The Keep - Couverture rigide

Egan, Jennifer

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0786291958 ISBN 13 : 9780786291953

Editeur : Thorndike Pr, 2007

Synopsis

Book by Egan Jennifer

A propos du livre

Extrait :

The castle was falling apart, but at 2 a.m. under a useless moon, Danny couldn’t see this. What he saw looked solid as hell: two round towers with an arch between them and across that arch was an iron gate that looked like it hadn’t moved in three hundred years or maybe ever.

He’d never been to a castle before or even this part of the world, but something about it all was familiar to Danny. He seemed to remember the place from a long time ago, not like he’d been here exactly but from a dream or a book. The towers had those square indentations around the top that little kids put on castles when they draw them. The air was cold with a smoky bite, like fall had already come even though it was mid-August and people in New York were barely dressed. The trees were losing their leaves—Danny felt them landing in his hair and heard them crunching under his boots when he walked. He was looking for a doorbell, a knocker, a light: some way into this place or at least a way to find the way in. He was getting pessimistic.

Danny had waited two hours in a gloomy little valley town for a bus to this castle that never frigging came before he looked up and saw its black shape against the sky. Then he’d started to walk, hauling his Samsonite and satellite dish a couple of miles up this hill, the Samsonite’s puny wheels catching on boulders and tree roots and rabbit holes. His limp didn’t help. The whole trip had been like that: one hassle after another starting with the red eye from Kennedy that got towed into a field after a bomb threat, surrounded by trucks with blinky red lights and giant nozzles that were comforting up until you realized their job was to make sure the fireball only incinerated those poor suckers who were already on the plane. So Danny had missed his connection to Prague and the train to wherever the hell he was now, some German-sounding town that didn’t seem to be in Germany. Or anywhere else—Danny couldn’t even find it online, although he hadn’t been sure about the spelling. Talking on the phone to his Cousin Howie, who owned this castle and had paid Danny’s way to help out with the renovation, he’d tried to nail down some details.

Danny: I’m still trying to get this straight—is your hotel in Austria, Germany, or the Czech Republic?

Howie: Tell you the truth, I’m not even clear on that myself. Those borders are constantly sliding around.

Danny (thinking): They are?

Howie: But remember, it’s not a hotel yet. Right now it’s just an old—

The line went dead. When Danny tried calling back, he couldn’t get through.

But his tickets came the next week (blurry postmark)—plane, train, bus—and seeing how he was newly unemployed and had to get out of New York fast because of a misunderstanding at the restaurant where he’d worked, getting paid to go somewhere else—anywhere else, even the fucking moon—was not a thing Danny could say no to.

He was fifteen hours late.

He left his Samsonite and satellite dish by the gate and circled the left tower (Danny made a point of going left when he had the choice because most people went right). A wall curved away from the tower into the trees, and Danny followed that wall until woods closed in around him. He was moving blind. He heard flapping and scuttling, and as he walked the trees got closer and closer to the wall until finally he was squeezing in between them, afraid if he lost contact with the wall he’d get lost. And then a good thing happened: the trees pushed right through the wall and split it open and gave Danny a way to climb inside.

This wasn’t easy. The wall was twenty feet high, jagged and crumbly with tree trunks crushed into the middle, and Danny had a tricky knee from an injury connected to the misunderstanding at work. Plus his boots were not exactly made for climbing—they were city boots, hipster boots, somewhere between square-tipped and pointy—his lucky boots, or so Danny thought a long time ago, when he bought them. They needed resoling. The boots were skiddy even on flat city concrete, so the sight of Danny clawing and scrambling his way up twenty feet of broken wall was not a thing he would’ve wanted broadcast. But finally he made it, panting, sweating, dragging his sore leg, and hoisted himself onto a flat walkway-type thing that ran on top of the wall. He brushed off his pants and stood up.

It was one of those views that make you feel like God for a second. The castle walls looked silver under the moon, stretched out over the hill in a wobbly oval the size of a football field. There were round towers every fifty yards or so. Below Danny, inside the walls, it was black—pure, like a lake or outer space. He felt the curve of big sky over his head, full of purplish torn-up clouds. The castle itself was back where Danny had started out: a clump of buildings and towers jumbled together. But the tallest tower stood off on its own, narrow and square with a red light shining in a window near the top.

Looking down made something go easier in Danny. When he first came to New York, he and his friends tried to find a name for the relationship they craved between themselves and the universe. But the English language came up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom—those words were all too heavy or too light. So Danny and his friends made up a name: alto. True alto worked two ways: you saw but also you could be seen, you knew and were known. Two-way recognition. Standing on the castle wall, Danny felt alto—the word was still with him after all these years, even though the friends were long gone. Grown up, probably.

Danny wished he’d brought his satellite dish to the top of this wall. He itched to make some calls—the need felt primal, like an urge to laugh or sneeze or eat. It got so distracting that he slithered back down off the wall and backtracked through those same pushy trees, dirt and moss packed under his longish fingernails. But by the time he got back to the gate his alto was gone and all Danny felt was tired. He left the satellite dish in its case and found a flat spot under a tree to lie down. He made a pile out of leaves. Danny had slept outside a few times when things got rough in New York, but this was nothing like that. He took off his velvet coat and turned it inside out and rolled it into a pillow at the foot of the tree. He lay on the leaves faceup and crossed his arms over his chest. More leaves were coming down. Danny watched them spinning, turning against the half-empty branches and purple clouds, and felt his eyes start to roll back into his head. He was trying to come up with some lines to use on Howie—

Like: Hey man, your welcome mat could use a little work.

Or else: You’re paying me to be here, but I’m figuring you don’t want to pay your guests.

Or maybe: Trust me, outdoor lighting is gonna rock your world.

—just so he’d have some things to say if there was a silence. Danny was nervous about seeing his cousin after so long. The Howie he knew as a kid you couldn’t picture grown up—he’d been wrapped in that pear-shaped girl fat you see on certain boys, big love handles bubbling out of the back of his jeans. Sweaty pale skin and a lot of dark hair around his face. At age seven or eight, Danny and Howie invented a game they’d play whenever they saw each other at holidays and family picnics. Terminal Zeus it was called, and there was a hero (Zeus), and there were monsters and missions and runways and airlifts and bad guys and fireballs and high-speed chases. They could play anywhere from a garage to an old canoe to underneath a dining room table, using whatever they found: straws, feathers, paper plates, candy wrappers, yarn, stamps, candles, staples, you name it. Howie thought most of it up. He’d shut his eyes like he was watching a movie on the backs of his eyelids that he wanted Danny to see: Okay, so Zeus shoots Glow-Bullets at the enemy that make their skin light up so now he can see them through the trees and then—blam!—he lassos them with Electric Stunner-Ropes!

Sometimes he made Danny do the talking—Okay, you tell it: what does the underwater torture dungeon look like?—and Danny would start making stuff up: rocks, seaweed, baskets of human eyeballs. He got so deep inside the game he forgot who he was, and when his folks said Time to go home the shock of being yanked away made Danny throw himself on the ground in front of them, begging for another half hour, please! another twenty minutes, ten, five, please, just one more minute, pleasepleaseplease? Frantic not to be ripped away from the world he and Howie had made.

The other cousins thought Howie was weird, a loser, plus he was adopted, and they kept their distance: Rafe especially, not the oldest cousin but the one they all listened to. You’re so sweet to play with Howie, Danny’s mom would say. From what I understand, he doesn’t have many friends. But Danny wasn’t trying to be nice. He cared what his other cousins thought, but nothing could match the fun of Terminal Zeus.

When they were teenagers, Howie changed—overnight was what everyone said. He had a traumatic experience and his sweetness drained away and he turned moody, anxious, always wiggling a foot and muttering King Crimson lyrics under his breath. He carried a notebook, even at Thanksgiving it was there in his lap with a napkin on it to catch the gravy drips. Howie made marks in that book with a flat sweaty pencil, looking around at different family members like he was trying to decide when and how they would have to die. But no one had ever paid much attention to Howie. And after the change, the traumatic incident, Danny pretended not to.

Of course they talked about Howie when he wasn’t there, oh yeah. Howie’s troubles were a favorite family topic, and behind the shaking heads and oh it’s so sads you could hear the joy pushing right up through because doesn’t every family like having one person who’s fucked up so fantastically that everyone else feels like a model citizen next to him? If Danny closed his eyes and listened hard he could still pick up some of that long-ago muttering like a radio station you just barely hear: Howie trouble drugs did you hear he was arrested such an unattractive boy I’m sorry but can’t May put him on a diet he’s a teenager no it’s more than that I have teenagers you have teenagers I blame Norm for pushing adoption you never know what you’re getting it all comes down to genes is what they’re learning some people are just bad or not bad but you know exactly not bad but just exactly that’s it: trouble.

Danny used to get a weird feeling, overhearing this stuff when he came in the house and his mom was talking on the phone to one of his aunts about Howie. Dirt on his cleats after winning a game, his girlfriend Shannon Shank, who had the best tits on the pom squad and maybe the whole school all set to give him a blow job in his bedroom because she always did that when he won, and thank God he won a lot. Hiya, Mom. That square of purple blue almost night outside the kitchen window. Shit, it hurt Danny to remember this stuff, the smell of his mom’s tuna casserole. He’d liked hearing those things about Howie because it reminded him of who he was, Danny King, suchagoodboy, that’s what everyone said and what they’d always said but still Danny liked hearing it again, knowing it again. He couldn’t hear it enough.

That was memory number one. Danny sort of drifted into it lying there under the tree, but pretty soon his whole body was tensed to the point where he couldn’t lie still. He got up, swiping twigs off his pants and feeling pissed off because he didn’t like remembering things. Walking backwards was how Danny thought of that and it was a waste of valuable resources anywhere, anytime, but in a place he’d spent twenty-four hours trying to escape to it was fucking ridiculous.

Danny shook out his coat and pulled it back over his arms and started walking again, fast. This time he went right. At first there was just forest around him, but the trees started thinning out and the slant under his feet got steeper until Danny had to walk with his uphill leg bent, which sent splinters of pain from his knee to his groin. And then the hill dropped away like someone had lopped it off with a knife and he was standing on the edge of a cliff with the castle wall pushed right up against it, so the wall and the cliff made one vertical line pointing up at the sky. Danny stopped short and looked over the cliff’s edge. Below, a long way down: trees, bushy black with a few lights packed deep inside that must be the town where he’d waited for the bus.

Alto: he was in the middle of frigging nowhere. It was extreme, and Danny liked extremes. They were distracting.

If I were you, I’d get a cash deposit before I started asking people to spelunk.

Danny tilted his head back. Clouds had squeezed out the stars. The wall seemed higher on this side of the castle. It curved in and then back out again toward the top, and every few yards there was a narrow gap a few feet above Danny’s head. He stood back and studied one of these openings—vertical and horizontal slits meeting in the shape of a cross—and in the hundreds of years since those slits had been cut, the rain and snow and what-have-you must have opened up this one a little bit more. Speaking of rain, a light sprinkling was starting that wasn’t much more than a mist, but Danny’s hair did a weird thing when it got wet that he couldn’t fix without his blow dryer and a certain kind of mousse that was packed away in the Samsonite, and he didn’t want Howie to see that weird thing. He wanted to get the fuck out of the rain. So Danny took hold of some broken bits of wall and used his big feet and bony fingers to claw his way up to the slot. He jammed his head inside to see if it would fit and it did, with just a little room to spare that was barely enough for his shoulders, the widest part of him, which he turned and slid through like he was sticking a key in a lock. The rest of him was easy. Your average adult male would’ve needed a shrinking pill to get through this hole, but Danny had a certain kind of body—he was tall but also bendable, adjustable, you could roll him up like a stick of gum and then unroll him. Which is what happened now: he unraveled himself in a sweaty heap on a damp stone floor.

He was in an ancient basementy place that had no light at all and a smell Danny didn’t like: the smell of a cave. A low ceiling smacked his forehead a couple of times and he tried walking with his knees bent, but that hurt his bad knee too much. He held still and straightened up slowly, listening to sounds of little creatures scuttling, and felt a twist of fear in his gut like someone wringing out a rag. Then he remembered: there was a mini-flashlight on his key chain left over from his club days—shining it into somebody’s eyes you could tell if they were on E or smack or Special K. Danny flicked it on and poked the little beam at the dark: stone walls, slippery stone under his feet. Movement along the walls. Danny’s breath came quick and shallow, so he tried slowing it down. Fear was dangerous. It let in the worm: another word Danny and his friends had invented all those years ago, smoking pot or doing lines of coke and wondering what to call that thing that happened to people when they lost confidence and got phony, anxious, weird. Was it paranoia? Low self-esteem? Insecurity? Panic? Those words were all too flat. But the worm, which is the word they finally picked, the worm was three-dimensional: it crawled inside a person and started to eat until everything collapsed, their whole lives, and th...

Revue de presse :

“Dazzling. . . . Prodigiously entertaining and profoundly moving.”—Madison Smartt Bell, The New York Times Book Review“Daring. . . . Irresistibly suspenseful.” —The Los Angeles Times“The events that transpire are so surprising and provocative, the humor so wry, the sheer pleasure of reading The Keep so great, one instantly feels impelled to read it again. . . . Satirically sublime.”—Chicago Tribune “Roiling and captivating. . . . As you finish this novel, part horror tale, part mystery, part romance, the mind lingers over it, amazed by how vivid Egan has made it, how witty, how disturbing, how credible, and yet how utterly fantastic.”—O, The Oprah Magazine“This neo-gothic tale conjures a wicked form of therapy for BlackBerry-addicted urbanites. . . . Egan’s clever scenario presents Danny’s mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerous—imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggests—and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins–style atmospherics.”—The New Yorker“Egan is an exceptionally intelligent writer whose joy at appropriating and subverting genres and clichés—from prison memoir to Gothic ghost story—is evident on every dizzyingly inventive page.”—The Washington Post“[A] remarkable piece of work. . . . Egan effectively echoes the works of Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) and Horace Walpole (Castle of Otranto), fusing a seemingly moribund genre with elements borrowed from the metafictions of John Barth, Italo Calvino and others. It's tricky; but it’s a trick only a terrifically talented writer could pull off.”—San Francisco Chronicle“If Kafka's Joseph K. and Lewis Carroll’s Alice had a son, he would have to be Jennifer Egan’s Danny. . . . No matter how many symbols and zany subplots she juggles . . . the novelist keeps the action moving and the irony biting.”—Boston Sunday Globe“Intelligent, intense and remarkably intuitive. . . . Jennifer Egan gives us the satisfying thunk of a fully understood if unexpected, kind of sense.”—Nan Goldberg, The New York Observer“It’s precisely Egan’s talent for tapping into the American subconscious—with deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology–driven, image–saturated culture—that has established the author and journalist as a prescient literary voice.”—Vogue“Jennifer Egan spins a haunting tale. . . . Egan’s brilliance is in balancing the deliciously creepy elements of gothic–castle novels with the dead–on realism of a prisoner’s life, to create a book worth keeping.”—Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair“Egan’s third novel . . . is a strange, clever, and always compelling meditation on the relationship between the imagination and the captivities (psychological, metaphysical, and even physical) of modern life.”—The Atlantic Monthly“Visionary . . . at once hyperrealistic and darkly dreamed. . . . With Egan’s powers of invention running at full tilt, The Keep reads like a twenty-first-century mash-up of Kafka, Calvino, and Poe, in which the absurd meets the surreal meet the unspeakable—to edgy, entertaining effect.”—Lisa Shea, Elle“The Keep is an example of literature responding to current events not with a mirror but an artful mindfuck.” —David Bahr, Time Out New York“With The Keep, Egan breaks the mold from page one. Her muscular, lively prose achieves a haunting effect. . . . [The book] maintains a frightening, vertiginous velocity. . . . And the immersion in these high-stakes psychological tightrope acts gives The Keep a page-turning horror. . . . Outstanding.”—The Onion“Egan gets everything right–from the convolutions of the strung-out male mind to the self-deceptions of a drug addict–and her skill will keep you marveling at the pages that you can’t help turning.”—People“Like an old spirit who refuses to go away, this is one fantasy that haunts long after its physical end.”—The Boston Phoenix“Egan is both a captivating storyteller and an incisive social observer. . . . The events that transpire are so surprising and provocative, the humor so wry, the sheer pleasure of reading The Keep so great, one instantly feels impelled to read it again, an impulse that is grandly rewarded, so masterful is Egan’s foreshadowing, so nuanced and mysterious is the story. Gothic and chthonic, The Keep is satirically sublime.”—The Chicago Tribune“Arresting . . . insightful and often funny, so fluid that you actually have the sensation of sinking into these lives . . . strange and beautifully drawn, a place well worth visiting.”—Susan Kelly, USA Today“Dazzling . . . a metafictional tour de force . . . it draws us in with its compelling realism as surely as anything by Dickens or Balzac—not to mention Henry James, who understood better than anyone how to turn the screw.”—Chicago Sun-Times“Steeped in Gothic mystery and plugged into our wired, up–to–the–minute cultures, The Keep is a hypnotic tale of unexpected connections between isolated people, each concealing secrets that ultimately upend how we see them. . . . Though dark with betrayal and violence (both psychological and literal), The Keep ultimately reveals itself to be a love letter to the creative impulse.”—Newsday“The Keep is a novel of ideas.”—Poets & Writers“An engrossing narrative told in prose that’s remarkably fresh and inventive.”—Library Journal“Atmospheric and tense, this is a mesmerizing story.”—Booklist“Jennifer Egan is a contemporary American storyteller in the vein of Stephen King or The Sopranos scriptwriters. Her latest novel, a slightly gothic tale of love and the (possibly) supernatural, is a pleasure to read. . . . Egan’s eye and ear for contemporary America places the whole saga too close to home for fantasy.”—Emily Carter Roiphe, Minneapolis Star-Tribune“A dark and fascinating journey. . . . Egan skillfully builds the tension to a tipping point, culminating in an explosion. . . . The complicated plot comes together seamlessly, marvelously. . . . It’s a novel that engages and haunts the reader, a psychological who’s–who, who–dun–what and how–do–they–go–on. The Keep is a fast an furious read, a perfect summer novel.”—Rocky Mountain News“Egan . . . makes it all work. How she weaves the story of these four people together—and the unexpected links between them—is fascinating.”—The Oregonian“The book itself is a stronghold of imaginative story telling, the last stand of the Gothic novel.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer“Exhilarating . . . Context and borders shift and dissolve, and the reader experiences the precise frisson the gloomy genre of Gothic is meant to convey: the wonder, the terror and the trapped chill of fear that resolves in a mind-expanding realization of the dimensions within your own head. In a word: sublime.”—Linda Marotta, Fangoria“Part gothic romance, part ghost story, and peppered with Egan’s startling insights into the role of communication and loneliness in contemporary life, this is one brainy page-turner that will have you leaving the lights on at night.”—iVillage“The Keep is a cinematic treat for the inner eye, moving as it does between the musty dungeons of an ancient power to a prison full of angry men and deep into the souls of the walking dead—those riddled with guilt, lust and loneliness.”—Santa Cruz Sentinel“The Keep is imaginatively plotted and keeps you guessing until its final chapter. Far from seeming in any way contrived or dependent upon props or plot stratagems, Egan’s storytelling reaffirms the quality that defines ‘literary’ suspense.”—Pittsburgh Tribune-Review“Jennifer Egan’s The Keep is a page–turner.”—The Austin Chronicle“An addictive, clever story.”—The Register-Guard“A psychological drama inside a haunted house tale wrapped in a prison memoir that never fails to stoke the imagination. . . . An original thrill ride of a novel.”—Times-Leader“A chilling tour de force made eerily real.”—Bookpage“Egan’s story, like the elusive castle with its unexplored rooms and uncharted underground tunnels, keeps transforming into new realities as she unveils some extraordinary surprises along the way. Jennifer Egan is a very fine writer, whose characters and plot will keep you up late reading and pondering its fascinating turns.”—San Antonio Express-News

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Thorndike Pr
• Date d'édition: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0786291958
• ISBN 13: 9780786291953
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 389