Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Dec 28, 2011

karen rated it:

this book was very frustrating. i feel like i should love it, but it's like there is a barrier - a chastity belt between us preventing our love, and as much as i want it, it isn't going to happen for us. there is a quality to her writing that reminded me of what i loved or housekeeping, books i am also told i am supposed to love, but just can't feel anything for, like distant relations. she is a less antiseptic writer than hustvedt, though. i respect her prose - there are lines in here of More...

45 comments like (42 people liked it)

Apr 29, 2008

Jason rated it:

(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 imagin More...

1 comment like (23 people liked it)

Apr 20, 2008

Sammy rated it:

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 More...

5 comments like (27 people liked it)

Oct 29, 2007

Trevor rated it:

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 not feel that the s More...

4 comments like (13 people liked it)

Sep 19, 2008

Philip rated it:

Anne Enright’s The Gathering deserves every ounce of praise it has received, and perhaps a bit more. It’s a family history of the Hegartys, told by Veronica after the death of her brother, Liam. So, and therefore, it is a wake, a stream of consciousness response to bereavement. There are more than shades of Molly Bloom here, as Veronica recounts intimate details of her own and her relatives’ ultimately inconsequential lives. And despite its obvious – and necessary – preoccupation with death and More...

1 comment like (12 people liked it)

Jun 24, 2008

Brian rated it:

This book actually angered me, and I think this paragraph sums up why:

"I know, as I write these... that they require me to deal in facts. It is time to call an end to romance and just say what happened in Ada's house, the year that I was eight and Liam was barely nine."

That passage occurs about halfway through the book. The preceding pages are an endless series of shapeless ponderings on what may or may not have happened. The narrator leaps from one era to th More...

2 comments like (16 people liked it)

Mar 14, 2008

Alice rated it:

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 w More...

1 comment like (11 people liked it)

Feb 26, 2008

Fiona rated it:

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 colo More...

5 comments like (12 people liked it)

Aug 19, 2011

Paul rated it:

CELEBRITY DEATH MATCH

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Tonight's contest from the palatial surroundings of Monkstown Boxing Club here in Dun Laoghaire is to decide who is to represent the Republic of Ireland in the 2012 London Olympics Most Miserable Contemporary Novelist event.

(Scattered applause from the twenty or so people in the audience)

In the blue corner, we have Anne Enright

(Anne gets up tiredly from her chair in the corner and raises her h More...

28 comments like (14 people liked it)

Apr 16, 2008

Molly rated it:

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 More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

May 27, 2008

Lisa rated it:

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...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Dec 23, 2007

Kevin rated it:

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 twen More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jul 25, 2010

Khaya rated it:

Another one for the growing life-is-just-too-short pile. This book was draggy and depressing, and I didn't get a whole lot out of it. What were those Booker judges thinking?

First of all, while I would be the last person to minimize molestation, its prevalence, and its traumatic effects, it has really become a literary cliche: young child of a dysfunctional family living in a less enlightened place and/or time is molested, no one ever finds out/addresses it properly, young child is More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 30, 2008

Jessica rated it:

In The Gathering (winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007), Anne Enright tells the story of a bitter and bruised family in bitter and bruised prose. I was sucked in for the ride - even though I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to go.

Veronica Hagerty narrates the story about her Irish Catholic family of twelve children. She is particularly concerned with a disturbing event that occurred one summer when she and two of her siblings, Liam and Kitty, are sent to live with their grandm More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jan 21, 2008

Collin Shea rated it:

This is a very Irish story, written in a very Irish way. At times, I was not thrilled with Enright's particular style, and it did take some effort for me to really immerse myself in this book, but upon finishing it, I see that there are quite a few marked pages. In my world of reading, marked pages are a very good sign. There were sentences, or paragraphs, or entire pages that I want to go back to, that intrigued or moved me in some way, that will continue on in my psyche long after I've moved More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

May 09, 2008

Yulia rated it:

Another Booker Prize winner that is so besotted with its ambiguity and ephemeral nature that it is entirely forgettable and endlessly frustrating. Please, no more showing off how one can see without seeing, live without living, or know without knowing. Tell a story! Don't give me a magic show.

1 comment like (7 people liked it)

Jul 12, 2009

Jimmy rated it:

Ah, the gritty summer sidewalks of New York, with all those used paperbacks spread out on the pavement, waiting, like puppies at Bide-a-Wee, for new owners to take care of them! Hard by a corner on the Upper West Side, Anne Enright's "The Gathering" stares up at me with doleful eyes. A perusal of the cover, an absorbing paragraph or two on page one, a quick scan of review excerpts on the back cover, and the additional observation that the author was a 2007 Man Booker laureate, are eno More...

8 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 09, 2012

Shovelmonkey1 rated it:

This is a book which needs to be read and appreciated, not for the story but for the finely crafted, lyrical text. The story itself seemed to be a moderately predictable and stereotypical tale and I think I almost guessed the deep rooted reason for the suicide before the idea of looking for a possible cause had even hit the ground and started running. An impressively large Irish family gathers to mourn the passing of one of their siblings and history, as it is want to do at these kind of events, More...

3 comments like (13 people liked it)

Nov 09, 2011

K.D. rated it:

"God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same."

This line, found in the third to the last page of Anne Enright's The Gathering is an example of the many contradictions this novel has. This won the 2007 Man Booker Prize and I can see why. It is different. Ms. Enright has this fondness of contradicting herself not just in a single statement but in paragraphs, in several pages, the whole book and maybe even herself. Mrs. Enright, during the i More...

20 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 09, 2009

Lucy rated it:

I remember walking through the Guggenheim Museum and stopping at an exhibit called "White Canvas" or something like that. For all I know, somebody bought a blank canvas, realized they had no talent with painting but a knack for knowing what passes for cool and sold the idea to the powers that be of art. Or, perhaps it is actually art. I have no degree or expertise in that area, but a white canvas doesn't look like art to me.

Likewise, someone, Anne Engright in this case, wri More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 21, 2007

Kelly rated it:

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 relationship More...

3 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 29, 2008

Paula rated it:

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, bu More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 13, 2008

Julie rated it:

I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to those readers who are willing to live in an on-the-verge character's head who knows that she is unreliable and who may or may not be uncovering a repressed memory. If you can tolerate this ambiguity and like a dark -- although I would argue that the ending is optimistic -- lyrical, Irish tale, then this is the book for you. I found its title to be a bit of a misnomer, setting up the expectation that the protagonist's siblings would play a more prom More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 03, 2008

Lisa rated it:

The Gathering is a book full of very fine sentences and moments of uncanny insight--some (sentences and moments) quite stunning. But it was not an enjoyable reading experience for me. It's dreary book about grief and shame in which a self-indulgent narrator wanders randomly through memories old and new, none of them good. As my friend J put it, this was "just not a room I wanted to be in."

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jul 11, 2010

Emily rated it:

A review on the cover compared Anne Enright to Joan Didion, and, well, I haven't read any Joan Didion, so I can't say. But apparently Didion has "cold, furious grief" and so does Enright. Maybe I'd add "slightly manic" to the grieving part.

Veronica is one of 12, and her younger brother Liam has just killed himself. The general plot revolves around her attempts to gather her disparate brothers and sisters back to their ancestral home in Dublin for the funeral. More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 13, 2009

Barb rated it:

Amazing It Could Win Any Award, Let Alone the Man Booker Prize.

This was another selection from my book club. We affectionately refer to it as the 'bad book club' because we have chosen some really bad, awful, horrid, ghastly books and this one is right up there with the worst of the worst as far as I'm concerned.

I guess you either get Anne Enright or you don't and I don't. If this had been some sort of cathartic memoir like Joan Didion's 'Year of Magical Thinking' I cou More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 05, 2011

Alvina rated it:

”Terkadang harus ada kematian untuk menyadarkan kita akan pentingnya kehidupan”

Sejujurnya saya membeli buku ini karena label “ A New York Times Bestseller dan A Man Booker Prize Winner ” di cover depannya. Kisahnya berawal ketika Abang Veronica yang bernama Liam ditemukan meninggal dunia karena bunuh diri di laut. Jenasahnya ditemukan oleh orang-orang di pesisir Brighton. Kabar buruk ini harus ia beritahukan kepada ibu mereka. Wanita yang telah melahirkan 12 belas anak dan telah mengal More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 07, 2008

Anna rated it:

I read several blog reviews of The Gathering by Anne Enright, winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, and most had nothing but good things to say about the book. As those who read my blog know, I can't get enough of family sagas, so I had to add this to my ever-growing to-read list.

Veronica Hegarty, one of the 12 Hegarty children from Dublin, travels to England to pick up her dead brother, Liam, the victim of a suicide drowning. During the trip and later at the wake and funeral, Veronic More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 09, 2008

Hol added it

The protagonist in this novel was born into the archetypal family of Irish literature: the men are alcoholic, the women pregnant early and often, the children violated and shamed. Plus there’s the church reminding everyone how loathsome the human body is, lest anyone slack off in the shame department. (Having just returned from Italy, which is full of sensual religious art, I have to wonder: How did Catholicism get so twisted in Ireland? Is the weather to blame?) Despite this, however, and despi More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 28, 2008

Matt rated it:

May 29 CVN:

“The Gathering”

The stream of Veronica’s consciousness is confusing, contradictory, conflicted and rarely clear. She does battle with the tragic, but also the mundane. She, like many around her, is trying to navigate through the hurts, the loves, the villains and herself—in order to make sense of it all. Veronica is human. Anne Enright successfully depicts this chaotic stream of impressions and memories in “The Gathering,” and although the book is often as depre More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)