“Little Things from Nothing” by Claire Keegan: forbidden to hurt him

“Losing everything would have been the easiest thing in the world.” Bill Furlong, a forty-year-old owner of a timber and coal company, knows this very well. People with cold houses, who sleep in their coats and queue for the dole. People who stay awake with debts and hope to be able to pay for the wood they buy – wood for heating – “a little later”, the next month. He sees it every day, he talks to us. And he tries to make this clear to Eileen, his upright wife, who is less attentive than he is to these trivial things that stir in his mind and jostle in his thoughts both during the day when he drives around in the truck and at night when he drives around in his underwear (around the house). and settles, sleepless, at the window with a cup of tea. And to us readers of “Little Nothing Things” by Claire Keegan (Einaudi Stile Libero, 92 pp., 13 euros), a novel in which Furlong is the protagonist, tells what, from behind those windows, he sees: the streets, the rivers, the stray dogs. And the crowds of staggers outside the pubs, what he calls “men who can’t make it”. “Maybe,” Eileen replies with a twisted mouth, “but to have the slightest consideration for one’s children one shouldn’t go around under certain conditions.”

The discussion was triggered by the son of Mark Sinnot: going up and down the streets of New Ross – we are in Ireland, the story takes place in 1985, a time of economic hardships and massive waves of migration towards London or New York –, Furlong met the little boy. Rain and cold, so he gave him a ride and a handful of change. “It’s not done,” says Eileen annoyed, according to which the alcoholism of the fathers must fall on the children, Eileen reassured by a well-being that is not well-being but is still something (more draft, less draft), is to rest one’s feet on the full and to know that the five daughters can also count on it: Kathleen, the eldest, already able to help out with the accounting records; Joan, a middle school student, star of the church choir; Sheila and Grace, masters of multiplication tables, multi-digit division, hydrography and the accordion; and then Loretta, a great reader and designer of blue hens that collect prizes. Everything nice. All serene. All reassuring.

But every story is a “except”, and Bill Furlong – never met his father, mother got pregnant very young – while carrying a load of coal to the convent of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd makes an unexpected acquaintance. An unpredictable fact won’t leave his already overflowing conscience in peace, as a moral doubter, as an indefatigable strologer, as a meticulous inquirer of his own interiority. Because Bill Furlong is one who asks questions, one who is not satisfied, one who can’t feel good if he suspects that someone else close to him is in a position to navigate in bad waters, at least as murky as those of the river Barrow, which carries its trail of rumors across the city, including a curse that has haunted the place for decades.

“Little things from nothing” is a double plaid that houses a real pearl (to those who challenge Bill Furlong about the fact that there is no need to go against whoever counts because “he has the power”, he replies: “He has the power we give him”) and a story that is a panettone, in the sense in which this is said of certain pipe tobaccos that are not highly prized but highly smokeable. A “Christmas” novel which is forbidden to feel bad, unless you feel like Salvini who does not disembark Humanity 1. And which tells the ethical circularity of what is given to us and what we must give back. But the issue is really hot: the Magdalene Laundry, financed by the Catholic Church and the government and closed in Ireland in 1996, is a very black hole in the history of the country – we are talking about thousands of dead babies and women killed or exploited. For this he deserved to be treated in a more courageous and direct way, even within the framework of an edifying story. Then of course, keep calm and down to earth – you don’t come across a Colson Whitehead on every street corner.