“So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close,” muses coal merchant Bill Furlong, the protagonist in Claire Keegan’s finely sculpted 2021 novella, “Small Things Like These.” Furlong had been admiring the river that passes through his small Irish town, but upon approaching it, finds himself wondering “which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water.”
(Side note right off the top: “…he rathered…” Please don’t ever listen to anyone who suggests language, “mere” words, aren’t beautiful and endlessly pliable things.)
The same basic questions—distanced or closeup? gauzy appearance or sharpened reality?—run like a low-voltage current through this slim tale of 110 pages that lingers long after works of triple the length take leave of one’s consciousness with the morning mist. At barely an hour’s read and available in full here, Keegan’s tale is a case study in th...
Read More
Recent Comments