Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was the latest pick for the Swedish book club I’ve recently (if intermittently) started attending, and yet again they’ve opted for a translation into Swedish. (Previous entries include The Blind Owl, The World of Yesterday, The New York Trilogy.) No complaints from me, exactly, but I suppose that means I need to find other ways of keeping abreast of contemporary Swedish literature.
It’s getting on to Christmas in 1985 in New Ross, Ireland and protagonist Bill Furlong is working hard to get coal deliveries out and payments in to support his wife and five daughters. A delivery to a convent brings him into unusually close contact with behind-the-scenes matters at the local Magdalene laundry and (spoiler, I guess) the story ends with Furlong helping one of the girls escape.
Points for brevity and, despite the subject matter, not being an absolute morass of despair. I was expecting the conflict to revolve around one of Furlong’s own daughters being sent to the institution and spent most of the story trying to guess which one it would be. Maybe that was deliberate misdirection by Keegan, who’s to say? A lesser writer would have gone that direction, I’m sure, and I appreciate that she didn’t.
Otherwise, I imagine that a lot of the staying power a story like this has depends on the emotional resonance the setting has for a reader. I’m not Irish; I have no immediate connection to that particular tragedy. In the same vein, I expect a novel like Beloved hits different if you’re not American.
