New novel by Claire Keegan: Depression at your fingertips

Four books in twenty-two years and a reputation like Donnerhall in the Anglo-Saxon literary world.

Claire Keegan, born in 1968 in County Wicklow to a Catholic farming family of six, makes herself scarce and doesn't waste words.

At the age of seventeen she moved to New Orleans to study literature and politics, then to Wales.

In 1999, the first volume of short stories was completed, and “Antarctica” was followed by “Walk The Blue Fields” (2008).

Keegan earns a living as a creative writing teacher in Cambridge for a few years, but now lives in the west of Ireland.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

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Family is a big theme for Claire Keegan.

In 2010 "Foster" (German "The Third Light", like the previous volumes by Steidl) was published, eighty-five airy printed pages: the story of a girl who is brought by her father to a childless couple because another child is on the way and you such a hungry little mouth has less to feed.

The long-awaited volume "Small Things Like These" followed in 2021, and again the question immediately arose as to what we were dealing with - a longer story, a novella, a novel?

Almost 110 pages, and yet everything is laid out that a great book needs: timelessness, the aura of classicism, not a word too many, and yet enough fat to, as Keegan revealed in an interview, be considered a good piece of meat.

New Ross, a small town in the south-east of Ireland in 1985. The island is not doing well, high unemployment, the economy is in decline, young people are once again emigrating.

The shipyard has already closed, the fertilizer factory is lurching, shops are closing, houses remain cold.

In the midst of this misery, fueled by Catholic tradition, a hard-working coal and lumber merchant named Bill Furlong.

Married with five daughters, he's approaching forty and has an inkling of how quickly his modest prosperity could vanish into thin air.

Christmas is just around the corner, and despite the rituals, depression is within reach.

"It was a December of crows."

How church and state failed

There's something about Furlong's past that sets him apart.

His mother was sixteen when she became pregnant with him.

Her parents showed her the door, and the wealthy Protestant widow Mrs. Wilson made it possible for her maid to live with the baby in the big house outside of town.

Later, the childless Mrs. Wilson took care of Bill's education and helped him to set up a company.

He never found out who his father is.

Unloading a shipment of coal in the monastery shed above town, he finds a confused, frightened young woman with breasts full of breast milk.

Her son was taken from her, she exclaims, asking if he could take her away from this place.

The Mother Superior plays the role of caring, soothes the distraught supplier and sends him away with a fat tip.

But he can't get the story out of his head.

It's women, his own and a landlady, who warn him not to mess with the nuns, who have their fingers in everything.

The nuns who re-educate fallen girls, force them to work, take their children away from them - they not only wash laundry for the better circles, they also sell newborns abroad, it is said behind closed doors.

The story of the so-called Magdalen Laundries is a gruesome chapter in Irish history, one in which church and state worked hand in hand.

This coercive system existed for two hundred years, and the last laundry only closed in 1996. Today, researchers estimate the number of abused young women at 30,000 and the number of dead babies at 9,000.

Ireland only officially apologized in 2013.

But Keegan is not primarily concerned with settling accounts with church and state, the horror of the laundries is more in the background.

The author focuses on the heart and brain of her protagonist.

He wonders how sensible it is "to go on with your whole life without at least once having the courage to go against the circumstances, and still call yourself a Christian and look at yourself in the mirror".

Unlike most children, who used to be less important than they are now, Furlong experienced something like love with Mrs. Wilson.

Which leads him to wonder if "there was any point in being alive if you weren't helping each other."

In the end he will make a decision.

"Little things like this" is not a do-gooder fable, but a touching lesson in courage that is fed by empathy.

A brilliantly crafted piece of literature, Hans-Christian Oeser's translation captures Keegan's deceptively simple tone.

Maybe Claire Keegan will win the Booker this time;

the book made it onto the shortlist and we'll know more on October 17th.

It would be an excellent choice.

Claire Keegan: "Little things like this".

Novel.