Review
Murder, madness and chickens
Claire Keegan's first collection of short stories, Antarctica, is an exciting exploration of today's global provincianlism
Antarctica
Claire Keegan
Faber and Faber £9.99, pp209
Sunday 19 December 1999
In 1948, Seán O'Faoláin published a meticulous study of the craft of the short story in which he agonised over the many difficulties of getting it absolutely right.
'There is something very affecting about a young writer's first book,' he mentioned. 'The readers of such books always tend to over-praise them. What the critic rarely says is that the very source of the charm of such books is also their weakness - that untutored wonder!' True, his own first stories are woeful. And he himself frothed at the mouth at Neil Jordan's debut, Night in Tunisia, which was a mistake.
