Book 3.7: The Keep

Author: Jennifer Egan
Dates read: August 28, 2011 - September 6, 2011 (10 days)
Pages: 240
Genre: Fiction

Yikes, I just can’t seem to get back on schedule. I thought this book would be a quicker read than it turned out to be, but it took a little while for it to really hook me due to a slow starting pace. But I’ll get into that in a bit. I picked this book because I’d heard good things about Jennifer Egan from several people recently and realized I’d had this book for a while but just hadn’t gotten to it yet.

I think the book jacket description does a better job than I could of relating what this novel’s about without giving away crucial components of the story, so here it is: “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.”

My impression of this novel is almost entirely derived from one aspect of it, the pacing. This book is one of those rare cases in which I wasn’t sure how much I’d like it when I initially started reading, but once I got through the slow build at the beginning and into the real meat of the story, I very much enjoyed it. Part of the reason it took a little while to hook me is that the first few times the narrating perspective flipped to the prisoner character, I was less interested in his storyline than the cousins in the castle. I was also looking for the connection between these two portions of the book immediately, but the answer to the question of how they’re linked is something that develops throughout the entire book. My attempt to unravel the connection between the two was admittedly premature, perhaps brought on too strong too early by an inaccurate understanding of the book I had when I started it. In any event, it drove me nearly to the point of distraction from the content of the prisoner’s sections, which left me wanting to put the book down whenever the perspective changed from Europe to the prison (and of course this always seemed to happen just as something really exciting occurred at the castle!). However, as the line connecting the two portions slowly became clearer, I found myself devouring the last chapters voraciously. I was extremely satisfied with the conclusion, which answered all my major questions but also left just enough leeway for interpretation about certain elements to make me keep thinking about the book for several days after I’d finished it. Other than that, all I’ll say is that the voice becomes very dynamic as the book progresses, and I couldn’t help but think that Jennifer Egan managed to find the cleverest way possible to tell this story. The feeling of rightness you’re left with about how everything unfolds is actually kind of remarkable.