitrininde görünce kitabın ismine gerçekten vuruluyorum. Tanışmak için sadece bir bahaneye ihtiyacım var,biliyorum. Ertesi gün bahanem hazır: İstanbul kartım için parayı bozdurmalıyım! İlk oturduğum yerde okumaya başlıyorum ve bırakmadan devam ediyorum: metroda,işte,merdivenleri çıkarken,yürürken... Fırına girdiğimde sayfalar akmış sonuncu hikayedeyim. Henüz çıkmış sıcaklığı ile kese kağıdını dolduran ekmeğin kokusunu içime çekerek göğsüme bastırıyorum. Mayıs ayı ama sabah çok serin ısınıyorum. Kendi kendime konuşmaktan kendimi alamıyorum; bu hikayeler göğsümün üzerinde sıcak ekmek, yol artık mavi tarla...! For non-Irish, terms and even entire sections of dialog can be hard to follow or downright unintelligible, making it difficult to appreciate scenes or interactions which may (or may not) be key to understanding. 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 Tóibín, author of The Master and Mothers and Sons 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. A mean spirited IRA sergeant behaves in a superior manner to his subordinate and the people in town. It is war time and bread is scarce. He visits a baker to buy a loaf of white bread (bread the baker’s son eyes longingly) and a crate of oranges that is to serve as comfort food. We find out why. Later in a section on story notes, the author reveals why oranges featured in this story.HTML: "Seven perfect short stories" from the award-winning author of Antarcticaâ??"a writer who is instinctively cherished and praised" ( The Guardian, UK). Antarctica is an appropriate title from these spare and chilly stories by the up-and-coming Irish writer Claire Keegan. . . . Keegan [is] an authentic talent with a gimlet eye and a distinctive voice.”— Boston Globe With that said, the writing quality is impressively high and the prose in many of the stories fairly sings in the description of rural Irish life. I know that road, that cliff, that island, from childhood holidays, so it was with a little racing of the heart, a little skip, a little hop over the edge into a well of forgotten memories that I read the first story in this collection. Keegan is so good at conjuring place that I was there on the edge of the cliff, peering over the rim of the world alongside the woman watcher, feeling the wind whip my eyes and the salt burn my lips while the waves filled my ears with their tremendous sound. Achill really is such a wild outcrop. Anything can happen there, and ideas for great short stories are no exception. The austere style and measured pacing of “Foster” is perfect… [A] matchless novella.”— Wall Street Journal

Keegan’s] . . . collections have drawn comparisons to William Trevor and Anton Chekhov . . . [She] crafts stories out of small details and insight . . . like poetry. . . . Claire Keegan is the real deal.”—Keith Donohue, “You Must Read This” NPR.com There aren’t enough words in the universe to fully describe quite how affecting this little book is . . . As with all of Keegan’s work the pace is perfectly measured, like a relaxed heartbeat . . . Each sentence, each word is meticulously placed . . . As always, Keegan describes the domestic quotidian in beautiful detail, elevating it – women’s work – to an art form . . . This is a treasure of a book.” — Sunday Independent (UK) Keegan] is a superb stylist: every well-structured paragraph contains multitudes . . . Incredibly engrossing . . . She constructs her stories from a skeleton of inferences that rise, gloriously, to form complex urges, crimes, desires, rebellions and, crucially, universal truths. Each brief work is worth the wait: Keegan is something special.” — Sunday Times (UK) 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 A master class in precisely crafted short fiction . . . Keegan’s trenchant observations explode like bombshells, bringing menace and retribution to tales of romance delayed, denied, and even deadly.” — Booklist, starred reviewIn “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. These short fictions by the Irish author Claire Keegan haven’t a style so much as a microclimate, a chill mist blowing in on a hard wind off the sea. . . . The author’s own storytelling powers have darkened and matured since her first collection, as she takes confident command of her craft.” –Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe 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. 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. In another good story, “The Forester’s Daughter,” a woman marries a simple man, initially resistant to marry him because she doesn’t love him, and so you know how this works out, in spite of the birth of children over the years.