Irish Fiction: Claire Keegan’s Debut
Galway, “Antarctica,” & post-colonial feminism (from the Los Angeles Times Book Review)
Every spring, the city of Galway hosts the Cuirt International Festival of Literature. Ireland’s premier literary event, it draws the cognoscenti and the country’s leading writers and critics. Finding myself there in 2000 but uncertain which events to attend, I let others lead and followed a gaggle of Ireland’s well-known and established writers, who were going to listen to a young woman who had just published her first book of stories. The buzz was that she was the real thing. I heard Claire Keegan and was thunderstruck.
Keegan read “Men and Women,” a story in her impressive debut collection Antarctica. Set in contemporary and rural Ireland (small farms, muddy cows), the tale turns on a gesture: Because of a bad hip, Da never gets out of his car to open the gate but expects his wife to do so, even when she’s wearing her best dress for a night out. But, his daughter observes, Da’s hip isn’t bad enough to prevent him from flirting and whirling other women around at the Christmas dance. Humiliated again, on the trip home, her mother does not get out of the car when the time comes; instead, complaining, Da is obliged to get out and open the gate, and then he is stunned when his wife slides behind the steering wheel…
