Synopsis

Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams?

These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe.

Monument Maker straddles genres while fully embracing none of them, a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a horribly disfigured British soldier made prophetic by depths of suffering; books that interact with Keenan's earlier novels, including a return to the mythical post-punk Airdrie landscape of his now classic debut, "This Is A Memorial Device" whole histories of art and religion; books that are glorious choral appendices; bibliographies; imagined films; tape recorded interviews; building to a jubilant accumulation of registers, voices and rhythms that is truly Choral.

Written over the course of 10 years, Monument Maker represents the apex of Keenan's project to create books that contain uncanny life and feel like living organisms. It is a meditation on art and religion, and on what it means to make monument; this great longing for something eternal, something that could fix moments in time, forever.

Details

• Format : Very Thick 2nd Hand Paperback
• Condition : Very Good (Almost As New)
• Category : Fiction - Uncategorised Fiction
• Published : 2021 (This Edition 2023 - White Rabbit)
• ISBN : 9781474617109
• SKU : B003301
• PPC : SP700gm
• RRP : £14.99
• Quantity Available : 1 only.

External Reviews

"David Keenan has become one of the most prolific and innovative new literary stylists of the last five years . . . At this stage of his game Keenan can make his books do pretty much anything . . . Keenan's most ambitious and accomplished book yet. He has has built a monument, turning history to dust in the process, and delivering a hefty instalment of a literary career where literally anything is possible." - Irish Times.

"His visionary aesthetic reaches its grandest expression yet in his new novel, Monument Maker, a garrulous, gargantuan and ultimately elusive magnum opus." - Financial Times.

"A text of colossal ambition . . . at times, it feels a little like reading Yeats." - Literary Review.

"An experimental novel informed by religion, art, the occult, sex, Tarot, alcohol, signs, symbols and other experimental novels. It evokes the work of Malcolm Lowry, Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Arthur Machen, Philip K. Dick and even John Fowles. Like them, Keenan is a literary disruptor . . . This is not an easy or straightforward read, but it crackles with the energy of someone challenging themselves to make something new, meaningful and personal with the tools at their disposal. By turns it is obscure, romantic, terrifying, funny and - an underrated and unfashionable literary virtue - sincere." - The Spectator.

"Adventurous readers, devil-may-care readers, readers who are in it for the long haul - roll up." - Bookmunch.

"Don't read it. Smoke it. Snort it. Swallow it. It's not a novel. It's an acid trip. A freaky, feverish dream set in print. Baroque and bizarre, Monument Maker is a literary cathedral designed by Mad King Ludwig II, with help from Burroughs and Arthur C. Clarke." - Cheerio.

"Keenan is the kind of writer who can look forward to being lovingly over-interpreted into perpetuity." - The Scotsman.

"Occult, transformative, difficult, fantastic: Keenan is smashing through so many borders." - New Statesman.

The Author

David Keenan was born in Glasgow and grew up in Airdrie, in the west of Scotland, in the late-70s and early-1980s. He is the author of six novels, the cult classic This Is Memorial Device (Faber & Faber), which won the London Magazine Award for Debut Fiction 2018 and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, For The Good Times (Faber & Faber), which won the Gordon Burn Prize and was shortlisted for the Encore Award for Second Novels, Xstabeth/The Towers The Fields The Transmitters (White Rabbit), which was listed for the Dublin Literary Prize, the monolithic modernist masterpiece Monument Maker (White Rabbit) (about which the TLS urged readers to "sit back and marvel") and 2022's Industry of Magic & Light (White Rabbit) ("Keenan has written another classic" - The Scotsman). He is also the author of England's Hidden Reverse (Strange Attractor Press), a history of the UK's post-punk/Industrial underground, as well as To Run Wild In It and Empty Aphrodite, (Rough Trade Books), two experimental novellas, and the co-designer, alongside Sophy Hollington, of his own tarot pack, the Autonomic Tarot (Rough Trade Books). Edna O'Brien said about him: "I sometimes think David Keenan dreams aloud. His prose has the effortless, enigmatic, unsettling quality of dream."