The Keep by Jennifer Egan

"I close my eyes and jump in"
When you are reading The Keep that is perhaps the best thing to do. After reading this book, I read several reviews that called it "confusing" and "convoluted." But I disagree. What we have in The Keep is a delightful reversion to a style more like Wilkie Collins or Edgar Allen Poe in which the reader simply has to be patient and wait while bit by bit of the story is unfolded and revealed at the pace of the author's choosing. No, you won't understand everything from the beginning. In a book that holds secrets and mysteries spanning over a period of thirty or more years, you aren't supposed to.
Even more delightful to me was the discovery, some 60 pps into the novel that there is a second and even eventually a third story line. Each weaving and twining in and around the others spiraling downward to a point where all the stories come together and all the mysteries are revealed. While I originally bemoaned the lack of punctuation, as the story lines unfolded I realized that this was a brilliant and pivotal part of the story as well. Not all of the story is unpunctuated, to tell you why would be to spoil some of the surprise.
It's a story of mystery and secrets but also of forgiveness and redemption, of leaving the darkness and finding yourself again in the light. Don't go there looking for John Grisham style action, you won't find it. The pacing, the style, the slow tightening of tension bit by delicious bit is what makes this such an unforgettable book. It is one of my favorites this year.

The Keep - Kookiejar's Review

This novel was a bit of a mind game. Just when I thought I had a handle on the narrative...('Okay, two long estranged cousins reunite to turn an old European castle into a technology-free retreat...I get it'), Egan would pull the run out from under my feet. ('Wait! Now it's about some petty criminal in prison whose taking a creative writing course and may or may not be in lust with the teacher?')

The perspective between these two stories seems wildly disparate, but the farther you get into the novel, the more closely entwined the stories become, until at last you find they are both part of the same story after all.

Then, in the third section, we get a whole new story that, while integral to the first two, puts them all into a whole new light.

While, in the early going this novel challenged my patience, it was worth sticking out to the end. However, the final couple of paragraphs irritated me. A story should make you ask questions and then help you answer those questions. The heroine's actions at the end left me with the question 'why?'.

The Keep - Amy's Review

This review is also posted here.

Jennifer Egan
Library Book
240 pgs

I chose this title for the challenge because I was very intrigued by the summary that I read. Here is a part of it : "Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank whose devastating consequences changed their lives, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and family pride."

***** Possible SPOILER material below!

When I started reading "The Keep" I was prepared for a suspenseful thriller.

We start out meeting Danny and we learn of his cousins Rafe and Howard and the prank that affected all of their lives.

We then fast forward to Danny at age 36. Howard has purchased a castle in Eastern Europe and has given Danny a one-way ticket to come to the castle. Danny is unsure why.

We quickly begin to learn things about Danny like the fact that he can sense wifi connections through a tingling in his skin and he gets incredibly uncomfortable when he is disconnected (no cell phone, computer, etc.) for too long.

Maybe I missed some important connections, but things got strange and confusing to me after this point. Howard reveals his vision for the castle( a hotel that is electronic gadget free), Danny sleeps with an 89-year-old baroness(why?), falls from a window onto his head, becomes convinced that Howard is out to get revenge for the childhood prank, escapes to a nearby town and more.

After finishing the book, I discovered that there are actually three separate storylines going on with the stories intersecting and being told from different perspectives. The latter two storylines I understood and even enjoyed. The first storyline, though I understood how it connected, didn't make any more sense to me when I finished than when I when I started.

I was just left feeling like this book could have been better than it was. (2.5/5)