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The Gathering (Man Booker Prize)
by: Anne Enright

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780802170392
ISBN: 0802170390
Label: Grove Press, Black Cat
Manufacturer: Grove Press, Black Cat
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: September 10, 2007
Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
Sales Rank: 511
Studio: Grove Press, Black Cat

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Editorial Review:

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.

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

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Self-indulgent and tedious
My mother gave me this book a few months ago.

*Mom: I can't believe I'm giving this book to my DAUGHTER, but I'm interested to see what you'll think of it.
Me: Why wouldn't you give it to me?
Mom: It's uh... There's a lot of uh... Well, just read it and you'll see.

I took this to mean it has a lot of sex in it.

So, it sat on my shelf for a while, because I had a few other books in the queue. Honestly, I love a good sprawling family novel, but the description on the back just didn't grab me for some reason.

We went on vacation last week and I threw it in the suitcase since I knew I'd be finishing the book I was currently reading. I picked it up on the drive back and noticed for the first time that it won the Booker Award. "Well, that has to be a good sign", I thought. It wasn't.

I don't usually read the reviews here before reading ... Read More

Rating:

- Hidden in the Past
The Gathering tells the story of Veronica Hegarty, lost in the secrecy of her brother Liam's sudden suicide. As a result of her brother's death, she's forced to deal with the issues of her very large Irish family, her many issues with men and sex, her past, and her future. In the wake of Liam's death she explores her complicated relationship with her late brother by diving into her family's past. Reading the exposing portrayal I felt like an intruder. It seemed that Veronica's self reflective journey through three generations of her family was not meant to be read by others.

Her journey reveals that she is the only living member of the dwindling Hegarty clan to know her brother's secret, and she carries that burden. You can see it in the way she runs away instead of facing her problems. To me that felt cowardly. However in the end I think Veronica needed to run away from her marriage, her children, ... Read More

Rating:

- All men are bookies ...
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 ... Read More

Rating:

- The image on the veil
The narrator, Veronica, gathers the broken pieces of her life, her memory, and her family in this uncomfortably honest piece of writing. The reader must dance on shifting emotional sands as the narrator plays with remembered and imagined stories, allowing uncertainty full rein. Her sentences resemble splinters - shards of consonants, cultural detritus, and thrusts at truth that lodge under the skin, annoying you until you can pull them out. Sometimes I just wanted to chuck the book away in frustration - other times I would think, yes...this is the only possible way to express this. As the husband of an Irish-American, I have some experience with the high temper of the narrator and her family: I both laughed and shook my head ruefully at the family gathering. Veronica's attempts to gather and sort the pieces of Liam's personal drama were moving, especially because narrative uncertainty kept her (and us) from oversimplifying ... Read More

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