Gathering

By Anne Enright

Book Overview

A dazzling writer of international stature, Anne Enright is one of Ireland's most singular voices. Now she delivers The Gathering , a return to an intimate canvas and a moving, evocative portrait of a large Irish family haunted by the past. 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, she shows how memories warp and secrets fester. As in all Enright's work, her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction, and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802118739
• ISBN13: 9780802118738
• Release Date: August 1970
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

The Horror and Wonder of Love

Fellow novelist AL Kennedy, reviewing The Gathering for the Guardian, argued that everything Enright has written is "alive with that lovely thing - a fully realised voice: muscular, agile, sometimes witty, sometimes hallucinogenic, often dark and lyric in a quiet and horribly skillful way". Anne Enright has written a book about family, love, hate, sex, desire, generations, child abuse, and facing one's own mortality. Her character, Veronica, one of the Hegarty clan, has word of her brother, Liam's death, and she is on her way to claim his body. On her way she reminisces about the family and builds layer upon layer of the family members that we meet.Her prose is such that you are either intimidated by its mastery or drawn into the brilliance of the descriptions of the family and need to know the stories. And, the stories are there and come one by one as I said, built layer upon layer so that you finally come to know the feelings and needs of them all. Maybe too much of the feelings for some. Veronica, facing her own self shies away from her family and wraps herself in the waves of emotion that come her way. Anne Enright writes about love and sexual desire and as she says "One of the things I wanted to do in the book was explore how desire and hatred are closely bound up," says Enright. "You know, that sense that someone - usually a man - is enraged by the fact that he desires someone - usually a woman." I cannot in all honesty divulge much of the book. It must be read and devoured and instilled in the mind to set for later discussion. In Al Kennedy's review in 'The Guardian' he shares this nugget: "The chairman of the Booker judges, Howard Davies, revealed that he had spotted the brilliance of this novel when he said: "It has an absolutely brilliant ending. It has one of the best last sentences of any novel I have ever read." Al Kennedy goes on to say that "mortality becomes the ultimate definition of Love's stupidity - an outpouring of energy towards people who are always destined to disappoint, to be disappointed and, above all, who are compelled to leave us in the most devastating way, by dying. The horror and wonder of love, we are shown, is that it outlives its object." Wonderfully, Highly Recommended. prisrob 12-30-07 The Wig My Father Wore The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch: A Novel

Hauntingly behind closed doors

Anne Enright has created characters that resonate long after the book has been closed. Since I had the privilege of reading it in one sitting on a cross-country flight, I was able to absorb the beauty of its images, the 3-dimensional character studies, the haunting and enraging family dynamics without interruption, totally immersed in the passions and histories of Veronica and her family. This book is written in a meaty, organic style, rare to find (e.g., "There was something about the smell of us growing up that drove (our parents) completely insane." and "The ground is boiling with corpses, the ground is knit out of their tangled bones.") The plot should not be revealed in a review but allowed to unfold in the reader's imagination. It is a complete, masterful work.