Award-winning author Jennifer Egan brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep –the tower, the last stand –is 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 … 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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Meandering with multiple plot lines and points of view. I really wanted to like it and despite the mixed reviews was willing to suspend judgment because of the experimental nature of the author’s task. But i found the writng to be rather pedestrian and it exhausted my tolerance for the back and forth of different narrators with no real motivation, character development, or emotional depth. I gave up after four chapters.
Incredible how an author is able to pull you in and keep you totally engaged, anxious, pleased and horrified all in the space of a few pages!! What a wonderfully complex and mesmerizing story. Don’t miss this mesmerizing journey!
Intriguing … Waiting for the final twist is so sweet.
Not much.
Too many unanswered questions, not worth the time.
Really interestingly and originally done and the story “outside” of the story was as interesting as the story “in” the story. (You’ll quickly see what I mean as you read it). The ending felt, at first, a trifle inconclusive but as I considered it more I realized that I understood everything that was said and unsaid (or, I understood what I took from those things. Another reader might have a totally different take-away than I did) and this writer just didn’t feel the need to lay out every single detail in words of one syllable, with four part harmony and full orchestration; trusting, rather, that the reader would be intelligent enough to get it. Very different and a refreshing approach.
What a story! The plot blurs the lines between what is real and what is fantasy until it comes together at the keep—the base of the castle that holds everything up.
What an original tale.
Definitely keeps you reading, wondering what’s real and what’s a story, who the narrator actually is. Very original, with unexpected plot twists.
Didn’t enjoy the two stories being told at the same time and didn’t like the ending.
It was an engaging and enthralling story that I could not put down.
After reading some of the glowing reports of this book I expected to get straight into the story and be consumed by it. I was really disappointed. I found it to be really confusing and I seriously considered not finishing the read, but I persevered and read it through to the bitter end and found the last chapters the most interesting.
I was not impressed at all
Meandering style intended (I suppose) to make the reader dig for more and provide a mystery to be solved. Doesn’t work. The text is too broken, not well written. Characters lack illumination. Wasn’t worth my time.
Underrated and strikingly ambitious — and entirely successful — work from Egan, whose better-known hits A Visit From the Goon Squad and Manhattan Beach show a range unrivaled by modern novelists beyond Margaret Atwood, the queen of rendering genre irrelevant. The Keep is a story within a story, peopled by characters you can’t trust, with complete uncertainty around every corner. A bit slow in the initial going but once I was in, I was spellbound until the last page and beyond.