Claire Keegan has been compared to Russian author Anton Chekhov and Irish writer William Trevor. She shares their keen sense of empathy, attention to detail, and keen concern for the ethical issues raised by loyalty and suffering for witnesses as well. like those who suffer.
Keegan’s output is scarce and her stories are nothing special as they are intensely moving, deeply drawn to the essentials. If she had announced anything imperfect, I wouldn’t have seen it.
Since its first publication in 2010, Raiser became part of the curriculum at the school in her native Ireland. It appears in a slightly abbreviated version in New Yorkers, but this new standalone volume is the first edition of the full text in the United States. It is a beautiful companion for survival Booker of the year on the shortlist Little things like this, Her Christmas story and the moral story that makes Dickens’ Christmas Carol and by Hans Christian Andersen The Little Match Girl seems like fairy tales covered with glitter. Together, this pair of Keegan novels form a one-of-a-kind punch.
The unnamed narrator of Raiser was a little girl whose parents, poor Catholic farmers were battered by too many children and their father’s vices, had to raise her for distant relatives whom she had never seen before. met when her mother’s womb was “hard to have the next child”. When her father drove her away after Mass one summer Sunday “deep into Wexford towards the shore where my mother came from,” she didn’t know what to expect – whether she would be working hard or not. treated kindly, and for how long.
We recognize the deprivations in the girl’s previous life vicariously, through what she perceives, which is very different from what she used to be. The “shiny tall tables,” the clean kitchen tile, the daisies on the table, the smell of bleach and disinfectant and the smell of rhubarb in the oven all caught her attention. When Mrs. Kinsella, even taller than her mother, “looks at my clothes, I see my thin, cotton dress, my dusty sandals through her eyes.” The girl quickly realized that “this is a different kind of house. There’s room, and time, for thinking.”
Before her father hurried away without much hug, he warned Kinsellas that the girl ate a lot, “but you can do her thing.” The girl noticed Mr. Kinsella’s reaction, a subtle reprimand for her father: “Look up Kinsella.” There would be no need for anything like that,” he said. The child would need to do nothing more than help Edna get around.” The girl then describes her daily routine: “Myself and Mrs. Kinsella made a to-do list, and just did it. them “- cleaning the house, weeding the garden, digging potatoes, scissors. rhubarb, making banh tet.
Kinsella bathes the little girl, cleans her filthy nails, treats her urine-soaked bedding – all to no avail. During the night, she checked on the girl and heard the woman whispering, “God, help me. If you were mine, I would never let you stay in a house with a stranger.” As the woman begins to see the effects of their care, she says, “All you need is care.”
Gradually, from a series of critical comments from neighbors, the girl learns of the boy whose clothes she was given to wear before Kinsellas “takes her out” in her own new wardrobe, and the hole in Kinsellas’ life that she’s filling. . After a particularly malevolent woman told the girl about Kinsellas’ missing son and fish to spread rumors about her bereaved caretakers, Mr. Kinsella took her into the sea to comfort her. Teacher. He said, “You never have to say anything… Many people have lost a lot just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.” It was a lesson she kept in mind when her mother later told her about her stay with Kinsellas.
One of the things Keegan gets here is how painfully unfamiliar love and tenderness can be because they highlight what’s missing. Walking to the beach, Mr. Kinsella thoughtfully adjusted his stride to the child’s and took her hand. She notes, “my father never once held my hand, and a part of me wanted Kinsella to let me go so I wouldn’t have to feel this.” She then added, “It was a difficult feeling but as we went together, I started to settle down and let the difference be between my life at home and my life here. “
At first sight, Raiser reminiscent of Kaye Gibbons’ sensational 1987 debut novel, Ellen Foster, narrated by a disadvantaged 11-year-old girl who is fortunate to be relieved, after many hardships, to come to a home where she is loved and desired, forever free from her abusive father.
But the dilemma in which Keegan’s narrator, a victim of abandonment rather than abuse, finds himself more like the boy in Graham Swift’s We are here, whose loyalty is torn between the harsh life he leads with his hard, bitter mother and the privileged existence he shares with the kind, loving foster parents he Sent from London devastated during the Second World War. Keegan, like Swift, captures how difficult the ensuing guilt can be for kids.
More than most books are four times its size, Raiser It does some of the things we ask of great literature: It widens our world, redirects our attention outward, and it opens our hearts and minds. This is a small book but has an extraordinary impact.
