Antarctica - Softcover

Claire Keegan's debut collection of short stories, Antartica is a varied, often challenging, series of reflections on the drama, and violence, of everyday lives: the love affairs which tempt women, and men, to leave their marriages, the cruel rivalry between sisters, the common misery between men and women, the uncanny effects of requited love. Like her narrative voices, Keegan's themes are diverse, distinctive. "Every time the happily married woman went away," she writes, at the beginning of the eponymous "Antartica", "she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man." Taking her chance between danger and eroticism, she finds out. Does the au pair want to kill the baby? Is the question which drives "Where the Water's Deepest", while "Men and Women" gives voice to the desperation of being the "useful" child to a father-tyrant: men "do nothing" in a world in which mother and daughter do nothing but work. One of the most disturbing stories in the collection is "A Scent of Winter", a tale of "rape" and revenge, of keeping a white wife silent and waiting for a black man to "heal". That (grotesque) hint is typical of how these stories work, and of the strange, sometimes ruthless, world onto which they open.--Vicky Lebeau