Claire Keegan: Silences that speak volumes

Open-ended, controlled, and graphic, Claire Keegan's narrative style is powerfully brief and succinct and her mastery with the short story form has garnered global attention. Allowing herself limited space to share her depths and insights, she portrays slivers of lives and pieces of Irish history by getting to the point and introducing us to characters who in an almost chronicle-like fashion represent national stereotypes. Their queries and anxieties are set in narratives within a provincial Irish context expressing local concerns yet possessing wider relevance as universal issues. Their fates bind us across cultural borders and divides, therein lie their wider relevance. This essay inserts Keegan in an existentialist framework and draws on Zygmunt Bauman, Walter Benjamin, and Susan Sontag while focussing on stories where the mundane hides deeper concerns which are expressed less through verbal communication than pauses and silences charged with emotion.