The Gathering (Man Booker Prize)

The Gathering (Man Booker Prize)
by Anne Enright

The Gathering (Man Booker Prize)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Anne Enright
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-10
ISBN: 0802170390
Number of pages: 260
Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat

Book Reviews of The Gathering (Man Booker Prize)

Book Review: a remarkably wonderful story
Summary: 4 Stars

The way Anne Enright tells a story seems to try and please both the reader and her own sense of standards...not that this is bad, mind you, far from it. This causes her style to run the gambit of emotions and add an almost surrealism to the her stories - this can be taken as horrible or brilliant. Judging from the mixed reviews, this seems to be the case here.

In her fourth novel, The Gathering, the protagonist (Veronica Hegarty) gets a shock that forces her to reevaluate her past, present, and future. Her brother Liam, lost in alcoholism, passes. At his funeral, Veronica is forced back into her dysfunctional Irish roots. At the same time, she becomes increasingly haunted by the memory of her fallen brother to the point that every other aspect of her life becomes a fading memory.

But let me digress back to Anne's writing style. The Gathering isn't meant to be a simple tale of love and loss...it is so much more complicated than that. It's about pain, fear, and pleasure. Each character has flaws and each flaw screams at the reader via the strength of Anne's writing. When Liam sinks deeper into his alcoholism...Veronica sinks deeper into insomnia. She pens a tale which love springs eternal and death is a release from pain. Fear echoes throughout and when combined with memories the tale gains a disturbing tone. All this combined might overwhelm the reader if not for the beautiful story being told. We have all suffered loss, and Anne's story will change, motivate, and reshape your views. The Gathering may be a bit overwhelming, but it combines the mind, the body, and the soul into a remarkably wonderful story.........Another book I would highly recommend is: Geo Tin's break through novel--Sirens-A Novel: Sirens (Mass Market)--another great novel not to be missed.

Summary of 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

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