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The Keep

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "Part horror tale, part mystery, part romance ... utterly fantastic.”O, The Oprah Magazine The bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep—the tower, the last standis both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.
Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results.
And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 3, 2006
      Claustrophobic paranoia, intentionally mediocre writing and a transparent gimmick dominate Egan's follow-up to Look at Me
      , centered on estranged cousins who reunite in Eastern Europe. Danny, a 36-year-old New York hipster who wears brown lipstick (and whose body can detect Wi-Fi availability), accepts his wealthy cousin Howard's invitation to come to Eastern Europe and help fix up the castle Howard plans on turning into a luxury Luddite hotel (check your cell at the door). In doing so, Danny can't help recalling the childhood prank he played on a young Howie that left the awkward adolescent nearly dead—or so writes Ray, the druggie inmate who's penning this novel-within-a-novel for his prison writing workshop. Subsequent chapters alternate between Danny's fantastical castle travails (it's home to a caustic baroness bent on preserving her family seat) and Ray's prison drama. There are funny asides and trappings (particularly digital technology) along the way, and the sendup of castle narratives generates some chuckles. But the connection between the two narratives, which Egan reveals in intentionally tawdry fashion, feels telegraphed from the first chapter, making for a frustrating read.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 2, 2006
      When Gurner reads conversations, he announces the name of the person before reading the dialogue. This technique is as annoying as it is helpful, making the recording sound more like a grade school teacher reading aloud rather than a sophisticated audiobook production. Inmate Ray is working on a gothic novel at his prison's writing workshop. Eagan alternates chapters between him in prison and the adventures of his alter ego, Danny, within the novel. The speech patterns of Ray's fellow inmates are nicely individualized, but the women who inhabit the embedded novel are too similar. Geneva Carr appears only in the third part of the novel (on the last disc). As the voice of Ray's creative writing teacher and love interest, Carr explores the complexities of a woman who falls for a prisoner and makes listeners wish she'd had more to do in this production. The Keep
      is a clever, quirky novel that ping-pongs the listener between a medieval castle that kept people out and a modern prison that fences people in until the two worlds collide. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 3).

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  • English

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