The Caretaker, Doon Arbus
The Caretaker, Doon Arbus
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The Caretaker

Author: Doon Arbus

Narrator: Alan Cumming

Unabridged: 4 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/15/2020

Synopsis

Following the death of a renowned and eccentric collector—author of Stuff, a seminal philosophical work on the art of accumulation—the fate of the privately endowed museum he cherished falls to a peripatetic stranger who had been his fervent admirer. This peculiar institution (the Society for the Preservation of the Legacy of Dr. Charles Alexander Morgan) is dedicated to the annihilation of hierarchy. A priceless Dürer and other peerless antiquities commune happily with a toothbrush, a plastic coffee cup lid, and the rest of the ignored, the discarded, the undervalued and the valueless.The caretaker, a restless devotee of Dr. Morgan’s work, believes he has landed the job of his dreams. But as the years go by and the lines of identity begin to blur, the caretaker learns he must pay a terrible price to inhabit Morgan’s home, his history, and the remnants of his life.The Caretaker is a profound, probing novel with the momentum and tension of a thriller and is, in the words of Publishers Weekly, an “unnerving feat of contemporary postmodernism.”

About Doon Arbus

Doon Arbus is a journalist and author. She has written and contributed to several books about her mother, the late photographer Diane Arbus. She is the author of a novel, The Caretaker, and as a freelance journalist, she contributed to the New York Daily Herald, The Nation, and Rolling Stone, among others. She wrote the play Third Floor, Second Door on the Right, which was produced by the 2003 New York International Fringe Festival.

About Alan Cumming

Alan Cumming is an award-winning actor, singer, writer, producer, and director. He won a Tony Award for his portrayal of the Emcee in the Broadway musical Cabaret. He is the winner of the 2015 Audie Award for Best Autobiography/Memoir narration and Best Narration by the Author Award.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane on August 10, 2020

Wasn’t able to connect with the writing or story.......more

Goodreads review by Lark on August 06, 2020

This novel works through an accumulation of one exquisite detail after another, rather than through action. For this reason it takes more commitment and concentration than a conventionally plot-driven novel, and its rewards are different, and deep. I don't think there is a better way to have told th......more

Goodreads review by Robert on January 14, 2022

This must be the greatest debut novel by a 75-year-old ever written. I had no idea of Arbus's age; I thought it was the very mature work of a young woman. The prose is controlled, very intelligent, with an excellent rhythm. What there is of a plot is always surprising, and the protagonist is one of......more

Goodreads review by Margo on January 14, 2021

When a well-known collector named Dr. Charles Morgan dies, the management of his estate--which comprises the museum housing his eclectic, personal collection of objects--is turned over to a caretaker who has long admired Morgan’s artistic philosophy, which Morgan laid out in a tome titled Stuff. Ind......more

Goodreads review by Karen on October 26, 2020

I love these type of “off the wall” novels. “Didn’t you catch the uncut diamond in it’s case winking impudently at the shiny lump of coal across the way.”......more

Quotes

“Doon Arbus’s beautiful, moving, original novel…creates a fictional world that reflects, illuminates, and reveals the ‘real’ world we live in…[A] wryly funny, subversively philosophical book.” Francine Prose, New York Times bestselling author

“Arbus brilliantly describes the caretaker’s distorted sense of the museum as a living, breathing organism and flirts just enough with gothic tropes to dramatize his existential dilemma. Taking cues from tales by Kafka and Robert Walser, Arbus pulls off an unnerving feat of contemporary postmodernism.” Publishers Weekly

“Dense, visual, and true, this short book speaks volumes about the theater of the mind and how the ensuing comedic drama we call life unfolds inside and outside our control.” Hilton Als, author of White Girls

“A quite unsettling study of obsession and madness that gradually creeps up on you and makes you complicit with the caretaker at the expense of his more bloodless antagonists because he at least has passion and the courage of his convictions…The end—which, like all perfect endings, is both surprising and inevitable.” James Marsh, Academy Award–winning director

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