Walk the Blue Fields

Product Information

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. The freedom and range of Keegan's first collection, Antarctica, has narrowed to a town, a house, a few fields; and this stillness gives a close, lapidary beauty to the prose. Just like Synge a century earlier, Margaret is forced to flee across the sea to Aran, and there take refuge from her curses and her gifts. Yet just as these modes of narration—the folk tale and the short story—are not in competition with each other, so too are the mythical and the material conjoined as the sum total of existential possibility.

Walk the Blue Fields: Stories by Claire Keegan Reading Guide Walk the Blue Fields: Stories by Claire Keegan Reading Guide

But Keegan does capture the grueling synthesis of inevitable doom and elegant pride found both in Chekhov’s work and in the Irish people. It used to be an open room at the top of the stairs but Eugene put an end to all of that, got the carpenters in and the partition built, installed the door. The use of the second person narrator in the present tense hints darkly at collective complicity in her sexual ordeal and the ongoing trauma of memory. Though Chekhov’s are arguably resigned to their misery, they are self-important and often seeking answers and solutions. Stack, we are told, always knew that Margaret would leave, but “he couldn’t judge her, not even when she had taken his son’s hand and rowed away with strangers.Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. It is most clearly seen through the eyes of the young because "to be an adult was, for the greatest part, to be in darkness.

Walk the Blue Fields | Grove Atlantic

It has often been remarked that one of the peculiarities of the Celtic Tiger years is that in spite of the enormous changes that occurred in Irish life, no significant literary documentation of that moment was produced by an Irish artist. The oral tradition in Keegan’s work reminds the reader of an important, lost cultural practice; it is also part of the war against time and of the unknowability of total reality.

In this way, she remains faithful to gritty solidity of Irish tradition while feeding the modern reader’s thirst for inquisition and discovery. Perhaps, in a book full of bad male authority, she needs McGahern's benign authority to give her a place to stand. 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. That these islands are the Aran Islands is significant: for so long in Irish culture, the Aran Islands had been the spiritual home of an authentic Gaelic culture, and were particularly fetishized by the revivalists seeking Gaelic pre-Christian primitivism at the turn of the twentieth century.

Walk the Blue Fields, By Claire Keegan - The Independent Walk the Blue Fields, By Claire Keegan - The Independent

When sunlight reaches the foot of the dressing table, you get up and look through the suitcase again. 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. Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan is a collection of seven stories revolving around the themes of loss, regret, missed opportunities, and loneliness. In his travel writing, Synge takes an interest in the displaced, the mad, and especially tramps, but he stresses that his interest has little to do with a fascination with “freaks.A masterful portrait of a country wrestling with its past and of individuals eking out their futures, Walk the Blue Fields is a breathtaking collection from one of Ireland’s greatest talents, and a resounding articulation of all the yearnings of the human heart. The hard reality of "The Parting Gift" requires an equally real plane ticket to the States, whereas the southern gothic of "The Forester's Daughter" can only end in conflagration. As he walks home, his final, bland epiphany that “God is nature” surely delineates the limits of his spiritual horizon. Although they circle around similar themes, each story is in fact a different narrative world, with different rules, different possibilities for metaphor, or change. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon.