The Gathering

by Anne Enright
The Gathering  
published 2007 by Jonathan Cape
binding Hardcover
isbn 0224078739   (isbn13: 9780224078733)
pages 272
literary awards Booker Prize Winner 2007
date added
03-20-07



Sign in to Goodreads to see your friends' reviews of The Gathering.







discuss this book

topics replies last activity
Constant Reader 1 18 days ago, 10:05AM
A potrait of a large Irish family 1 01/01/2008 01:38PM

groups with this book

Constant Reader
Literary Prizes
Booker List
Noella's Book Club
Szirine New York
 NY Book Club




friend reviews (0)

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.



other reviews (showing 1-20 of 1950)



Jason
Jason rated it: 5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars5 of 5 stars
04/29/08

Read in April, 2008
(My full review of this book is larger than Goodreads' word-count limit. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

As a book critic, I of course try to steer clear of any information I can about a book I'm about to review, until I'm done with the book myself and have already made up my mind about what I thought; so imagine my sur...more
Like this review?   yes   (2 people liked it)
  add a comment

Gin
04/17/08

bookshelves: best
Outstanding. The Gathering is an early (and strong) contender for my favorite book of 2008. I'm tempted to add it to the "best" shelf but I want to wait a bit just to be sure that I'm not over-zealous in my surprise and affection. Give me a couple of months to make up my mind as it matters more than a little. I'll be honest; I'll use semi-colons. Hyphens too. And fragments. Anyway, I was prepared to like this book but I did not expect to seize it as fiercely as I have. It's abo...more
Like this review?   yes   (4 people liked it)
  2 comments

Fiona
02/26/08

bookshelves: books-i-loved
Read in February, 2008
recommends it for: the bereaved
This is the best novel about grief and bereavement that I have read.

Enright captures the peculiar relationship of close siblings perfectly. It is not about love - you don't "love" a close sibling just as you don't "love" your arm. They are a part of you. When they die, you are broken. It is a hard, bitter, angry book because the grief you feel when a close sibling dies is a hard, bitter anger. An anger that is as close to madness as makes no difference. Grief colours ever...more
Like this review?   yes   (1 person liked it)
  add a comment

Trevor
10/29/07

Read in October, 2007
This was the only book on the Booker short list that I did not want to read. When it won, I was disappointed because I thought it looked too much like Banville's The Sea, and I did not enjoy my time with that book. However, I thought I needed to give The Gathering a shot. No, I was not pleasantly surprised.
Enright's The Gathering may have a some inciteful, well written sentences, and it may be well structured both in sequence and theme, but for what purpose? I did no...more
Like this review?   yes   (6 people liked it)
  2 comments

Melody
04/29/08

bookshelves: bookgroup
Read in April, 2008
recommended to Melody by: Pat Clotfelter
Veronica and the remainder of her large family, are about to gather at the family home for the wake of her brother. As she prepares for this reunion she tries to decide which of her memories are real and which are imagined. There is something that Veronica remembers that may or may not have happened in her grandmother’s house. She skitters around it – teases us with what she may or may not have seen, then deliberately goes off to something that she may, or may not remember; something that ...more
Like this review?   yes   (1 person liked it)
  1 comments

Sammy
04/20/08

bookshelves: the-bad
Read in February, 2008
Please excuse me as I make a noise of annoyance, disgust, boredom and all around dissatisfaction... UGHARGHHHHUHHH. Don't even know how to spell that or if it makes any sense. Hey, that makes a nice segue into my review.

Let me start with the one perk I can honestly give this book. Anne Enright has a beautiful grasp of words but she doesn't know how to use them. She also had a wonderful gem of an idea for a story, but she didn't know how to develop it. Combine those two together you get ...more
Like this review?   yes  
  add a comment

mali
04/16/08

bookshelves: ireland, literature, memory, uk
Read in April, 2008
In terms of writing, characterization, and the exploration of memory - this is among the best books I have read, period.

I am not a grieving middle-aged woman with a large family who has lost her brother to suicide. But the strong and accurate portrayal of alienation, loss, and grief - and the way people deal with these things in ways that are erratic, self-destructive, confusing, and unpredictable and illogical even to themselves - had me finding myself identifying with the narrator much mo...more
Like this review?   yes   (2 people liked it)
  1 comments

Lisa
05/12/08

When I see that some people have given this book five stars, I start to question my own sanity. For me, the book had wonderful potential when I took it off the shelf and the Booker Award sticker only reinforced my impression that this would be a great read: WRONG. Wonderful words strung together does not a good story make. The narrator is completely two-dimensional as written and I was unable to connect with her or her perspective in any way. Yes, I understand the woman's "beloved" ...more
Like this review?   yes  
  add a comment

Alice
03/14/08

bookshelves: read-in-2008
Read in March, 2008
I bought this book because I once again fell for Borders' Buy-1-Get-1-50%-Off deal. I needed a 2nd book, and this one won the Man Booker Prize in 2007. Hell, I thought, it can't be that bad.

Well, it wasn't terrible, but once again, I was deathly bored. More and more, I find myself very annoyed at authors who use the carrot-on-a-stick opening shtick (e.g. "OMG, you guys! Something HORRIBLE happened at my grandmother's house in 1968!! Now you've got to read this to find out what it w...more
Like this review?   yes   (2 people liked it)
  add a comment

Sharon
01/31/08

Read in January, 2008
recommends it for: language lovers
Enright does many lovely things in this novel. I imagine the language of this novel is what gained the admiration of the Booker committee. Enright can do a lot in a paragraph:

The problem with Liam was never something big. The problem with Liam was always a hundred small things. He had cigarettes but no matches, did I have matches? Yes, but the match breaks, the match doesn't strike, he can't light these cheap Albanian trash matches. Do I have a lighter? F—k, he has split the matches. Why ...more
Like this review?   yes  
  add a comment

Rebecca
Read in December, 2007
I'd like to give this book 2.5 stars. It's better than okay, but I can't really say that I liked it. It's a romantic, drifty, floaty, "I've been unmoored" book about grief, and I much prefer more concrete books like Joan Didion's Magical Thinking.

There are some moments of real illumination here. But I never felt the loss of the person being grieved, and the marriage complication seems tacked on to give a possible consequence to the narrator's extremely self-involved actions. ...more
Like this review?   yes   (1 person liked it)
  add a comment

Paula
04/29/08

Read in October, 2007
I was given a signed copy of this book a few days after Enright won the Booker Prize. She had signed it at a conference on Irish women writers, at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where my daughter had presented a paper. I had tagged along as a tourist, and the gray skies and gray buildings of Leuven perfectly suited the gray mood produced by the book.

Don't read "The Gathering" if you're already in a grim mood. Yes, there is some humor, of a very bitter, sardonic kind, but the na...more
Like this review?   yes   (1 person liked it)
  add a comment

Tabitha
bookshelves: blog, cross-reviewed, reviewed
Read in January, 2008
The Gathering was not the book that I thought it would be when I began reading it. As promised, it is a journey through a family's lively history of family gatherings, childhood adventures, and diminished dreams. I type that the dreams were diminished, but if I were to be more accurate, I would type that they were reevaluated. The ideals that we hold have room for adaptation. There are beautiful moments that are both imagined and revealed. I enjoyed this journey, but not in the way that I i...more
Like this review?   yes   (1 person liked it)
  add a comment

Kevin
12/23/07

Read in December, 2007
It's been said that Sigmund Freud said of the Irish "This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."
After reading the Gathering you can begin to understand why. The Irish seem to be haunted not only by guilt and shame, but by the ghosts of their dead relatives as well. Here's a particularly telling passage from the novel :

" I know I sound bitter, and Christ I wish I wasn't such a hard bitch sometimes, but my brother blamed me for twenty years or ...more
Like this review?   yes   (2 people liked it)
  1 comments

Susan
11/09/07

Read in November, 2007
Enright is brilliant. She tells the story in the voice of an angry, bitter woman capable of the darkest humor and the most unreliable of narrations. Veronica's responsible for identifying the corpse and bringing back from Brighton the remains of her drowned brother. She's also footing the bill for the funeral and coffin; that's how close she was to Liam. She believes his problems started the year they and their younger sister Kitty (there were 12 Hegarty children if you count Stevie, "the l...more
Like this review?   yes  
  add a comment

Katherine
My family has no appreciation for a good, honest tragedy. They poke fun at me for liking "depressing" things. I talked this book up to my mom, because I thought she'd enjoy the author's no-nonsense sensibility and her description of how an enormous Irish family shows its love, but now I realize that I can't buy her this one for her birthday. ;)

This story of a large Irish family converging after the death of one of their own masterfully handles the most difficult parts of memory and...more
Like this review?   yes   (1 person liked it)
  add a comment

Kelly
11/21/07

bookshelves: irish
Read in November, 2007
Enright’s The Gathering is a bleak, often brutal, and sometimes viciously humorous, gem of a novel. Veronica Hegarty is on her way to London to collect the body of her dead brother, Liam, who committed suicide by drowning himself. In her grieving, Veronica navigates her past, and Liam’s, and the entire large Irish Catholic family she belongs to. What unfolds is a tapestry of recollections, atmospheric and unreliable. Veronica, being only 11 months younger than Liam, shared a close re...more
Like this review?   yes   (2 people liked it)
  3 comments

Teresa
05/08/08

Read in May, 2008
The artistry here is masterful. I was hooked by the writing style, and its attempts to understand and fill in memory, perceptions and the past. I know there are some who didn't like the book because of the narrator and the subject matter -- and it is true that the narrator is not someone you will like (though that isn't the point, of course) -- but if you can get past that, there is some insightful writing here.

I never minded 'listening' to the thoughts in the narrator's head (horrible and...more
Like this review?   yes  
  add a comment

John
04/19/08

bookshelves: literature
Read in March, 2008
Winner of the 2007 Man Booker prize, this poignant, melancholy novel by Enright has several things to recommend it. Foremost was the writing style which was both brazenly direct and subtly evasive in its treatment of grief. At times edging to the rim of hope and resolution Enright throws these glimmers of light painfully away. Enright also captures the intimacies of a large close family well, where ancient minor flaws ferment and fester into grudges as deep as any abyss.
In this fir...more
Like this review?   yes   (1 person liked it)
  add a comment

Marcy
11/27/07

bookshelves: book-club
Read in November, 2007
I had a very difficult time getting into this book and it was not a pleasure to read. There was a lot of raw, sexual imagery and tone. I am decidedly not a prude, but some of the content actually made me uncomfortable. Maybe that was the point! The book was very depressing and sad, and I didn't feel that any of the characters were redeemed as promised on the back cover synopsis. Our bookclub wondered what about this book garnered it the Booker Prize. We weren't being petty; we really wante...more
Like this review?   yes  
  add a comment


« previous 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 97 98



book data (includes all editions)

avg rating (all editions): 3.17 (972 ratings)
avg rating (this edition): 2.96 (23 ratings)
number of reviews: 365