I did not like this book. It is the only book I have ever read where I didnt like any of the characters. I found it a strain to read and was glad when I finished it. ( )

I did not like this book and was tempted not to finish it. It was boring and tedious. Other reviewers have expressed my exact sentiments so I will not attempt to improve on them. ( )

Enright pushes the 'unreliable narrator' to the breaking point in this somewhat harrowing read. Feels almost hallucinatory, with a welter of images, memories, false memories, flat out fictions, and dark thoughts coming at you. Not to mention the most horrible interior descriptions of even fairly loving relationships, everything just coated in putrid slime. Brrr. ( )

Good writing, but not my cup of tea. ( )

It took a while for me to get into this, the language is full of Irish terms .. and the main character is cold and very difficult to understand. ( )

I don't regard the Man Booker prize as a reliable indicator of books that I might like, and I have no idea what criteria are used by the M B prize judges. However I can see that this is the kind of book that might appeal to the judges of a literature prize. In many ways it's a collection of images and feelings-in-context rather than a straight forward story. A number of LT reviewers apparently don't like this style!...but I do - that's what my life is like. I seem to recall that the book was recommended to me by an artist known as "Fifi LaStupenda" who has a brilliant blog (http://fifilastupenda.blogspot.com/), which is also a series of images and thoughts, rather than a simple narrative. I liked the basic concept of the book: the death of a woman's brother causes her to reflect on her current life and the life she shared with her brother. I guess she is initially trying to answer the question: why did he suicide? But then she goes on to question the value of her own life and try to understand herself in her present context. I liked this book & I'll be interested to compare it with another of her books ("Taking Pictures") sitting in my "to read" pile. ( )

People tend to get somewhat distracted by prizes, and some authors become even more self-regarding. This book has tremendous ambitions but it is not always the ambition to describe a family's loss. More often, it's the ambition to write a great novel and become famous. There is a lot of scraping of the bottom of the emotional barrel here.

There are abrupt transitions, one-sentence paragraphs, unexpected diversions, invented memories and fragmentary scenes, and they are part of the novel's purpose: Enright wants to demonstrate what happens when memories are defective. The problem is that there is another reason why writers turn to fragments and hypothetical scenes: because they are struggling to fill the page, to build the novel, to write a masterpiece of introspection. As I read, I sometimes felt the sting of real pain, real memories: but more often, I felt the persistent trouble the author had in writing great prose, in putting together a great book. Moments when other authors would drill down into difficult memories are alleviated by the sparkly kaleidoscope of Enright's writing. As proof: we never understand why the mother should be so despised; we never hear the difficult conversations with the family about Liam's past; we never see more than fragments of the narrator's noctournal life. When I read those pages describing how the narrator would stay up all night while her husband slept, I thought: Yes, that's Enright, staying up all night fretting about her Great Novel.

Enright is like Kavanagh in the rawness, the nakedness of her writing. But Kavanagh's ambition was to see himself, to understand things clearly and honestly. Here there is much naked ambition, too little naked analysis.

If the prize hasn't cocooned her in a warm swathe of self-regard, then she might well go on to something genuinely strong. But this is a weak novel, where family feelings are marred by an unpleasant desire for fame. ( )

If I am honest I found this difficult to follow, although I did enjoy the underlying story.

The subject of abuse was skirted around for most of the book and that left me feeling as if it perhaps wasn't given as much importance as perhaps it should have.

Good in parts would seem a fair assessment, but overall I was left disappointed. ( )

A difficult subject - many brothers and sisters, most ignored and some abused. The American upwardly mobile middle class seems "silly" in light of the this family's pain. ( )

I really did not enjoy this book at all. I found it really slow moving. I read it 2 weeks ago and I can't even really remember what happened in it - that might be my old brain but think it is more likely that it is because it was an unremarkable book. I can't believe it won the man booker prize. ( )

Fine writing but for me too little narrative. Someon has died, we go back through a family history. Will we ever go forward? I lost the will to find out. (Well actually I skipped to the end but found little to make me regret my haste). Sorry. ( )

I never quite got into this book but that could be because I rushed through it in one day. After her brother's death, Veronica needs to sort a few things out to bring him back home. While all the siblings gather together for the funeral, she looks back at their lives (and that of their grandmother) to reach the moment where she thinks her brother's fate was decided. ( )

We find it intense, lyrical, thoughtful,reflecting experiences of three Irish generations.

A beautiful book. Dark, midnight dark, but filled with heart, and the writing is absolutely stunning. The depth with which Anne Enright portrays her characters is impressive and as a result they are completely believable, beyond believable, in fact, they are alive. She makes it look easy, organic, effortless -- the mark of a wonderful writer. My only criticism is that the turning point crisis seemed a bit too familiar and I would have liked Enright to have pushed the plot into new territory, rather than that which seemed a bit obvious. ( )

The writing style of this book has this beautiful, lyrical poetic flow to it, that captures the reader from the start, Enright has done an amazing job at capturing the emotions and creating such real aspects of it, that pour out of the page. Her ability to show the level of grief of the family, the level of emotion, the level of their characteristics is amazing. Unfortunately, the protagonist is one, which I really disliked, she had her reasons for being the way she is, and she is very grief ridden, but the way she acts, her way of thinking just becomes so very un-likeable, it ruins the story at time, despite the wonderful style of writing. I don’t know much more to what I could say, the author has done an amazing job at capturing the Irish sprit, and at capturing the emotions in grief, family secrets, and the emotions of life in general, but I found the one character and her attitude, just ruined the story for me. I liked finding out more about the family, but the main character Veronica was a character that I couldn’t connect to or liked enough to like the story more. Again, a fantastic and beautiful flow and style of writing, truly stunning.

Review can also be found at my book review blog
http://juliebooks.blogspot.com/2009/0... ( )

I enjoyed Irish writer Anne Enright’s fourth novel The Gathering, winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2007. Although I wasn’t sure of that fact in the first few pages of this novel about a large Irish family gathering together for a wake in Dublin. It is a story involving many familiar themes, the role of memory in the present, family secrets, sexual abuse, alcohol abuse, suicide, and absentee parents, but it is also filled with passages of love and it‘s close relative hate. Veronica Hegarty, 39 years old, looses her best loved brother Laim to suicide. With his pockets full of stones, wearing a bright fluorescent jacket, and no socks or underwear, Liam, an alcoholic, drowns himself off Brighton Beach . Precisely because she loves Liam, she understands the later two conditions that attended her brother‘s suicide, but much more:
“I 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 need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me - this thing that may not have taken place. I don't even know what name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones.”
Enright successfully moves back and forth though past and present and in and out of fact and fantasy in this rich tapestry of family life. We find Veronica’s varying versions of the past acted out by her grandmother Ada , Ada’s suitor Charlie, and Lambert Nugent, who is perhaps a family friend, perhaps a rival suitor, but surely a significant figure in this family tragedy. As Veronica creates and recreates Ada’s life she understands more of her rather vague mother, mad uncle and many siblings, and finally a hard truth about her own life:
“I thought about this, as I saw in the Shelbourne bar - 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.”
Enright has created a beautiful work full of all the hard edges of reality and soft slippery slopes of love. Well worth the read! ( )

A deep, dark almost cheerless read. But well written and a worthy prize winner. If you enjoy the many tales of miserable Irish childhoods it's for you. I think I'll look for a cheerier novel for my next read. ( )

Beautifully written (smooth, silken style, relentless and at times quite funny too) meditation on grief, time, memory--how the mind muses, backfills, avoids, denies. Also on family, its ghosts past and present.--specifically, the huge Hegarty clan, which is gathering for the funeral of handsome, hapless, desperately drunken Liam, who has put rocks in his pockets and walked into the sea. His closest sibling Veronica tells the tale, managing eventually to touch down in her own reality by coming to terms with the past, and her terrible secret knowledge that Liam’s fate was written at the age of 9 when he was sexually molested by their grandmother’s landlord [not info given away early]. Powerful stuff. For the Irish family gathering/wayward boy (American, this time), see Charming Billy, Alice McDermott (Nat’l Bk Award); for meditations on memory, family, Ireland, grief, and writing to die for, The Sea, John Banville (Man Booker 2005), other works as well for unreliable narrator, wicked humor and self-serving “memory”; more accessibly, his Benjamin Black novels. Excellent novel on awful subject of sexual abuse of boys and consequences--Mysterious Skin, Scott Heim. ( )

Unbelievably dreary.

I desperately wanted to like it but struggled. Maybe it was one too many penis references.

At its best the book rings true in describing the difficulties of relationships with family, the unevenness of childhood memories, and the damage to lives that can be sustained from childhood incidents. I could be too harsh in my rating, maybe the book was just too damn blunt and "real", but all I can say was I was glad when it ended.

Favorite quote:
"Now I know that the look in Liam's eye was the look of someone who knows they are alone. Because the world will never know what has happened to you, and what you carry around as a result of it. Even your sister - your saviour in a way, the girl who stands in the light of that hall - even she does not hold or remember the thing she saw. Because, by that stage, I think I had forgotten it entirely". ( )

An intense odyssey through the heart of Irish suburbia but with resonances for troubled famlies and marriages everywhere - told in a wonderfully engaging and simplistic language which must have been difficult to capture. Because of the setting [times and locales] I particularly indentified with the narrator but you know we all have these troubles, we just have to go on and smile. ( )

reviewed on my blog ( )

Glorious, controlled writing unfurls this Irish family saga of memory and love. Some might complain of the lack of plot but that just allows for a richer exploration of internal life. What I did fail to connect with however was the absence of an exploration of the social and political setting. The spotlight is relentlessly directed to the personal (something that marks novels off as "female" reads?) and I did on occassion hanker for a little external philosophising as light relief. An impressive book non the less, although some of the sexual tinkerings were a bit rich for my taste.. ( )

I went through like-dislike phases with this book, but regretfully towards the end I found myself losing interest and appreciation. Not that there weren't moments when I thought "Brilliant!" It just for some reason didn't work for me as well as it should have. I was finally tired to try to find out how the narrator was like her grandmother, how she and her siblings were "interfered with" and how they were affected by their childhood experiences.

There were times when I tried to draw parallelisms between this book and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, which I enjoyed reading tremendously. But beyond the fact that both are Irish and both talk about the miserable Catholic Irish childhood with a drinking problem somewhere in the household, I am not sure that this book turns out as appealing to me as the other. I found myself tired of the excessive phallic references, which I understood to be necessary. But there's a fine line between stylistic necessity and vulgarity, and I think Enright crossed it with this attempt. This is not to say, of course, that I don't think the author has a great writing style. ( )

Oh, Anne Enright, how I wish I could hate you. Let me share a little story: about two or three years ago (well before she won the Booker prize), I had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of Anne Enright when I arranged for her to speak to a class of study abroad students in Dublin. My professor, who as part of the study abroad course was teaching an Irish women's literature section, was particularly interested in Enright's perspective as, whaddyaknow, an Irish woman writer, but apparently this label offended Enright to no end. When she arrived, after a short train ride from Bray, she was the surliest, most unapproachable individual I have ever heard speak. She sat at the table, barely willing to articulate more than a few words together, and alienated the students that we were paying her several hundred euros to enlighten (for heaven's sake, even in some minor way). It was, at a word, frustrating, and so this summer, when I met her again at a larger and more formal function, I was loathe to allow myself any enjoyment at the occasion. I rolled my eyes as she spoke about the newly discovered burden of fame and felt quite satisfied when she gave evidence of being, if not so surly as before, at least solidly antagonistic toward much of the world. It was enough, at least, to perpetuate my particular understanding of her a little while longer.

Actually, I would have been content to heartily dislike the woman for the rest of my life, if she weren't such a genius on the page. I say this, so you can believe it, with the full weight of a grudge long held -- I wish I could consign this woman's work to the bin, at least verbally, with some erudite critical lashing, but the fact is, the fact remains, that she is a bloody genius. This book, The Gathering, for which she won the Booker prize, is the sort of novel that clings to you. Just as its characters do within the story, the book itself gets under your skin. You find yourself looking out of windows, or neglecting the whistling kettle, not so much thinking, not coherently, about reading one more chapter, but feeling an indistinct urge to return to the narrative -- to see the finish of these lives, as much as you will ever see it. There is a certain magic to her first-person style that feels so intimate, it's almost as if you, the reader, are becoming tangled in the narrator's emotions. And these are not happy emotions. This is no romance novel where one delights in the happy bubble bursting in your chest as the love ripples out of the page. One does not want these feelings and yet there is no escaping them. "Drawn in" is a phrase we use when we speak of good books, of favorite plots and fantasy epics, but it is not quite right here. It's more like being hooked, and struggling to be free.

The prose is occasionally complex, occasionally even slightly incoherent, which is where Enright seems to excel even in comparison with the rest of her writing. Inside the narrator's head, things are a jumble, and so we are jumbled along with them, and even clarity is not quite clear, in the end. I cannot say that this book is charming, or delightful, or any of those bright, easy words that describe so many of the books I like to read. I don't really know that I liked to read this book at all. But I was compelled to, and it was brilliant, and as much as I would rather tell you that this whole thing was a stinking pile, I can't -- if you are a reader of literary fiction, or a connoisseur of prose, or even just an emotional type, then it is for you that I admit Anne Enright's brilliance. Surly thing that she is.