The Gathering (Man Booker Prize)
Anne Enright is a dazzling writer of international stature and one of Ireland?s most singular voices. Now she delivers The Gathering, a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family and a shot of fresh blood into the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, drowned in the sea. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him?something that happened in their grandmother?s house in the winter of 1968. As Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light. The Gathering is a daring, witty, and insightful family epic, clarified through Anne Enright?s unblinking eye. It is a novel about love and disappointment, about how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars.
Amazon Significant Seven, November 2007: Pretty early on in The Gathering you realize that in her lingering portrait of the Hegarty clan (and this isn't hyperbole--they are a family of 12), Irish novelist Anne Enright will wrestle with all the giant literary tropes that have come before her. Family, of course, is the big one, but with equal intensity she explores death and dying, the sea and its siren song, sex, shame, secrecy, unreliable memories, madness, "the drink," and--always in the shadows--England. That said, it's not like any other novel about the Irish that I've read. The story of the Hegartys is indeed bleak, and hard, but it surges with tenderness and eloquent thought which, in the end, are the very things that help this family (or at least her narrator Veronica) survive. Through her eyes, and in Enright's skillful imagination, those small turning-point moments of life that we all know in some form or another--a petty fight, a careless word, an event witnessed--come together in an unshakeable vision of how you become the person you are. --Anne Bartholomew
The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) Accessories
 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
On Chesil Beach
Out Stealing Horses: A Novel
Bridge of Sighs: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)
Run: A Novel
Mister Pip
Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Unaccustomed Earth
The White Tiger: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) Reviews
The story unfolds when her brother Liam commits suicide and Veronica is forced to bring the body from England - the scene of his death. We learn of the trouble that harbors deep within her as a result of her childhood. Veronica is lost in her own world and seems to be unable to express her emotions and damages her psyche. Another book I would highly recommend is "Sirens by Tin Geo" Sirens:A Novel A great novel that came paired with "The Gathering" Anne Enright has written a book that will (and has) spark debates for years to come. Veronica tells the story of the dark family secrets dating back to her Grandparents and vaulting forward to her present day in an effort to unweave this family tree.
Admittedly, this book is not for everyone and more often than not the reader will have to re read it to fully understand what this book is about. Anne Enright has done a remarkable job outlining the troubling life of this thirty something woman who finds difficulty in gripping reality. I, for one, enjoyed this grim tale of Veronica Hegarty. The backdrop of the story is Irish and we're taken on an arduous journey of a woman trying to escape the Catholic Church.
Her words are well chosen and the book is generally well crafted. The tone reminded a little bit of John Banville's "The Sea", the Booker winner of 2005. Anne Enright certainly writes well. While I didn't love "The Sea", I felt it was a much tighter book.
Her switches back and forth in time are very sloppy. The craftmanship didn't make up for the frustration I felt in reading it. I think this could have been very good but ultimately fails to entertain or provide insight. I found myself very frustrated reading this book and didn't enjoy it much at all. I probably disliked the characters more than I should have because I began to dislike Enright's style and frustration with her translated into frustration with the characters. I can't recommend "The Gathering".
This book is typical of many others thematically and since Enright is a skillful writer, it should have the basics for a good book. I was very much looking forward to "The Gathering", yet I must say it is my least favourite recent Booker winner. . Additionally, Banville is poetic at every turn. I often enjoy books written on families and the hidden rage and secrets that exist.
Darkness is not the problem. Happy was the day when I gave up on this book a quarter of the way through and returned it to the library. Some writers can make dark stories sing the Canadian writer Ann-Marie MacDonald in Fall On Your Knees, for example. In the portion I read, neither she (nor the author) contributed any leavening, by way of humor or irony, to this relentlessly unpleasant voice, whether it spoke of current or past events. I enjoy literary fiction and looked forward to this Man Booker prize winner, based on a review in the press.
But I found nothing in either the prose or the story to keep me pushing forward with The Gathering. The "gathering" in this Irish novel is triggered by the suicide of one in a large family of siblings. She is a singularly joyless character, who finds little to animate her in any affirmative way. What ultimately frustrated me about the narrative was the incessantly negative voice of Veronica, the sister who tells the tale. Life is too short, and there is too much excellent and entertaining writing out there to spend my time with this book.
Emotion is messy stuff and Enright does not shy away from the refuse and detritus. The passionate negativity The Gathering has generated is telling, and is I believe due in part to the uncomfortable depths it brings the reader. I also did not find the novel "disjointed" as many reviewers have complained. The comments from reviewers bragging about how they read the book in one sitting left me shaking my head. Please, if you commit yourself to reading this book, take your time, taste and digest each word, each sentence, one at a time, and ride with the emotions that this writing evokes. The plot is of minor importance, really only a literary device allowing the author a framework within which to do due her real work.
There were a number (not many) of times when I simply had to move on because I could not follow her. Don't expect definitive answers or tidy explanations for what "really" happened. This is not an easy read. It seems safe to warn any prospective reader that one thing is certain: you will either love or you will hate this novel.
I will admit that I did struggle at times with where Enright was taking me. Enright's book is not a comfortable read. The novel uses the death of a sibling and the gathering together of an extended family as a vehicle to explore the intense emotions and distant memories these events provoke in the central character. Skimming through the reviews that have preceded mine I find myself amused by the passion this book has generated.
Her book is about Human emotion. I found the shifts between present and past seamless and close to my own experience of consciousness. She takes us into the mist strewn land of child hood memory deftly exploring the boundary lands between reality and fiction. She explores her subject with an unflinching directness and power that left this reader unable to tolerate more than a few pages at a time. This book is not for the reader who can only give it 2 hours or for the reader who reads 100+ novels a year. This Enright achieves with brilliance.
But because of the richness and truth of the rest of the book I assumed that my failure to take meaning from these passages had more to my own failings as a reader than to the writer's "self-indulgence". If you are hoping for certainty at the end of the novel you will be disappointed. She has a seemingly magical talent for using language to evoke in the reader a sense of her character's physic experience with all its ambiguity, ambivalence, and irrationality. It took me 3 weeks to read, and even then I felt that I needed to re-read it from start to finish if I expected to appreciate its full richness.
This is the kind of book that you feel you are friends with the narrator. I loved it.
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