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:  151 reviews
Sales Rank: 5225
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 146 more reviews...
 Raw view of suicide surviors,each caught within their own worlds June 29, 2009
Mary Lee Kraushaar (Loganville, GA)
Although set within a large dysfuntional Irish family, this speaks to the famlies of the world. Any time "shameful" secrets are allowed to fester, they shape lives and deaths, and guilty conscious' as ANNE ENRIGHT so powerfully illustrates in The Gathering. Just when you think you have it all perfectly in place, WHAM!. A curve I certainly didn't see coming. Love,bonds even death can't break,addiction's,mental illness, it has it all. A fine weekend's read.The Portable VirginThe Wig My Father Wore What Are You Like?: A Novel The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch: A Novel
 Shoot the Booker people June 24, 2009
CJM - (London, UK)
This book was nothing special.
It was an okay book. All over the place, not well written, indecisive, a bit of a waste of time, but the sort of book a person picks up time and time again, and thinks, "That was an okay book".
The trouble is, when labels like WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE are attached to books. The label says, or at any rate suggests, this is really something, this is worth reading, go out and buy this book, read this book! And then you do, and you're filled with a sense of disappointment. You've been cheated, deceived, fraudulently robbed of your 6.99 (or $whatever).
The Booker people need to stop attaching a "Man Booker Winner" label to books that don't deserve praise. Then there wouldn't be so many disappointed people providing reviews like the low-star ones you find here. People who only bought/read the book in the first place because the Booker label suggested the read would be worth it.
Luckily my local library was chucking out five copies of this book, so I got it more or less for free.
I felt the same sense of disappointment with another Booker winner, "The God of Small Things", as I felt with this book. This one wasn't quite as bad as that one, but it didn't deserve a prize.
The Booker Prize people need to say, some years, "No book was up to prize-winning standard this year." Then they wouldn't waste our time and money.
Irish Eyes Are Not Smiling June 22, 2009
Ann Ahnemann (NJ, USA)
Man Booker. OK. The writing is gorgeous. Plot, characters? If you have a tendency to depression this is not the book for you! It is a relentlessly and ultimately tiring dark tale of Irish life: too much sex, too many children, too much booze and death, death, death. The young girl picturing maggots swelling inside her dead grandfather was the end for me. Nope. Couldn't take it.
This really won awards? June 4, 2009
Chris M. Bonnell (Buffalo, MN)
A very odd, wordy, and chaotic book. This was the first book chosen for our new book club, and it was such a disappointment to all of our 14 members. We chose the book based on its recommendations and awards, however were sorely disappointed.
Rewriting family history May 31, 2009
J. Ang (Singapore)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The narrator Veronica Hegarty's brother walks into the sea and she tries to link it to something unspeakable that happened in her grandmother's house some 30 years ago. With such a tasty morsel anchoring the story, there promises to be plenty of scope for an epic family drama, with 12 siblings each boasting various degrees of damage growing up in the Hegarty household and exhibiting them in flawed adult personalities.
However this premise does not quite follow through. Perhaps the problem lay in the fact that Enright chose to tell the story solely through Veronica's perspective, without any room for counter perspectives. It might also have worked if Veronica wasn't such a self-involved sex-obsessed/frustrated whiner who can't resist turning the focus on herself even as she tries to come to terms with her brother's suicide and the secret she thinks she holds which is responsible in some way for his untimely demise, and not just drink as was popularly believed.
Through it all, she shows her worst trying to deal with it, turning nasty to her loving husband and various other family members. One can't help but think of her as that irritating friend who loves an audience to her private drama, who relishes doling out unsavory morsels of her failings, and more importantly, how others' failings inevitably shaped hers. Even though she promises to tell her brother's story, she is more interested in how it affects her, in a case of 'enough about me, let's talk about ME!'
This continues in frustrating fashion so much so that by the time Veronica gets to the point some two-thirds of the novel, no one is particularly shocked or interested anyway, even as she edits and correct her version of what her saw to show how traumatised she is by the event.
Perhaps Enright intended for her protagonist to be unreliable and detestable, in order to drive home the point that family histories are rarely simple and never reliable, and that it is always being rewritten and always changeable.
To Enright's credit, her prose is exacting and she does delve into Veronica's psyche with some precision, and one inevitably walks away from the book feeling moved in some way
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