The Keepsake by Kirsty Gunn

The Keepsake by Kirsty Gunn  (1997, 213 pages)

"Parts of The Keepsake somehow brought to mind ancient death cults in Meso-American religion."-from my first post on The Keepsake (in September 2011)"
This is an update of a prior post on the occasion of my fourth reading of this great book with a few new observations added at the start.

Notes added after fourth reading

. Obviously I hold this book in very high esteem.  After finishing my fourth reading I look forward to the fifth, hopefully in 2015.  As I read this time I saw,I think,how the circular broken wheel structure of the narrative mirrors the life of the narrator.   I saw deeper I hope into the perpetuation of cycles of abuse, I began to wonder if the narrator was sexually abused by her mother.  There is much pain and loneliness in Ths Keepsake  that it hurts to read but not as much as the pain of knowing it is there and looking away.    There are deep things about old books and the reading life here but I do not yet feel I am close enough to an understanding to yet talk of it.  

3rd reading observations

"Parts of The Keepsake somehow brought to mind ancient death cults or Meso-American religion."-from my first post on The Keepsake (in September 2011)

This is my third  reading of a very amazing almost painfully beautiful very dark book, The Keepsake by Kirsty Gunn  (1960, New Zealand).  I hope to read it a number of more times.

There is so much in this book it is hard for me to know where to start.  I found reading it the third time a very intense experience as I feel I am beginning to come to terms with the work.  

Here is the goodreads description of the book (almost never do I quote third party descriptions but I need help here)

Through a shifting and interwoven narrative, 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 her lost love, the girl's father. Raised on these 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. Her shocking affair with an older man seems to repeat the pattern set by her mother. The tangled yarn of her mother's past begins to be unraveled by the younger woman - until finally she can come to tell a story that is her.   

This is not a bad description but it misses the real core themes of the book, in my opinion.  It is about love as obsession, incest, child molestation, reading and its role as a memory and a trapping device, about colonialism, about Europe, about drug addiction, the nature of evil, about human weakness and predators that feed upon it.  I wish I could explain more but I cannot.  The prose itself seduces us with its opiate like beauty just as the woman in the plot was seduced and destroyed.

There is a very dark beast lurking in the labyrinth , a mystery the narrator may or may not understand as her life progresses and as she falls in the same traps her mother did.

The Big Music by Kirsty Gunn (2012, 496 pages)

I have read Kirsty Gunn's The Keepsake three times.  I have posted on it twice and hope to read it again in 2014.   I think it belongs in the Sontag category of "High Art".  The Big Music, twice as long as The Keepsake, is a very challenging, intricately constructed modernist tour de force set in the highlands of Scotland (where New Zealand born Gunn now lives).  There are excellent very insightful reviews of The Big Music in online editions of majors newspapers which I suggest interested buyers read.  

The central thing in the book, called "The Big Music", is Scottish bagpipe music.  If you know little or nothing about the history or the musical theory and methods of bagpipes, you certainly will after completing The Big Music.  Gunn's work is a deep meditation on the nature of music and through this that of art.  It is also a lesson in how to read a novel.

The novel is presented to us as if were a collection of material Gunn found relating to a famous family of bagpipers.  For generations they have composed music for bagpipes and instructed others advanced techniques of the instrument.  Gunn uses the material as if were the basis for an academic treatise.  Interspaced with personal notes from many members of the family are historical and theoretical notes about bagpipe playing.  

I read this book twice, once three months ago and once this week.   There are many wonderful sentences and paragraphs about loneliness and the Scottish Highlands.  The bagpipe is superbly equipped for expressing pain and loss.  It was played as troops went into battle and at the funerals of kings and presidents.    It's sound is like no other instrument.  

There is a lot of fascinating historical information in The Big Music.  

The Big Music is a very challenging book which should be read slowly and thoughtfully.  I hope to reread it in a year or two.  

The Keepsake by Kirsty Gunn

The Keepsake by Kirsty Gunn (1997, 214 pages)

I first read The Keepsake by Kirsty Gunn (1960, New Zealand) in August of 2009.   I did not attempt to post on it then as I knew I could not begin to convey the dark terrible beauty of this book.   After my second reading I feel little more confidence but I will now attempt to say a bit about this book as I want to encourage others to read it.  (I had a fairly long post written on this book but somehow either my computer or my internet locked up and I lost it all so this post will be very short.)


Here is the Goodreads description:


Through a shifting and interwoven narrative, 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 her lost love, the girl's father. Raised on these 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. Her shocking affair with an older man seems to repeat the pattern set by her mother. The tangled yarn of her mother's past begins to be unraveled by the younger woman - until finally she can come to tell a story that is her.




The prose in The Keepsake is almost painfully beautiful.    It could be seen thematically as about a lot of things.   Among them  memory, sexual obbession, drug addiction, the need for stories to have patterns in our lifes, and possibly incest.   


I think when you reach the scene where the nature of the keepsake is revealed you will shudder at the terrible beauty and power of what is revealed to us.


Parts of The Keepsake somehow brought to mind ancient death cults or Meso-American religion.   


I am not doing this wonderful book justice but I will reread it in 2012, God willing, and will attempt to do a better job then.   It has some wonderful quotes directly related to the reading life.




I completely endorse this wonderful, beautiful work of art.




Mel u