The Keep

Jennifer Egan

2006 • 240 pages

Ratings23

Average rating3.7

"Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank whose devastating consequences changed both their lives, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and family pride. Built over a secret system of caves and tunnels, the castle and its violent history invoke and subvert all the elements of a gothic past: twins, a pool, an old baroness, a fearsome tower. 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 - a story about two cousins who unite to renovate a castle - that brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation." "Egan's relentlessly gripping page-turner plays with rich forms - ghost story, love story, gothic - and transfixing themes: the undertow of history, the fate of imagination in the cacophony of modern life, the uncanny likeness between communications technology and the supernatural. In a narrative that shifts seamlessly from an ancient European castle to a maximum security prison, Egan conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep - the last stand, the final holdout, the place you run to when the walls are breached - is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive."--BOOK JACKET

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Popular Reviews

Reviews with the most likes.

Deb Nance

Danny and Howard are cousins, friends during childhood, who have their friendship destroyed when Danny plays a cruel trick on Howard. Howard as a child is the geeky fat kid and Danny is the popular athletic one, but as the boys grow into men, the tables turn. Danny is surprised to hear from Howard who invites Danny to his new castle in Europe, a castle he is renovating into a hotel. The story shifts back and forth between the cousins and a prisoner in writing class struggling to write his first book. I was never sure what was real and what was not real, but the story was captivating and the characters were compelling.

January 1, 2007

David Woodger

It was a promising set-up: there's two cousins, they played imaginative games together as kids. Then one, Danny, played a cruel prank on the other, Howard, and soon after they lost touch. Now they're adults. Howard has changed, become exceedingly rich, and has bought a castle somewhere near Prague. He invites Danny over for some nebulous help in Howard's renovation of the castle. What are his motives?

I got a hundred pages in and then... Nope. I'm not finishing this. First of all, Danny is too much of a weird loser to be interested in as the main character. What kind of supposedly straight 30-something guy wears brown lipstick, anyway? And then there's the shifting viewpoints with unexplained other characters. Got kinda meta, kinda fast. And, finally, the whole bit about having people conversing but not including quotation marks in the text... I find that style highly annoying. Not for me.

September 30, 2024