![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Furlong sees his own potential fate in the lives of the less fortunate and is kept up at night ruminating “over small things like these”-the random-seeming moments that separate good fortune from misfortune.įurlong also spends a lot of time wondering about the identity of his father. ![]() When he sees a small boy foraging for sticks along the road, he offers him a ride and the change in his pocket, knowing that the boy’s father is an alcoholic. Wilson, is able to escape poverty without getting separated from his mother.įurlong is humble, hardworking, and deeply compassionate. A family man, he enjoys a level of success that belies his origins: born to an unwed sixteen-year-old mother-a deep mark of shame in Catholic Ireland-Furlong, through the generosity of a wealthy Protestant benefactress, Mrs. This character study is really the bulk of the plot, which moves not through propulsion, but by a steady undertow of dread embodied by its protagonist, Bill Furlong.įurlong is a coal and wood merchant living in a small Irish town in 1985. On the one hand, it has the scathing social and religious indictment of a longer novel on the other, it is a quiet and morose character study, a novella that delves into one man’s psychology and moral fiber. At just over one hundred pages, Irish writer Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a deceptively slim volume. ![]()
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