In these stories men and women who have made some very bad choices with regard to the other face the consequences of their mistakes - well the woman in The Long and Painful Death, seems at peace with her choice not to be involved, which contrasts well with the two other stories. ( )

4.5

My first book from this author and I must say I enjoy their writing style.
A very quiet but satisfying glimpse into the life of an Irish man and his brief romance.
I would have preferred to be in his fiancée’s point of view but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

https://youtube.com/@ChanelChapters ( )

I listened to Claire Keegan read this at The New Yorker but I found it depressing and Keegan's reading of it lugubrious.
Which surprised me because I really, really liked Small Things Like These and Foster.
Ah well...
I'm not going to bother reviewing it on the blog because it's only a short story and I can't think of anything much to say about it. ( )

https://shawjonathan.com/2024/05/30/claire-keegans-so-late-in-the-day/ ( )

This is the story of an interesting, poliglot woman of international upbringing and of many qualities and of how she took back her life, seen through the eyes of the mediocre man who didn't manage to crush her sense of self with his stinginess in matters of both money and feelings.
This is also the story of mysoginy being born, cradled, and cultivated through the obstinate refusal to take accountability.
It's a tale of such crude simplicity in its ugly truth, that when I realised what was REALLY going on in this guy's head - "the woman could cook" being the first hint at his entitled sense of what part she deserved in the relationship - I felt a jolt of physical disgust.
I always found amazing how physical nausea and moral anger go hand in hand. Take this very short story: the further I went - I'd say waded - into its protagonist's murky psyche, the more uneasy and a bit queasy I felt. When the first "cunt" hit the page, I had lost all interest in my dinner. Not because the guy had made mistakes, we all do; rather because, confronted openly (and apparently for the first time in his life) with the starch reality of how himself and many Irish men see and treat women, he didn't find in himself anything more to do than to whine about his upbringing, rage against a random animal, sulk against all the female characters as if they were ganging up against him, and in the end go to bed feeling sorry for himself. Mysoginy is lack of accountability.
Claire Keegan's mastery shines through most of the narrative, which made the flashback to the crass family practical joke seem a bit heavy-handed by contrast. Many other reviewers had the same feeling, and indeed, the coarseness is there.This said, her style didn't let us down. Read well the first page again; Dublin's miraculous sunny summer day is described in a series of positive images that end describing children, and immediately after that, there is a comment on the way everything ends. There it is, the story in a nutshell.
Children are referred to repeatedly throughout the narrative; in the light of the story's development, I interpreted this first mention as a prefiguration of the protagonist's obsession with all HE's lost, with all HE expected her secretly to do for him, with all HE feels when confronted with his own ugliness reflected in her eyes, laid out so "continentally" in clear words in front of him. Never once are we told how he feels about HER. His loss congeals around all these children HE won't have; we will never know HER opinion about having children, and if it weren't for our inferences allowed by Claire Keegan's impeccable story-telling, we would never know anything of her through him. Actually, he doesn't have a clue himself of what we know about the woman he lost. So good is Claire Keegan at writing, that we see a complex portrait of a woman through the words of a man who doesn't see any of what we see. And the sad truth of this short story is that he doesn't even care to see. He liked his dinners cooked but would rather not have to help washing up. That sums him up pretty tidily.
Claire Keegan managed twice, already, to describe through a male character the plight of women in a world that hates them. I find it a refreshing perspective and a fair one. In this sense, So Late In The Day is the contrapunt to Small Things Like These, where a man refuses to keep avoiding accountability for the way a young woman is treated by society. Claire Keegan is apparently building a literary anthropology of the Irish man in relation to mysoginy, and I am living for it.
I can't wait to read a VERY long novel where everything comes together.

One last edit: I don't agree with the official description of Cathal thinking about a "woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently." Wrong. Cathal could never have acted any differently, nor did he leaves the story with any learning.To the very end, he kept regretting the money spent, the investment not returned. ( )