The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) | 
|  | | | Title: | The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) | | Author: | Anne Enright | | Publisher: | Grove Press, Black Cat | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 10 September, 2007 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0802170390 / 9780802170392 | | List Price: | $14.00 | | You Save: | $2.80 | | Amazon Price: | $11.20 | |
 This book is also available, brand-new, from 3rd-party marketplace sellers at Amazon.com, from $4.50. |
The HTML code below can be pasted onto your web-site, your MySpace page, or blog - or any number of similar places - to create a link to this page: If, instead of a text link, you'd like to create a link to this page which will display the book cover, if it's available, then the code below will do exactly that:
Check for the same book at these other US book sites:
• [ Abebooks ] • [ Alibris ] • [ Barnes & Noble ] • [ Half.com ] • [ Powells ] … or check UK bookstores
| Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
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
| Other Items You May Enjoy:
Browse Books From These Related Subjects:
Customer Reviews:
• Masterful Prose But Lacking In Momentum 06 August, 2008
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A2KIVODZRTGY4U
• Terrible Waste Of Time! 05 August, 2008
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1N8W7B1J9515V
• Not Their Best 13 August, 2008
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3NH7PYU4AD5GA
• All Men Are Bookies ... 27 August, 2008
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.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1C9WVCEU72PJB
• The Image On The Veil 25 August, 2008
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 the story. By making the novel Veronica's story, Liam was rescued from the status of beautiful loser.
The book jacket didn't really prepare me for all the sex in the novel. I had no objections to it - indeed, I was quite happy to read such a deep meditation on childhood and adult sexuality, especially her relationship with her husband, which was particularly vivid - but the novel was quite different from the wake I expected. "Gathering" mainly describes the narrator's act of summoning the pieces of herself and putting them back together. As a fan of St. Veronica and her veil, I loved the way Enright applied this tea-towel of a text to the narrator's past: the image we behold may initially look like Liam, but in the end it belongs to the observer, whether Veronica or the reader himself.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3ER9PKW9P746E
|
