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November 06, 2006

The Keep - Jennifer Egan

I had to finish this one up quickly for three reasons.

1) It was the last book on my RIP Challenge.
2) I wanted to get started on the From the Stacks Challenge
3) I didn't want to waste any more time on a book I wasn't enjoying.

I suppose that's not the intro. people want to read for a book review but I just wasn't engaged at all with this book. Perhaps it was because I had just finished The Thirteenth Tale when I start this and had loved that novel so much. But I am not even sure that had I read this another time I would have liked it any better.

It wasn't terrible but I was just not drawn in. There were moments, during the descriptions of the Keep itself and the explorations of the tunnels that I was interested but those moments were too brief and spread out to make me want to push through the novel.

I realize that the structure of the novel makes it impossible to determine whether or not it was a reliable narrator. But, aside from the fact that the narrator shifts often during the novel, the writing seemed choppy and disconnected. Maybe this was a choice, to enforce the layered narrative, but it was very disconcerting to me. I felt that the book so was fragmented that it made it difficult to be involved with any of the characters.

I was hoping for some twist at the end that would blow me away and have me scrambling back through the pages wondering why I didn't see it coming. And yes, there's a twist at the end, but even that left me kind of flat.

It isn't a terrible book. I know I am not conveying that. It's a decent read but my expectations were very high and I found myself disappointed. Egan does a good job with the descriptions of setting and mood but changes locations, and often in jarring ways, so frequently that even those moody, gothic descriptions seem to be lost.

Not bad but not one that I would re-read.

My rating: **

Posted by michelle at November 6, 2006 09:42 AM

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