The Keep by Jennifer Egan

From National Book Award finalist Jennifer Egan, author of Look at Me (“Brilliantly unnerving . . . A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel” —The New York Times), a spellbinding work of literary suspense enacted in a chilling psychological landscape—a dazzling tour de force.

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.

A novel of fierce intelligence and velocity; a bravura performance from a writer of
consummate skill and style.

I first saw this book on Amazon and was drawn to the cover. It's taken me a while but I finally got around to reading it last month.

There are two threads of storyline in this book, and at first they seem completely unrelated. The first is the story of two cousins who have just been reunited after many years apart. The reason for the separation is quite horrific. Basically one of the cousins (Danny) deliberately left the other in a deep cave and left him for dead. Howard recovered to be quite wealthy, and has recently bought a castle in Eastern Europe with the intention of creating a hotel where there is no entertainment, no outside contact, only serene surroundings where the guests will be expected to rely on themselves for entertainment...their own imagination.
Danny is quite wary of Howard - not really sure if he has ever been forgiven for the childhood prank that could have been fatal. Howard has given Danny vague reasons as to why he has invited him here and after a nasty incident with the pool, Danny is convinced that maybe Howard is out to get him.

Gradually though, we get to meet Ray who is in prison and he is writing a story for his creative writing course that he is undertaking whilst incarcerated. He is attracted to the teacher, and eventually we find that the story that we have been reading about Danny and Howard is just that...a story. Or is it? The novel within a novel is certainly not a unique idea, but sometimes it doesn't work. This one did, for me at least.

At times the story was humourous - Danny's encounter with the Countess who lives in the Keep and refuses to leave - made me laugh out loud on the train, as did the episode where technology reliant Danny loses his satellite phone. At other times, an intense dissection of human relationships including betrayal, both spousal and familial, the novel is also quite creepy and atmospheric.

The only discordant note for me was the introduction of the point of view of the writing teacher towards the end of the book. I understand why she was injected into the story more at the point where she was, but it felt like an unnecessary story to tack onto the end of the other two story lines that were already completely intertwined!

Originally posted on my blog March 2007

Another Reader On Board

Hi to all Orange Prize fellow readers and thank you to Wendy for setting up this blog - I'm excited to be on board.
I'm fairly new to the blogging world and am just starting to get into the swing of things. My personal reading/writing blog is http://bookbath.blogspot.com
I've just had a look at the 2007 Orange Prize list and the books that I have read from that year are:

Winner - Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Shortlist - The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
Longlist - Carry me Down - M J Hyland
Longlist - The Girls - Lori Lansens

I will have another look at the other lists soon and add a more detailed post - just wanted to introduce myself to begin with.
Looking forward to all the Orange reading!

Review, The Gathering by Anne Enright

We have a word for a woman whose husband dies, and vice versa. But we have no word for those who lose a brother or sister. Yet the bereavement of each leaves the bereaved experiencing much the same depth of loss. A whole part of their life is now remembered only by them, not by the brother or sister who shared it. The traditions and rituals of a shared childhood can no longer be carried out, not even remembered and mocked with hindsight and laughter. And the body that both hugged and kicked, that squashed up on the settee with to watch TV, fidgeted fretfully in the back seat of the car, is gone, never to remind you of other times with a careless shrug, or gesture or grin.

Anne Enright describes a sister’s loss in The Gathering. Veronica, one of twelve siblings has lost her brother Liam. As in all big families, siblings form partnerships or cliques, according to age or circumstance. Veronica and Liam were close, close in age but also because they were sent off together to live at their grandmother’s for a period when their mother was ill.

Now Liam, missing for several years, has turned up dead – suicide. He walked into the sea at Brighton, England, his pockets weighed down with stones, his heart weighed down with ... what? And Veronica has to deal with this. She has to tell her mother and her siblings, identify the body and get it back to Ireland, arrange a wake. She has to deal with her feelings too, which is so much harder. The shock and the bereavement take her back to the memories of childhood and, with a mind ripped apart by grief, she remembers.

She remembers their childhood and the trauma of being sent away and not knowing why. She remembers their adolescence at college and their travels to England. She remembers leaving Liam and coming back to Ireland to make something of herself. And so the guilt creeps in. The guilt of laughing at him when he was younger and struggling to understand himself, and of letting him laugh at himself, treat himself as one big joke. The guilt that she saw that education was a path leading them out of poverty and but when Liam strayed off that path she chose not to go looking for him and drag him back. The guilt of having created her own family with Tom, just two daughters loved and cherished as the individuals she and Liam had never been able to be. Such a different family from the one she experienced hreself, and the only one Liam ever knew.

This is where Anne Enright’s storytelling gift is revealed. This is not a misery tale, but it is raw and angry, savage at times. Yet the prose is liquid and lyrical, concise and personal. And as Veronica stumbles through her grief she tries to piece together a “reason” for Liam’s death, from her own perspective of how their parents treated them and what happened at their grandmother’s. She looks for the reason in the only place she knows, their family. She turns to a history she never experienced and pieces it together (or fabricates it completely perhaps?) from tiny snippets of her grandmother’s life. We as readers experience a gradual, very gradual, blurring of fact and fiction, of memory and invention, of shifts in perspective and jumps in time until we feel as disconnected and lost as Veronica herself.

The end of the novel finds Veronica ready to return to her family life, to the husband and two daughters she has not been able to focus on. She isn’t happy, she hasn’t “got over” Liam’s death but she calm enough, sitting at Gatwick Airport, to acknowledge that her family is her home and to chose to go there.

The end of the novel leaves the reader confused, about the grandmother’s life, about the strange Mr Nugent, and the abuse of the children; still no nearer understanding why Liam killed himself. We are no longer sure that Veronica’s story is any kind of truth at all. Our initial belief in her descriptions of her siblings as psychotic or controlling is shaken; her statements that her husband is having an affair don’t ring quite so true. We do believe that she loved her brother, that whatever else her childhood gave her, it gave her Liam to grow up with. We see how, with that swept away so suddenly and so cruelly, Veronica’s response is not extreme but explicable.

And for that we must thank the author, for an insight into a grief that so many suffer and yet so few write about.

Review - The Blood of Flowers

What a wonderful world this book has introduced us to! Seventeenth century Iran would initially make me think of dust and deserts, shahs and swords, mullahs and mosques, and all those feature somewhere in The Blood of Flowers, but so much more is revealed.

The unnamed craftswoman who narrates the novel (I shall call her The Girl, for ease) is, she believes, cursed by a comet which puts paid to her chances of marriage and happiness. Her father dies, leaving her and her mother dependent on the goodwill of her half-uncle, whom they have never met. The novel takes place in a timespan of barely a year, and in that year The Girl loses her father and her virginity, moves from a tiny village to a bustling city, and develops her talents for carpet weaving into a business idea for carpet designs.

I loved this book because it was such a different world and the detail (which I am happy to take as authentic) was so rich. The Iran that Anita Amirrezvani paints is not dry and dusty but vivid and blooming, and incredibly textured. The bath houses and the women's community within them were especially fascinating as were the descriptions of the houses and the kitchens.

I also loved it because of The Girl. What a Dick Whittington-kind of story. In a culture and society that saw women as possessions to be bought and sold (by the trade called "marriage") The Girl manages to achieve an amazing level of independence.

How does she do that? It would be too twentieth century American to say "because of her skill at carpet weaving and design". Clearly that helped, it gave her a sense of her own worth, it gave her something to add to society and something to trade, but it wouldn't have been enough on its own. Having an uncle who worked in the Shah's weaving workshop was helpful too (and I'll think about the role of the men in the story in a minute), because she needed something to make her understand the value of what she could do.

Her parents set her on the path to independence, they cherished her and helped her develop. Perhaps their devotion made them fall short in showing her her "true" position in society, which led her to make some fairly disastrous decisions later, but they can hardly be blamed for that.

Her sexuality gave her independence. Being offered "temporary marriage" by Fereydoon was a key point in her life, more key than even she and her mother and uncle realised in fact. She gave up the chance ever to have a "proper" marriage (though her prospects for that with no dowry were pretty slim anyway). But she used that to her advantage. Forced to confront her sexuality she realises that she can use it to try to get what she wants. She also realises that she enjoys sex, which must help her not to feel totally objectified by the whole situation.

She didn't achieve independence without any assistance from men, she didn't achieve it despite the men (that again would be too cliched and Amirrezvani is far too subtle for that). Her uncle's contacts and advice are crucial, Fereydoon's interest in her and attitude towards her is important. What she sees of her friend Naheed and her relationship with her polo player informs The Girl about how some see love and marriage. Yet by remaining unhampered by a husband (or without the blessing of a husband as her aunt and mother see it) she has opportunities denied to "properly" married women. And she uses them intelligently.

The combination of events that The Girl experiences takes her from naivety to knowingness, to adulthood in fact. It could so easily have taken her to disaster and to despair. What saved her? Surely the love of her parents, especially her mother, must have helped? Her instinct to create, by knotting and desiging carpets, probably gave her another reason to look beyond the immediate problems of her life. But some inner resilience is there too, what we would call "character" now I suppose, drives her to keep going. I think that is why I liked the book so much. The Girl was someone worth knowing, someone worth reading about and I cared what happened to her. I think so often in historical novels the authors are so busy trying to cram all their research onto the page that they pay too little attention to their characters.

My only complaint is that while I found the voice completely authentic and compelling, I found the language stilted. At best it was flowery and unnecessarily peppered with Arabic terms, at worst it read like a poor translation. I believe the author was trying to convey the difference in time and culture but for me it didn't work.

Hello from SarahA

Hi, having been sent a link to this by Sonia I just had to join. Not in a spirit of oneupmanship but because I really enjoy reading "quality" books (literature as I like to call it) and to discuss them with likeminded people. So thank you for the invitation.

I have been reading since I was 5 (apparently when I finished my first school reading book I came home and told my mum I didn't need to go to school anymore as I had learned to read, clearly that was all I thought school was good for). If work, family and community responsibilities permit then I love nothing better than sitting down to be transported somewhere else for a while. And I can't think of anything that is better for relieving stress or depression than being able to leave your own life for a while.

I have always taken an interest in the Orange Prize so I was actually quite surprised at how few of the winners/shortlisted entries I have actually read. They are:

2007
Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss
Anne Tyler Digging to America

2006
Ali Smith The Accidental

2005
Lionel Shriver We Need to Talk About Kevin
Jane Gardam Old Filth
Marina Lewycka A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

2004
Andrea Levy Small Island
Margaret Atwood Oryx and Crake

2003
Valerie Martin Property
Carol Shields Unless
Zadie Smith The Autograph Man
Donna Tartt The Little Friend

2002
Sarah Waters Fingersmith

2001
Margaret Atwood The Blind Assassin

2000
Zadie Smith White Teeth

1999
Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

1998
Carol Shields Larry's Party

1997
Margaret Atwood Alias Grace

1996
Amy Tan The Hundred Secret Senses
Anne Tyler Ladder of Years

However, the list does correctly show me as a big fan of Margaret Atwood, Anne, Tyler, Carol Shields, Barbara Kingsolver and Amy Tan. Other authors who have appeared on the list but I haven't read the shortlisted works are Helen Dunmore, Jane Gardam, Jane Smiley and Shena Mackay.

I will be posting up reviews of the books I have read as I go along. So far I have read The Gathering, The Keep, The Blood of Flowers and Sorry. I find I need a little while for the book to settle in my mind before I do a review but with 4 down and I am feeling very excited. The only downside to it is realising how many books there are and how few, all told, I will ever get to read!

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

Once there was a girl who could make glorious carpets from wool tinted with the essence of orange safflowers and pomegranates

In Persia, in the seventeenth century, a young woman is forced to leave behind the life she knows and move to a new city. Her father's unexpected death has upended everything - her expectation of marriage, her plans for the future - and cast her and her mother upon the mercy of relatives in the fabled city of Isfahan.

Her uncle is a wealthy designer of carpets for the Shah's court, and the young woman is instantly drawn to his workshop. She takes in everything - the dyes, the yarns, the meanings of the thousand ancient patters - and quickly begins designing carpets herself. This is men's work, but her uncle recognizes both her passion and her talent and allows her secretly to cross that line.

But then a single disastrous, headstrong act threatens her very existence and casts her and her mother into an even more desperate situation. She is forced into an untenable form of marriage, a marriage contract renewable monthly, for a fee, to a wealthy businessman. Caught between forces she can barely comprehend, she knows only that she must act on her own, risking everything, or face a life lived at the whim of others.

The world of medieval Persia comes alive in this luminous novel, from its dazzling architecture to its bustling markets with their baskets of spices and breathtaking turquoise-and-gold rugs. With spellbinding Persian tales and prose as radiant as the city of Isfahan, The Blood of Flowers is the remarkable adventure of one woman choosing a life - against all odds - on the strength of her own hands, mind and will.

Marg says:

Sometimes it is a real breath of fresh air to read about an unusual time and place, especially when the story is also well written and interesting! The setting for this book in 17th century Persia, during the time of Shah Abbas, and features a young girl who is trying to make her way into the male dominated world of carpet making.

The author was very skilled at weaving together both the story of the girl, but also details about the techniques used in the designing of carpets, in the selection of the colours to make the carpets, and the precision required by the carpet knotters. There are also several old Persian tales that have been interwoven into the narrative, used to illustrate and to guide our young heroine.

When one of the town elders brings back the almanac for the year, the small country town is interested to see what is destined for their lives - for marriages, births, the harvest etc. For one young girl in particular she is interested to hear what is going to come as she is now of a marriageable age. This year is an unusual one though. There has been a comet in the night sky, and everyone knows that that means bad luck. For the small but happy family, that ominous sign comes to eventuality when her father dies, leaving her and her mother to fend for themselves. After running out of resources, including those that were meant to be her dowry, the two head to the big city to request assistance from the brother of the husband and father.

Once in the city, the pair become basically house servants, but the young girl gets to visit the great carpet market making workshop owned by the Shah, which is run by her uncle, and gradually her uncle begins to teach her many of the secrets of the process, including design, colour selection and knotting with the most luxurious of threads.

After being caught acting rashly more than once, the young girl is contracted with a sigheh - a renewable marriage contract, that everyone involved in has agreed to keep this secret. The end result of this is given that there is now no dowry left, the girl is being forced to give away the only thing she has left of any value - her virginity. It takes a long time for our heroine to get used to the ways of her husband and to learn the secret of wifely enjoyment, and there are several times throughout the story that her mother is worried that the sigheh will not be renewed, which means that the contracted price won't be paid. It is quite an interesting contrast. By day the girl is a servant, subject to her aunt's somewhat nasty treatment, using every spare minute she has to learn to make carpets. By night, she is a wife, albeit subject to her husband's whims.

Life then offers a choice - to continue as things are, or to take a chance at having a different and more independent life. There are many lessons to be learned, and many of them are painful. There are times when things get much worse before they get better, but our girl's spirit is strong, and she is willing to learn the lessons that life is teaching her!

This book took 9 years to write, and you can tell that for the author this was a labour of love! It took me a couple of days to read it, and it was a joy to read! Filled with the colour and allure of different cultures and times, this is a really good read. I definitely hope to read more by this author!


Originally posted at Historical Tapestry - September 2007

The Gathering - Wendy's Review

I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. -From The Gathering, page 1-

Anne Enright won the 2007 Booker Prize for this novel set in Dublin which centers around a woman’s long repressed childhood memories. Veronica Hegerty is one of twelve children - a large and dysfunctional family with dark and unspoken secrets. The suicide of Veronica’s wayward brother Liam provides the catalyst for Veronica’s traumatic memories to surface. Told from Veronica’s point of view and switching from past to present and back to past again, the story is a twisting tale about the reliability of long buried events and the importance of uncovering secrets. Veronica’s revelations about what happened in her grandmother’s home so many years in the past are tangled up in alternative stories fabricated by Veronica, woven together with guilt and shame.

Veronica is a cold, cynical person - angry with her mother’s passivity, confused about her brother’s choices, and ambivalent about her siblings.

Meanwhile, the train chunters through England, clicketty-clack, and Bea talks on, sitting on my dead father’s knee with a ribbon in her hair, like the good little girl she has always been, and I look at the hills, trying to grow up, trying to let my father die, trying to let my sister enter her adolescence (never mind menopause). -From The Gathering, page 43-

She is a woman struggling in a rocky marriage which is made more unstable by Veronica’s negative view of men. But, she is not all hardness and anger. Veronica’s love for her children leaps from the pages and as the novel unfolds, the reader is drawn to Veronica, wanting to understand her and make sense of her life.

Enright leaves the reader with ambiguity in the end. The facts are hazy and the outcome of all the characters’ futures are unsure.

The power of this novel comes from Enright’s fresh language and her ability to expose her characters’ faults. Time and again I found myself stunned by the searing choice of words and phrasing; the graphic descriptions; and Enright’s ability to take the reader to an uncomfortable place to drive home her point.

The Gathering is a tough book which deals with a difficult subject matter. Enright seems to purposefully set out to shock the reader - dragging her through the muck of dysfunction and pain, stirring up the sediment in the lives of the characters to reveal their souls. Written with a great deal of intelligence, unerringly true to its characters, and staggering in its scope - The Gathering is a novel which is not easily forgotten.

Highly recommended; rated 4.5/5.