Monument Maker

Product Information

Gravestones with angled, curved or special cuts reflecting more diverse, less conventional design elements. David Keenan’s fifth novel, Monument Maker, may be construed as a monument in its own right, aspiring to timelessness – a vast, often bewildering store of memories and narratives ranging across different periods and landscapes. Keenan, we are told, spent a decade writing the book, and the result is a text of colossal ambition.

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 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.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? THE SCOTSMAN Keenan is the kind of writer who can look forward to being lovingly over-interpreted into perpetuity I began work on it in 2008 but stopped after a year. It started to worry about my mental health. I was losing who I was and wondering if David Keenan even existed. It was like looking into the abyss. I was suffering from a kind of psychos." The IdeaBook lets you choose custom gravestones from a broad range of styles. For each memorial you choose, you can enter text, images, and information that best represent the life you’re commemorating. Patten’s IdeaBook gives you the chance to visualize an infinite number of possibilities for creating the perfect memorial, and lets you save as many custom combinations as you wish. Styles of Custom Monuments and Headstones Of the ambition, intelligence and provocation of David Keenan’s mammoth Monument Maker there can be no doubt. Whether a majority of readers will enjoy the experience is another matter entirely. I ought to be the ideal reader: I admired his previous books, especially This Is Memorial Device and For the Good Times. Like his other work, this novel is avowedly experimental, pays homage to the avant garde, features science fiction and more than a little theology, and is riddled with puzzles. In some ways, especially in its obsession with paranoia, fascism, conspiracy and transgression, it can appear as a vast homage to Thomas Pynchon.

The IdeaBook lists a variety of headstone models, from customary, classic styles to more modern designs: 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. Our lives are greatly defined by the items, principles, activities, events or occupations that we’re most passionate about. Often these hallmarks are how others identify or remember us. The event of a life’s passing causes others to reflect on the deep importance those elements meant to the departed—and often how the deceased contributed to and honored those aspects. Options are classified by the type and size of the grave: single, double, children, or family estate. You can browse images for custom monuments and headstones in grid or gallery view. You can also designate custom grave marker designs as “favorites” for easy access and viewing on repeated visits to the IdeaBook. Personalized Elements Daniel Chester French, one of the most prolific and acclaimed American sculptors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is best known for his design of the monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC.Despite initial impressions Monument Maker is not an exercise in world building, but one of exploration – of the past, present and future, of the internal and the external, and of art and writing itself. It’s a sensual book that comes close to being overwhelming at times. Poetry, plastic surgery, and pornography. Love, lust and Lionel Ritchie. Music, movies and micturition – all and more are present and frequently incorrect. 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. There are so many things I have been thinking about since finishing Monument Maker, and one of them is how important art and artists are to David Keenan and his writings. In both of the novels I have read by him, he has focused on an obscure artist and the people who surround these artists and worship them, turning their following into a small cult. This group, sometimes 20 or 30 people worldwide, are devoted to these artists, even when these said artists really have not released a massive amount of work, sometimes just one obscure book. In Keenans’ world, if someone writes a slim novella or someone paints a few canvases, there is a potential that a group of people will follow this artist, try to learn everything about them, and will obsess over every move that the artist makes. This devotion to the artist, regardless of obscurity, seems to be one of those things that Keenan likes to fantasize about, like how every single little piece of art has the potential to make someone a devout to the artist and his life. This exhibits a sincerity to the value of art in David Keenan’s life, otherwise this phenomenon would not continue to be a major plot in his novels.