The Keepsake

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.