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The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) | 
| Author: Anne Enright
Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  120 reviews
Sales Rank: 825
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0802170390
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780802170392
ASIN: 0802170390
Publication Date: September 10, 2007
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Amazon.com
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
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 115 more reviews...
 Not their best August 13, 2008
13 out of 23 found this review helpful
Let's look at this parody of a novel from the positive angle: how Monty Python got away with it, making the Man Booker jury believe that this is written by a real Irish woman, and that the whole thing is serious, so that they even got the prize for it in 2007, is not a small achievement. At least, I assume they are not fooled that easily. Or are they? (though some past decisions did cause shadows of doubt...).
So what do we have here, soberly: a 39 year old woman, Veronica Hegarty, tells us of her life and her family and her 11 siblings and her mother's 5 miscarriages, and the deaths in the family, and the overboiling emotions, and the sex, legitimate and otherwise, and the whole Irish mess that nobody can celebrate like they can, these people from the green island. The pocketbook edition has some blurb comparing the Gathering to Dubliners. I'll be damned, must read that again, just to defend poor Joyce against diffamation.
Now, this melodrama isn't badly written, it is in places actually funny. But with so much exaggeration, I can not honestly recommend it, maybe just try a page or two here and there, to get the flavor. And then take something else.
And I will never again buy a Man Booker winner if I don't have a reliable recommendation from somebody that I trust.
Masterful prose but lacking in momentum August 6, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize. The story unfolds as a dysfunctional family gathers together for the funeral of the dead brother Liam, who killed himself by swimming out into the ocean. Flashbacks abound and hidden secrets of the past are revealed. Enright's prose is unique: sparse, poetic, and evocative of deep mourning. Unless artful prose can keep you entertained for several hundred pages, however, this book is likely to be slow going for you. Although I appreciate Enright's masterful writing, I struggled to finish this book.
 Terrible waste of time! August 5, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book was dreadful. The story went back and forth from the present to the past and was very confusing. The big secret is not such a secret since you can see it coming for a mile. Everything in this book has a sexual tint to it -- so much so that I just wanted to say enough already! I didn't want to finish the book but did in the hopes that somehow I might end up liking it. WRONG! It was a waste of both money and time. Don't bother with this one. There are better books out there.
 Bitter ... Bitter August 4, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Many people like sweet naturally, but bitter is often an acquired taste. Bitter grief. Bitter humor. Bitter chocolate. Bitter greens. Some savor the bitter, playing off the sweet and the salt, and others do not. Some will enjoy the pervasive bitterness and corrosive humor in this book, and others not.
Veronica, the eyes, ears and voice of the novel, is named after a saint who offered her veil to wipe blood from the face of Christ on the road to Calvary. She, like her namesake, is attracted to suffering men. Her dear brother Liam, a terminal alcoholic, commits suicide by walking into the sea. She organizes the funeral that refers to the book's title.
Veronica also gathers her memories to reconstruct the events leading to Liam's suicide. She tries to recall her life and marriage, her childhood in a large family, and the time when she and Liam lived with her grandmother Ada. She filters scenes from these histories through the fabric of her grief, cynicism, and uncertain memory. Veronica dictates her stories in a seeming random stream of consciousness. In fact, the images and scenes are artfully arranged to play off one another and peel away the bourgeois mask of propriety from family life.
Veronica realizes "that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go 'home' where I could 'have sex' with my 'husband' just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn't seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died." Her abundant cynicism mocks the polite fictions of Irish-catholicism, respectability, family life, gender roles, and consumerism.
The commas point especially to the hypocrisy of socially accepted gender roles that are supported by an unspoken confusion of lust with love. Of her 'modest/ardent' grandmother Veronica observes that "Ada is the wraith and Lilith the lovely girl, the fallen woman the sad whore." (Lilith is the mythological feminine embodiment of seductive youthful lust, leading men astray "against their will." ) Veronica's unhappy marriage to Tom and Ada's illicit arrangement with Lambert, may remind readers of Shakespeare on lust: "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action ... Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight."
A similar insight moves Veronica to caustic observation of middle-class values that appear to support respectability, but actually debase men and women. "Frank Duff ... (who was the actual head of the actual Legion of Mary, a religious organisation dedicated, in 1967, to inanity and making of tea) ... spent his early years rescuing prostitutes off the streets of Dublin. ... This I discovered, as I chased him through the college library stacks, working on an essay ... which I called ... 'Paying for Sex in the Irish Free State'." A fitting alternate title for Enright's book. Ada was likely one of those rescued prostitute. The marriages of Veronica and her mother, Ada's legacy to her daughter and granddaughter, look uncomfortably like prostitution. Fortunately, just as the bitterness begins to cloy, Enright provides relief in Veronica's lover Michael and Ada's husband Charlie, who provide more wholesome, although imperfect, relationships. Parallels and contrasts across the two love triangles (Veronica-Tom-Michael and Ada-Charlie-Lambert) tie the narratives together.
Shrugging off bourgeois hypocrisy, Veronica believes she owes it to her family to reconstruct the truth about Liam's life and death. Her siblings, parents, and grandparents have averted their eyes from disgusting truths, which must now come out. However, truth that relies on fallible memory is a mirage. Veronica confesses that she "would like to write down what happened in my grandmother's house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. ... I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns ..."
What makes Enright's novel an absorbing psychological study and sets it apart from its tattle-tale comrades is its lack of certainty, its vagueness, a fog that sometimes conceals and sometimes partly lifts to reveal the shifting, blurred outline of the 'truth.' This book is for readers who prefer shades of grey to black and white, the bitter to the sweet, and mockery of middle-class self-deception to comfortable illusions of respectability.
Difficulty coming to terms August 3, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Anne Enright has written a book that will (and has) spark debates for years to come. 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. 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. The story unfolds when her brother Liam commits suicide and Veronica is forced to bring the body from England - the scene of his death.
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. 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. Anne Enright has done a remarkable job outlining the troubling life of this thirty something woman who finds difficulty in gripping reality.
Editor of the novel: Fates by Georgiou, Tino Fates (2nd Edition)
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