Keepsake, The - Softcover

Kirsty Gunn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1862070482 ISBN 13: 9781862070486

Publisher: Granta Books, 1998

Synopsis

In hypnotic and mesmerizing language, Kirsty Gunn explores the dark world of a young girl who has grown up with a mother dependent on storytelling and the oblivion of addiction to cope with the memory of lost love, the girl's father. Raised on deceptive tales of happiness, the younger woman is drawn into and begins to relive the real story of pain, abandonment, and the tyranny of desire. As her life spirals out of control, the tangled yarn of her mother's past begins to unravel, until finally she can come to tell a story that is her own. This luminous and disturbing novel reveals the terrible intimacy of family love and the redemptive power of storytelling.

About this title

Review

The Keepsake is a strange, hypnotic book, a tale of sexual obsession dressed in such beautiful language that the reader is swept into its universe willing or not. Kirsty Gunn is fearless, wading into such unsavory topics as imprisonment, rape, torture, and incest to tell the story of a nameless female narrator caught up in the obsessions of an aging psychotic. The book begins with the memory of a beautiful café, but whether the memory belongs to the young woman or to her mother is difficult to tell. The narrator seems to be assuming her mother's life, her own memories jumbling with those of her mother, from the café she had frequented to the destructive love affair she embarked upon.

Memories of mother bleed into the history of the narrator's own disastrous affair, and, as the details pile up in phantasmagoric prose, it becomes increasingly probable that the man to whom she surrenders her body and her will is the same man her mother loved--her father. The Keepsake is a disturbing novel, a garden of perversions made weirdly compelling by the author's unheated approach.

From Library Journal

Gunn (Rain, LJ 2/15/95) creates a sensation akin to drifting under the influence of a powerful drug. The writing flows beautifully and deliciously, gradually revealing a tale of obsession, addiction, and abuse. The narrator is the daughter of a lovely (and nameless) young woman who fled her abusive father by eloping with an equally abusive husband. "Like all the frightened women who run frantically towards the future...all they meet is memory." After her husband leaves, the woman escapes into drugs and dreams but manages to maintain a deep and strong connection with her daughter. Raised on tales of passion and abandonment, the daughter knows nothing else and eventually replicates her mother's life. "Repeating is a truth of nature, like one flat cloud forming in the sky after its sister. They are not identical, but in the blue sky they are the same." The story is disturbing until the end, when redemption seems within reach. Recommended for public libraries.?Kimberly G. Allen, networkMCI Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1862070482
• ISBN 13: 9781862070486
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224