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Castle Keep
It is December of 1944, and a detachment of American soldiers has been assigned to guard an ancient castle in Belgium inhabited by an elderly aristocrat, his young wife, and countless valuable artifacts. The soldiers virtually wait out the war—indulging in various hobbies, exploring the castle's excesses (including a replica of Venice, complete with canals and gondolas), in other words, trying to do something other than war—until a German counterattack puts them in the fray. Semi-autobiographical, Castle Keep was the first major novel to use the real language of the soldier, uncensored and true-to-life. Inventive and brilliantly comic, this novel is the quintessential portrait of man at war.
Read an excerpt from Castle Keep, originally featured in CONTEXT N°4
Details
ISBN-10
1-56478-208-5
ISBN-13
9781564782083
Publication Date
Nov 1999
Nb of pages
382
Dimensions 6.5 x 9.5 in.
ReviewsPress Reviews
Life
Eastlake's ultimate destination may be classically tragic, but the way to it lies through the twisting corridors of a carnival fun house. . . . He has a gift for creating unforced comic situations
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New York Times
Castle Keep weaves way-out fantasy with grim realism. . . . It is a story of war, but not of technical battle, and altogether poetic. . . . It is far more coherent than Catch-22, the
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Time
The strength of Eastlake's design is in the massing of details and moments—bizarre, farcical, obscene, recondite, but always vividly pictured—into a whole that is truly tragic. There are drunk
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New York Review of Books
Kenyon Review
New York Times Book Review
The challenge to the novelist would seem to be to write fiction which has a real bearing on present-day concepts and values and, ideally, does something about them, while not descending into
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Choice
A quite unusual and superb war novel that should appeal to the devotees of Heller's Catch-22, but also to a wider audience, since it is a more meaningful and ultimately tragic book.
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Library Journal
A book for reading more than once, its strong interplay of idealism and realism, fantasy and reality, character and setting are skillfully handled. Some high humor between the bouts of
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Quotations
Through three fine novels Mr. Eastlake has been moving steadily towards this novel, Castle Keep. In it he has brought into sharpest focus all the questions about modern man and ...more
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