The Gathering by Anne Enright
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Book Reviews of The Gathering
Book Review: All men are bookies ...
Summary: 4 Stars
What do you do with a book about a dysfunctional family and the penumbra of bizarre characters surrounding it, when the narrator concludes that all men are bookies and all women are whores? I thought about putting it down, but I kept reading. All the way to the dysfunctional ending. From the narrator, a middle-aged woman with an obsession concerning male genitalia, to the fastidious grandmother (a former whore) whose prim order captures the narrator's imagination as a child, to the grandmother's rejected suitor whose predatory response almost consumes the family, I found the characters to be thin and unconvincing. Inoculated by a fixation on church ceremony, none of them have any connection with God. And it shows. Basically, all of these people hate each other and themselves. In spite of this emptiness, I found the book to be a strangely compelling read. Put it down to Enright's gifted prose writing. I will probably even keep the book (usually I resell stuff like this). If you are looking for inspiration, look elsewhere. If you are looking for the writing craft elevated to a high level, you might like this book.Book Review: Raw view of suicide surviors,each caught within their own worlds
Summary: 4 Stars
Although set within a large dysfuntional Irish family, this speaks to the famlies of the world. Any time "shameful" secrets are allowed to fester, they shape lives and deaths, and guilty conscious' as ANNE ENRIGHT so powerfully illustrates in The Gathering. Just when you think you have it all perfectly in place, WHAM!. A curve I certainly didn't see coming. Love,bonds even death can't break,addiction's,mental illness, it has it all. A fine weekend's read.The Portable VirginThe Wig My Father Wore What Are You Like?: A Novel The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch: A NovelBook Review: When there is nothing else left
Summary: 4 Stars
Last Year's Man Booker Prize Winner, "The Gathering", is a novel of buried high feelings and deep emotions. Irish writer Anne Enright has a beautiful prose that not always matches her objectives. The novel's subject is a heavy one, a woman dealing with her problematic and beloved brother's death. While avoiding easy solutions, the novel never seems to go that deep it should. When Enright looks back in her characters' lives, she is telling us we are the result of our pasts. That is right but sometimes, a novel needs to stick to the present also, so that readers can really care about past.Book Review: better than it could have been
Summary: 4 Stars
When I first started reading this, I thought, oh no, Oprah-esque women's fiction. I can't stand a lot of what passes for women's fiction - especially the brooding kind. But don't worry. This book is NOT LIKE THAT. The story has flesh, the main character has a personality, and while some of the other characters (e.g., her husband and kids) are shadowy, there are others that have space and depth. Overall, good book.Book Review: Fails to Sustain Itself
Summary: 3 Stars
A great fan of the Booker Prize, which has in recent years garnered more true respect than either the Pulitzer or Book Critics Circle, this recent winner by Anne Enright, however, does not continue the run of praise. Where Enright's family gathering for the funeral of the narrator's brother, Liam, after his suicide, seems a fitting occasion for deep thoughts on the nature of family and sibling bonds, it quickly falls into a relentless diatribe against mothers, brothers, and uncles, from the not so advantageous viewpoint of a women's whose primary concern seems to be recalling all of her sexual failures, problems, exploits, and dysfunctions while drinking herself into a stupor over her love/hate relationship with her dead brother. Anne Enright's narrator soon begins repeating herself, and her basic story, rather than developing any true sense of understanding (of herself or anyone else). If times are this hard in Ireland, then the Potato Famine of the 19th century must have been only a passing annoyance. Enright seems to revel in the brutal psychological alienation of each individual, without let up. The memories of sex, including a rather tawdry and cliched account of Liam's sexual encounter with his uncle at age 9 (do all family narrative now demand sexual abuse as a prerequisite of reader interest?), seem gratuitous at best. And one can sense Enright's love of sexual dysfunction as well, for the narrator returns whenever possible to complain about her sex life, her husband's, her daughter's, her brother's, etc. Where the language of Enright's novel is moving and tense, and the style masterful, the content fails to live up to the early hints of psychological engagement.