Fin Keegan

Periodically, I write for The Second Circle, a book review I also happen to edit. Here are excerpts from a few:

PENELOPE FITZGERALD experienced a dream denied to all but a lucky few: her debut novel was accepted by the first editor to read it. Within a year the book was published, to be swiftly followed by further and better books: a year later she had won the Booker Prize and captured a loyal, readership which was to grow steadily over the following years. Her final novel sold 100,00 copies in the United States alone. Until her recent death at 83, Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most widely admired writers in the English language… Read MORE of my review of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower

FOR A PERIOD of six months towards the end of the 1990s this reviewer read for the Fiction Department of a major New York magazine of no small pretension and more Names in its past and present than, well, one could easily shake a stick at. My job in those haunted halls was simple: to read (i.e. to reduce; to liquidate) the Slush Pile, a Ionescian execresence of paper that was crawling up one wall of the office and threatening to choke a much-traversed shortcut through to the sanctum of the Literary Editor, a man who had already suffered his share for art (some of it at the hands of the Italian riot police, but that’s another story). This mound of unsolicited short fiction, a slow-motion volcano crudely distributed in Post Office bins as if by an Emergency Response team, was the most famous–and certainly the biggest–such heap in the world. Escaping it meant, and still means, instantaneous transformation of a life, the literary equivalent of triumphing on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. Read MORE of my review of Ismail Kadare’s Palace of Dreams

AS RUSSIA SLIDES further into chaos and dissolution (what internal strife does not achieve sheer loss of heart and conscience seems likely to) and her miserable people wage war on their neighbours and themselves, there is little to give observers hope for the Russia of the third millennium, a nation whose glories, though usually tainted by expansionism and xenophobia, are now long past and well beyond repeating, even in benevolent forms. Russia’s population is falling, her regrets accumulating and, with persistent anti-semitism, a parlous economy and a sense of having been duped by History, she increasingly resembles inter-war Germany. One of the few things to cheer about is the rude health of her literature, since in Russia books are still important, though never approaching the state-sponsored print runs of bygone days or the intense devotion of samizdat literature. And among young writers none is more accomplished or admired than Victor Pelevin, whose failure to win the Little Booker in 1999 was greeted with outrage by the Russian reading public. Read MORE of my review of Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra

NOW THAT Jean Rouaud has produced the final volume of what has turned out to be a quintet the time seems propitious to reconsider Fields of Glory (Les champs d’honneur, 1990) and its four successors. The author grew up in the rainy département of Loire-Atlantique (precipitation features heavily in his books). At the age of twelve he lost his father, aunt, and grand-father, all within a year of each other. Rouaud’s work, which is profoundly autobiographical, has been written out of this pain. As Proust, presiding ghost over this work of memory, pointed out: we learn only through suffering. To judge by the reaction of a teacher, in the third volume of the series, to the young narrator’s account of visiting his father’s grave–he grades him bottom of the class, a judgement delivered with sadistic ritualism before the other boys–Rouaud was not especially mollycoddled in the aftermath… Read MORE of my review of Jean Rouaud’s “Loire-Atlantique” Cycle

WITH THE UNTIMELY DEATH OF W.G. SEBALD IN 2001, Europe lost one of its greatest writers. He was born in Germany–the initials stand for Winfried Georg–in the alpine town of Wertach-im-Allgau in 1944. Since his early twenties he lived in England, first in Manchester and then, from 1970, in Norwich, where he taught at the University of East Anglia. We can safely say Sebald did not cross the North Sea to hobnob with the literati: his own agent once claimed never to have met him… Read MORE of my review of W.G.Sebald’s Rings of Saturn

LIKE THE WORK of Herta Muller and Victor Pelevin, Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Declares (Sostiene Pereira, 1994) observes the life of the individual under the strictures of State oppression: unlike them, in fact unlike most writers treating this theme these days, Tabucchi himself grew up in a democracy, in his case post-war Italy (albeit an Italy recovering from Fascism and war: the day after he was born his father cycled mother and child home through a Pisa all but destroyed by Nazi and Allied fighting). He has however steeped himself in Portuguese culture and is now a lusophile to the Beckettian degree of being able to compose high literary art–the novella, Requiem–in his adopted language… Read MORE of my review of Antonio Tabucchi’s Pereira Declares

SPEAKING TO “Time Out New York” recently, novelist Patrick McCabe (The Butcher Boy) made the point that the narrators of his novels tend to be Social Fantastics, that is, unreliable to a degree that allow a novelist to remain a Realist while, in the guise of depicted reality, including material drawn from the far shores of human possibility. Don Quixote is the greatest Social Fantastic in literature, though Cervantes affords us the company of the sceptical Sancho Panza–as most contemporary Social Fantasists do not–so as to play up the richly ironic contrasts between the “real” world (sheep; windmills) running alongside the hero’s fevered imaginings (knights; damsels)… Read MORE of my review of Alice Thompson’s Justine

More reviews here.