Foster - Claire Keegan

Na een epische film of levensgroot boek kan ik niet direct aan iets nieuws beginnen. Dan is een kort verhaal of dun boek ideaal, dit was perfect.

De verhalen van Keegan zijn vaker perfect.

Met zo weinig informatie karakters tot leven brengen, met precies genoeg woorden een sfeer creëren, spanning laten voelen.

In drie bladzijden was ik in het arme Ierland van de vorige eeuw, en de zomer van de hoofdpersoon die uit logeren gaat…

The Guardian:

“Keegan's lyrical novella was originally a New Yorker short story, but it has gained greatly from this expansion: the narrative breathes along with the child slowly detaching from her cramped, impoverished home and starting to unfurl, leaf-like, in an atmosphere of attentiveness. This is a story about liminal spaces: about having ‘room, and time to think’, about the shifting lines between secrecy and shame, and a child's burgeoning apprehension of the gap between what must be explicit and what need merely be implied.”

The New York Times:

“We critics are guilty of emphasizing, ad nauseam, the novella’s size. Our epithets (short, slim, brief) imply slightness, something lesser than, as if we owe the reader a trigger warning: not a novel.

But who doesn’t want to finish a book over the course of a weekend?

For those of you who do, the Irish writer Claire Keegan’s beautiful new novella, Foster, is no less likely to move you than any heaping 400-page tome you’ll read this year.”

Als je tussendoor iets wil lezen, of dit weekend iets bijzonders mee wil maken, lees dit!