The Gathering | 
 enlarge | Author: Anne Enright
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Category: EBooks
List Price: $11.00
Buy New: $8.80
You Save: $2.20 (20%)
Rating:  125 reviews
Sales Rank: 360
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
Publication Date: November 2, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Amazon.com Review
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
In the taut latest from Enright (What Are You Like?), middle-aged Veronica Hegarty, the middle child in an Irish-Catholic family of nine, traces the aftermath of a tragedy that has claimed the life of rebellious elder brother Liam. As Veronica travels to London to bring Liam's body back to Dublin, her deep-seated resentment toward her overly passive mother and her dissatisfaction with her husband and children come to the fore. Tempers flare as the family assembles for Liam's wake, and a secret Veronica has concealed since childhood comes to light. Enright skillfully avoids sentimentality as she explores Veronica's past and her complicated relationship with Liam. She also bracingly imagines the life of Veronica's strong-willed grandmother, Ada. A melancholic love and rage bubbles just beneath the surface of this Dublin clan, and Enright explores it unflinchingly.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 120 more reviews...
 Graceful & Imaginative September 21, 2008
Patricia Harrelson (Jamestown, Ca USA)
I'm not surprised that this book won the Booker Prize. Enright has a superior command of the language. She creates fluid yet surprising prose, moving between real and imagined events, past and present with astounding grace and skill. This book is a surreal meditation on family--mother love, sister love, craziness, memory, and in particular the way one generation impacts the next.
 Self-indulgent and tedious September 5, 2008
S. Leigh Whitaker (Ohio)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
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 a book, because I like to form my own opinions first. I didn't read the reviews here in this case either, and it's funny that as I read this book the words "tedious and self-indulgent" kept going through my head. I see that mentioned quite a few times here on the reviews, and I think it's interesting that these were the exact descriptions I came up with as well. Let me also say that I very rarely dislike a book enough to write a negative review of it. As a matter of fact, this is the first negative book review I have submitted to Amazon.
Much of what I could say about the book has already been said very well by other reviewers. I won't give a synopsis of the "plot" since that has already been done numerous times and I don't have anything more interesting to contribute about that, especially since I'm not even sure what the plot was.
As many have mentioned, the writing style is disjointed. This is not something I am generally opposed to in a book. I happen to adore The Time Traveler's Wife and Water for Elephants, which I think both incorporated a brilliant use of this technique. It's very effective if done well and for a reason. In The Gathering, there is certainly a reason to use the technique. The author is trying to convey the main character's disjointed and uncertain memories of her and her families' past. One would think this style would suit quite nicely, but it falls disappointingly short, making the book difficult to read and tiresome. A difficult book is not necessarily a bad thing, but in this case there seems to be no reward for slogging through the jumbled and, maybe (or maybe not) imagined scenes of the past.
We are never sure if Victoria is remembering or imagining what happened as a child. We are also unclear about her telling of the story of her grandmother Ada. There is no way she could know the story of Ada, so we can be fairly sure these stories are meant to be read as fabricated. As a result, this part of the story has to be telling us more about Victoria's character than Ada's, but what is the purpose? Both of these devices are so confusing and ineffective that we just don't care after a while. Eventually it seems that we are just being beat over the head with them. Yes! I get it that she's not sure of her childhood memories, she has an imagined life for her grandmother. I GET IT! Enough already!
I'm not generally opposed to graphic sex scenes either, but the ones in this book are again, confusing, disjointed, and well... seemingly pointless. Sex is painted with an angry brush, and we are never quite sure where this anger is coming from. What is its purpose and what does it lend to the story? How can we figure it out when we're not even sure what really happened? I'm still not sure, but it makes for a very dark read. I found myself comparing this aspect of the story to The Crimson Petal and the White, which also had abundant and dark sex scenes. In that case however, they were an integral part of the story. The story could not have been told without them. They made sense. In The Gathering, they just don't make sense. I feel the author must have had a reason, but that reason is lost in the (often) awkward prose, disjointed narrative, and dreary and confused "soul searching" of the main character.
I'm not going to say much about the portrayal of the characters. I will say that I found them mostly incomprehensible and unlikable.
About halfway through the book (after what seemed like a year of reading) the "secret" is revealed. That in itself was disappointing because (yawn), it is so trite and expected. At that point I did have a glimmer of hope though. Maybe the plot would turn around. Maybe something would now happen and the seemingly pointless ramblings would coalesce into a well defined, or at least a somewhat recognizable theme. Unfortunately this never happened (or hasn't so far, as I'm not done yet). The story wanders around some more and culminates into the wake of brother Liam, again finding no purpose or redemption.
I have, maybe, 50 pages left to go in the book, but I relented on my self imposed "rule" and decided to check the reviews here to see if there was any compelling reason to finish the book. I probably will, just because I find it hard to abandon a book, but I now have no hope that anything will redeem the book in my eyes.
I called my mom to tell her my opinions so far.
Me: Hey, remember that book you gave me to read?
Mom: No, which one?
Me: The Gathering
Mom: I don't remember it.
Me: It's about a woman whose brother dies, I guess...
Mom: That's not ringing a bell for me.
Me: Let me read the back to you. [I read the description on the back]
Mom: I still don't remember it. Are you sure it was me who gave it to you?
Me: Yeah, you said it had a lot of sex in it.
Mom: Oh yeah, that one. I remember it had a lot of sex, but don't remember what it was about.
Me: It wasn't about anything really.
Mom: Oh, okay.
*I feel I should note, in the spirit of the book, that I may not be remembering these conversations accurately.
BTW- if anyone would like this book I'll send it to you for the cost of shipping only. I usually give my old books to friends or relatives, but I can't fathom recommending this book to anyone. If you have read the reviews and would still like to give it a read, let me know. :o)
Hidden in the Past September 1, 2008
Nicole Abraham (Los Angeles, CA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
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, and her dysfunctional family in order to truly appreciate what she had and as the cliche goes "she needed to find herself".
Veronica's exploration was so internal that I had a difficult time deciphering the source of dysfunction in her family and in her life. The first half of the novel left me wondering what was so screwed up about the Hegarty clan. It could have been the absent and always reproducing mother. Or Veronica's hatred of men and shocking portrayal of sex led me to believe she was molested as a child. Nevertheless, nothing was apparent on the surface. What was supposed to be "on the surface" was the relationship between her grandmother and Lambert Nugent. Until Liam's secret was revealed, the relationship had no purpose to the reader. After Veronica's disclosure of Liam's secret, the reader finally knows that Nugent was inadvertently responsible for Liam's suicide.
While the words written by Anne Enright were pleasurable to read, the story jumps between past and present in a confusing manner. It made Veronica's journey truly difficult to follow. What made the novel more complex was the unreliability of the narrator. Veronica admitted to being an unreliable narrator, so I was never sure whether she was retelling true events or retelling works of the imagination of her eight year self.
 All men are bookies ... August 27, 2008
Zechristof (Albuquerque, NM United States)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
The image on the veil August 25, 2008
Larry Dilg (Van Nuys, CA USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
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