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The quiet story of the quiet girl
Apr. 11th, 2024 04:31 pmSad Irish Literature Month, Part II, continues! I read Claire Keegan’s Foster last night, the novella that excellent Irish-language film An Cailín Ciúin is based on. So I already basically knew the story.
The one thing I’m not sure I was prepared for was quite how short it is. I read the whole thing in about ninety minutes, which might be less than how long the movie is (OK I just checked and the movie is… 96 minutes. So pretty much exactly how long the movie is, actually). A big (relatively) chunk of the physical book I was holding in my hands was actually a preview of the first few chapters of Small Things Like These, which I only skimmed because I had in fact read just that text yesterday. Foster itself is 92 pages.
Foster is from the point of view of an unnamed nine-year-old girl (she’s called Cait in the movie but not here) from a dysfunctional and very chaotic household–shiftless dad, continually pregnant harried mom, several siblings and another one the way–who is unceremoniously dumped with her mother’s childless cousin and her husband for a summer, essentially for the family to have one less person to look after while her mother is dealing with having the latest baby. The story is basically about her learning to be less stressed out and to trust that she is in fact being taken care of. There is not a whole lot of plot per se; things happen, but they are all small and domestic things. The girl runs down the drive to the post box and back, and learns to help out around the house. They go shopping in town. A neighbor die and has a wake; another, very nosy and unpleasant neighbor interrogates the girl and gossips about the Kinsella’s (the couple the girl is staying with–they’re Edna and John here, though they’re Eibhlín and Séan in the film version); the girl falls in the well and catches a cold. It’s all drawn in very observant, understated details; none of these characters are expressive people.
I did find myself once again struggling with wanting to know what happens next but I think that is on me as a reader being fundamentally a big-fat-novel type of person. This is a little character-driven novella and it’s good at being that.
The one thing I’m not sure I was prepared for was quite how short it is. I read the whole thing in about ninety minutes, which might be less than how long the movie is (OK I just checked and the movie is… 96 minutes. So pretty much exactly how long the movie is, actually). A big (relatively) chunk of the physical book I was holding in my hands was actually a preview of the first few chapters of Small Things Like These, which I only skimmed because I had in fact read just that text yesterday. Foster itself is 92 pages.
Foster is from the point of view of an unnamed nine-year-old girl (she’s called Cait in the movie but not here) from a dysfunctional and very chaotic household–shiftless dad, continually pregnant harried mom, several siblings and another one the way–who is unceremoniously dumped with her mother’s childless cousin and her husband for a summer, essentially for the family to have one less person to look after while her mother is dealing with having the latest baby. The story is basically about her learning to be less stressed out and to trust that she is in fact being taken care of. There is not a whole lot of plot per se; things happen, but they are all small and domestic things. The girl runs down the drive to the post box and back, and learns to help out around the house. They go shopping in town. A neighbor die and has a wake; another, very nosy and unpleasant neighbor interrogates the girl and gossips about the Kinsella’s (the couple the girl is staying with–they’re Edna and John here, though they’re Eibhlín and Séan in the film version); the girl falls in the well and catches a cold. It’s all drawn in very observant, understated details; none of these characters are expressive people.
I did find myself once again struggling with wanting to know what happens next but I think that is on me as a reader being fundamentally a big-fat-novel type of person. This is a little character-driven novella and it’s good at being that.