The Keep by Jennifer Egan
My rating: 4/5 cats
god, i am so glad jennifer egan won the pulitzer. when i heard she won, i said “her??”
because i had read invisible circus and thought it was really average and not to my liking at all. but then i read goon squad, for science, which made me read this one, and i loved them both. and now i say loudly “HER!”
this one has similarities to goon squad (and thankfully none to invisible circus). it is a weaving narrative swirling metafictionally between a criminal writing a story for his prison writing class and a man visiting his estranged cousin in a broken-down castle somewhere in eastern europe; a castle that is slowly being renovated into a hotel… and something more.
and then there is our narrator.
this book is a creeper. both stories are individually marvelous, and when they converge, it is like the angelic choir going “ahhhhhh” in a way that is completely satisfying and chilly. is it perfect? no, there are some questions i am still having at the end of it, but enough of it works that i love it to little pieces, and was squeeing most of the time i was reading it. it combines the gothic sensibilities with a mystery that is at once a mystery of real-world dimensions, and a mystery of the miiiind.
it is about technology and imagination and how the one impacts the other. it is about childhood mistakes and the ways in which adulthood can be resisted. it is about atonement. it is about enduring the aftershocks of decisions regretted.
and it is beautiful.
i, for one, did not mind the last chapter. many people did. but that story, the beginning of it anyway, felt so necessary to me. the very-end i can see is not as strong as the rest of the book, but the words leading up to it are some of the most heart-wrenching in the whole book.
i love stories-within-stories and i love the gothic settings, so this was pretty much a guaranteed win for me. and i am officially a big fan of jennifer egan, and am going to read look at me before the year is out. count on it.
