Claire Keegan: 'Small Things Like These'

 Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is my kind of book: short in length, big in scope.

It’s about an Irish fellow named Furlong, a coal and firewood merchant who just wants to live a quiet life and provide for his wife and five daughters. But he witnesses an injustice. If he gets involved, it means trouble — the kind of social trouble you can’t avoid and have to pay for.

If you grew up wondering how so many people could accede to a racist, apartheid social order, this book might be for you. If you are still wondering how a wealthy, self-satisfied country can accept such inequality in the treatment of its residents, this book might be for you. It’s short, but the questions at its foundation are substantial.

If you’re a writer or an aspiring writer, allow Ms. Keegan to give you a writing lesson. I copied 10 sentences into my notebook. Here’s one from the beginning, setting the scene in New Ross, a small city in Ireland, around Christmas 1985:

 

And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under the doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.

 

I think I’m going to try to read everything Claire Keegan has written.

• Source: Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These; New York: Grove Press, 2017, p. 2.

Hearing, and having to guess which artist

 I stopped in the woods twice this week to try to find the source of sounds I don’t hear every day. The first, at Stone Mountain, sounded like a tropical bird, or perhaps a couple of chimpanzees arguing. The second, at Arabia Mountain, I mistook for a whining dog.

I never saw a thing. But I’m pretty sure both sounds were made by a Yellow-billed cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus. They are common in the Piedmont, but shy. The first call was the cuckoo’s signature chatter, hoot, rattle and trill. The whining dog was its “coo song.”

You can hear both tunes at the Audubon Society’s website:

https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/yellow-billed-cuckoo

Summertime, and the shade is impressive

It was an overcast day, and the woods were dark. If you were taking a photograph, you’d think about using artificial light. I have lived here for more than a year and I just can’t get used to the density of the canopy.

I grew up in the days when boys who were learning to take photographs carried light meters. I wish I still had one and could tell you just how dark it was. But the evidence of deep shade is on the forest floor. The ephemeral wildflowers that bloomed before the canopy got dense are gone. It would be hard to find a bloom now, though you see meadow beauties, genus Rhexia, at the forest’s edge.