Monument Maker

Product Information

It evokes the work of Malcolm Lowry, Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, Arthur Machen, Philip K.

But then part of the trick of Monument Maker is that so many things are, and that despite a title which makes it sound like Melody Maker for stonemasons. He’s on record as saying that the book is “a monument to all the sweethearts separated in time and to the cruelties that tore them apart and the summers separated in time and to the summers they once loved it. Both the text (including extensive back matter) and the illustrations produce a balanced blend of the gravitas and the humanity of Daniel Chester French. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.Because when a book is as funny, smart, beautiful, and interesting as Monument Maker, you have a chance to remember that old adage about judging a book by its cover.

With Shawn Fields' marvelous pen and ink sketches, Linda Booth Sweeney tells this story of a boy who grew up on a farm, then small towns in Massachusetts who became a famous sculptor whose work can be found in many places, foremost in our capitol.It is structured as a cathedral, the reader moving through books entitled “Nave”, “Transept”, “Apse” and “Choir”. There wasn’t a single time, in the week that I devoured this book, where I did not very actively look forward to my next frolic through Keenan’s clouds and meadows of language.

Patten’s IdeaBook helps visitors conceive the ideal, everlasting monument to the deceased family member, loved ones and friends. Monument Maker: Daniel Chester French and the Lincoln Memorial by Linda Booth Sweeney, illustrated by Shawn Fields. Some of the sentences are pages long, some of the little details turn into pages of falling down a rabbit hole of information (like the idea that Goya should paint what might possibly be on the flag that is planted on the moon if we were to land in a joint world effort and why). But as a showy, ludicrous, possibly great work of mythmaking, an idiosyncratic statement of a personal creed which also works as a late entry in the Pynchonesque field of the baggy conspiracy doorstopper.

For each memorial you choose, you can enter text, images, and information that best represent the life you’re commemorating. The novel is built of interlocking novels, and is both intertextual and metatextual in making reference to Keenan’s other novels. 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.

But it is clear from the start that, despite the great detail, Keenan is not primarily concerned with people or place. When I reviewed David Keenan’s last Europa Edition release, Xstabeth, I thought it was an interesting way to tell a story.Books are a fluid thing and even when we close the pages, when we open them again, the novel has dreamed and has changed. Linda Sweeney does a wonderful job explaining the rich history behind one America's most talented artists (at least in my opinion).