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
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Book Reviews of The Gathering (Man Booker Prize)

Book Review: Literary, readable, and profound--what's not to like
Summary: 4 Stars

Enright explores the inner life of a family, through the eyes of a self-confessed unreliable narrator. Enright mixes together the fallacy of memories in general, the particular fallibility of childhood memories, the malleability of the past, and the license a novelist has to create a "memory" for her characters.

Enright's narrator (Veronica)is a middle-class Irish married woman with two children, a dozen siblings (each damaged in his or her own way), a mother who suffered a nervous breakdown during Veronica's childhood--and never quite recovered, and suffers from typical middle-age, middle-class angst. Enright adds hints of sexual abuse, and sets the entire story at a defining moment in Veronica's life--the suicide by drowning of her favorite brother, which in turn leads to a crisis in her own marriage.

In her attempt to discover the truth about her own life--she has discovered that she is living her life in "inverted commas, as in going "home" to her "loving" husband, and having "sex"--she searches her memory, family lore, half remembered scenes from her childhood, and buried memories of her brother's sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend--and hints of repressed memories of her own abuse by that same friend.

Enright succeeds in weaving together these multiple strands into a thoroughly readable story. That is not to say this is an easy read--Enright jumps in and out of the present without warning, and Veronica is at times apparently reliable, only to end up confessing that none of what she just described happened--or at least it probably didn't, or in any event, she has no idea if it did or not, but thinks it should have. But isn't that the way the mind really works--seamlessly weaving past, present and predicted future into what we call reality. Isn't that the basis of the Holy Trinity--via St. Augustine--only the present is real--the past is only a memory and thus exists only in your mind, and the future hasn't happened yet. However, you can slice time so finely, that the present moment is infinitesimally short...and thus really doesn't exist either. Yet we are undoubtedly real.

Similarly, while Enright's Veronica may not be sure what happened in the past, has only the vaguest grasp of what is going to come in the future, and is somewhat hazy on the here and now--the portrait which emerges is a very convincing one of a real family.

Highly recommended.

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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