Walk the Blue Fields

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Dunagore was a strange place without so much as a tree, nor a withered leaf to be seen in autumn, just the shivering bogland and all the gulls wheeling around, screeching under restless clouds. The landscape looked metal, all sturdy and everlasting to Margaret, coming from a place of oak and ash, it was without substance.’ A mini-masterpiece . . . There is nothing demonstrative about this prose, which is not spare but restrained, strategically discharging touches of eloquence only when needed, and not through a profusion of descriptive detail, but through choice adjectives and verbs that just stray from the literal . . . Keegan stands almost without rival.” — Irish Times (UK) There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.” ( from the story “Walk the Blue Fields”) Yolumun üzerindeki kitapçının vitrininde görünce kitabın ismine gerçekten vuruluyorum. Tanışmak için sadece bir bahaneye ihtiyacım var,biliyorum. Ertesi gün bahanem hazır: İstanbul kartım için parayı bozdurmalıyım! İlk oturduğum yerde okumaya başlıyorum ve bırakmadan devam ediyorum: metroda,işte,merdivenleri çıkarken,yürürken... Fırına girdiğimde sayfalar akmış sonuncu hikayedeyim. Henüz çıkmış sıcaklığı ile kese kağıdını dolduran ekmeğin kokusunu içime çekerek göğsüme bastırıyorum. Mayıs ayı ama sabah çok serin ısınıyorum. Kendi kendime konuşmaktan kendimi alamıyorum; bu hikayeler göğsümün üzerinde sıcak ekmek, yol artık mavi tarla...! Lccn 2007408869 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA17314 Openlibrary_edition

For non-Irish, terms and even entire sections of dialog can be hard to follow or downright unintelligible, making it difficult to appreciate scenes or interactions which may (or may not) be key to understanding.A young man from Harvard spends his 21st birthday with his mother and millionaire stepfather at a posh penthouse by the sea. What matters is not the quality of the food but the company at table. He looks longingly at the sea which brings to mind his grandmother’s love for the sea and what it taught her.

The austere style and measured pacing of “Foster” is perfect… [A] matchless novella.”— Wall Street Journal Sanırım porsuk ağacı gördüğüm zaman üçüncü okumamı da yapmış olacağım. Çünkü onun da adı kitapta geçmekte:) Astonishing and beautiful. Her writing is intimately tuned to the landscape, language and ancient storytelling tradition of Ireland. . . . With a few crisp stark sentences, she opens whole worlds into which her reader falls, fully enthralled, captivated and amazed until her very last word.” –Alice Greenway, author of White Ghost Girls Such simple sentences. But, everything is carefully constructed and builds to the exact mood of the piece. It's a very brilliant short story - as good as one by Chekov. The land, which is a source of wealth and spirituality, also epitomizes duty, heritage and binding roots that imprison the main characters in the jail of their own resignation. And so they live with a conflicted sense of belonging that is naturally paired with alienation, which doggedly morphs them into natural exiles in their native country.Yürüyüş yolumun üzerindeki meşe ağaçlarının arasındaki üvez ağacını fark edince aklıma ilk gelen “Üvez Ağaçlarının Gecesi” oldu. Yani bu kitaptan bir öykü. Kitabın bütünü, tüm öyküler o kadar iyi anlatılmış ki yine hayranlıkla kitabı kapattım. Özellikle “Su Kıyısında” öyküsü beni çok etkiledi. Suda boğulma tehlikesi atlatanın kıyıya çıkışını evrimle o kadar güzel bağdaştırmış ki, hem de tek cümleyle… I think you'd rather have to be Irish, preferably rural Irish, to really get everything there is to get out of the 8 stories in this collection, however. There are tears there but she is too proud to blink and let one fall. If she blinked, he would take her hand and take her away from this place. This, at least, is what he tells himself. It's what she once wanted but two people hardly ever want the same thing at any given point in life. It is sometimes the hardest part of being human."

Hope lurks somewhere in almost all [Keegan’s] stories. . . . You start out on the paths of these simple, rural lives, and not long into each, some bit of rage or unforgivable transgression bubbles up . . . Then the truly amazing happens: Life goes on, limps along, heads for some new chance at beauty.”— Los Angeles Times Book Review As usual, I loved the first and last stories, but I also liked the feminist strain in these stories--the unwanted visitor, the wayward priest, the unloving husband. I like the exploration of desire/lust as shaping lives, and the place of quirky Irish characters (reminded me a bit of Flannery O-Connor here) and the rich presence of Irish myth.

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He’s not a terrible human being, necessarily, but he is gruff and selfish, maybe to be seen as a traditional (which is to say selfish, patriarchal) Irish male. He yells at her for her spending “my money on roses,” and so flowers play an important part in making meaning for her sad life.