This is a book of social criticism and satire, seriously weakened by its uninteresting, dimly described, humanoid characters. Anne Enright depicts this generation of Irish yuppies as vacuous nonentities, almost psychopathic in their disregard for conscience. This does not add to the strength of her indictment. Instead, it produces a dull book, very easy to abandon.

Taken paragraph by paragraph, this is a well-written book. As a whole, it disappoints.

I've liked novels by English and Irish authors I've read in the past (Maeve Binchy, Phillipa Gregory,etc.). In Enright's novel, however, I found the language, wording and even some ideas so colloquial that I didn't understand at all what was trying to be said. Maybe it was this occasional lack of understanding that made it hard to really get into The Forgotten Waltz. I liked the main characters ramblings and way of looking back on things, but at times her rants grew tedious and pointless and I f More...

With her Booker-winning novel The Gathering, Anne Enright gained a raised profile and a new following. This, her first novel since, again takes up the theme of family connections and domestic secrets, in a story that centres on an affair.

Gina meets Sean, her sister’s neighbour, at her niece’s birthday party – and again on a beach holiday. There are prickles of interest, but no real connection. When Gina’s employer needs to hire a management consultant, she suggests Sean, and the wheels are in tr More...

This book has been sitting on my Kindle for quite some time, and I started it while also reading Moby Dick, as some light reading in amongst the frozen seas of the whale hunt text. There is some gorgeous writing about love in here, about broken hearts, about broken homes, about disappointment, and about Ireland. Mmm, and about business travel, about the coldness of houses in winter when all there is, is a boiler to heat a house and then radiators in the rooms, and that's not enough sometimes.

It More...

The best books for me are the ones I learn from--about life, about myself, about the world, about writing. This novel is so much more than a novel simply about an affair. In fact, details such as their sexual encounters aren't shared in detail with the reader--why write what has been written about, experienced, by anyone who has ever had an affair? Not necessary. And not what the book is ultimately about. What is enthralling for this reader is the sharing of what is going on in 34 year old Gina More...

I have to admit I bought this book because of the blurb. It just sounded so mysterious and seemed to promise a menage-a-trois between father, daughter and daddy's new girlfriend. Maybe that is the theme or maybe it is not: I've now finished the book and still cannot tell.

To start with the positive: I really enjoyed the romantic way the author described the affair between Gina and Sean. The scenes of the first part are written in a poetic kind of way that was quite interesting for me. However, my More...

I liked this book. I think I did, anyway. I mean, perhaps I didn't but I just forgot. On the other hand, maybe I didn't forget and I'm just being coy about memory. But then, maybe I do remember everything completely, but I'm just lying outright. I think I liked the book.

If that is an irritating introduction to a review, try reading 230-odd pages of a book written entirely in that vein.

Enright plays with the nature of memory while her protagonist forward slash narrator plays with the nature of an More...

Anne Enright always pulls me up short. It is as if she is hidden on my shoulder, reading my mind. She writes with a dreamlike yet direct quality noticing details others might not bother to mention. It is like daydreaming when your mind falls upon something you had long forgotten from the past. The stories always,dot about in time as she dwells on one thing that leads onto another, but not always chronologically. I don't always understand what she is saying - it is so personal to the character. B More...

Ich habe hin und her überlegt ob ich mich über dieses Buch "hermachen" soll oder nicht.... Die Leseprobe habe ich fast "verschlungen" - fest davon überzeugt "dieses Buch unbedingt lesen zu müssen". Und dann: Las ich die Rezensionen. Und dachte mir: okay, vielleicht doch nicht so gut?!?! Aber auch bei diesem Buch war es so, wie es nunmal oft im Leben ist: man muss sich seine eigene Meinung bilden. ;) und ich habe dieses Buch dann in 2 Tagen fertig gelesen. Okay, es gibt hier weder, wie von manche More...

This book taught me a couple of things about myself as a reader. First, I don't enjoy first person narratives like I used to. The characters are naturally too self-absorbed and unless they are complex, insightful people, their view of the other characters and their situation is too limited. In this story, a married woman with little self-knowledge begins a relationship with a married man - a man she never seems to fully understand and so we, as readers, don't really understand him either. Enrigh More...

This is the second book I've read recently where an important element of the book was the fraught relation between a woman and her lover's daughter by another woman (the other was True by Riikka Pulkkinen). This book is narrated by a 32-year-old Irish woman beginning in Ireland's early 21st century economic boom and ending in its bust. She is married to one man, but drops the spoiler early in the text that in the end she is living with another. Thus the plot, which hinges on how their relationsh More...

The prose is gorgeous but keeps its distance. With Gina as the sole narrator, we only hear her perspective, and from what I can gather, she is a difficult person to know. Clues to her shallow, self-absorbed behavior are revealed in bits about her childhood and her relationship with her "pretend everything is perfect" mother (who even hides her declining health from her family). Even Gina's sister is too concerned with pretenses to feel authentic.

As I type this, I can't help but wonder if Enrigh More...

As I started reading this book I thought I had read it before...then I realized that I had started it previously but put it down after about 50 pages. Something about it hadn't clicked for me the first time but I had ordered it from the library again without realizing it and so decided to give the book a go again since it was a holiday and I had a free afternoon. This time I got through the whole book but I'm not terribly excited that I did. It's basically a book about an affair between two peop More...

Anne Enright won the 2007 Booker for The Gathering I liked it, liked it, liked it, always meant to get back to Anne, and here she is with The Forgotten Waltz. Check out the cover, above. A perfect statement of the book. The woman represents Gina Moynihan, the chairs her husband and her lover. She’s got a hand on each, chosen neither. That’s part of the mess she creates. I’ll follow up on the rest a bit later. First, a word about language and voice, since those are the elements that make this bo More...

The Gathering, Enright's Booker Prize winning book, will be my next read. I am a sudden and delighted discoverer of Enright's gloriously poetic, understated prose. As we move back and forth in time inside the narrator's mind, slowly emerges a portrait of a certain set of Irish people in boom time and in bust. The narrator remembers her first glimpse of the man who would be the love of her life, (at a party where everyone was part of a couple). IN a fragmentary way, we suffer through a parent's d More...

The Forgotten Waltz, by Anne Enright, Narrated by Heather O’Neill, Produced by Recorded Books, downloaded from audible.com.

Gina Moynahan is a Dublin woman with a good job, a husband, and seems to be happy. But she starts having an affair with her neighbor, Sean Zallely, also married and with a little girl. The two knew each other for quite a while before the affair started. And it went along for some time without anyone noticing, but finally, gossip being what it is, people found out. Gina’s mot More...

This very disturbing and gloriously written novel, by Anne Enright, takes place in Ireland, but a modern day Ireland which, other than the places which are named, could just as easily be modern America. The setting is irrelevant, except that it is a middle/upper middle class venue filled with intelligent, professional characters rather than one of poverty or extreme wealth. The Forgotten Waltz is the story of an affair between Sean Vallely, a married man, and Gina (I am not sure we know her last More...

Anne Enright, author of the 2007 Booker Prize winner, The Gathering, has written a new novel called The Forgotten Waltz. It is told from the point of view of Gina Moynihan who has a lust-filled affair with a married man, Sean Vallely. They first meet at a garden party hosted by Anne's sister Fiona, and progresses from there. At first there are innocent (and not so innocent) looks, and then on a business trip in Switzerland, the affair begins in earnest.

When Gina first sees Sean at Fiona's garden More...

I expected to love this book, given Anne Enright's reputation and my love for all things Irish. But it left me cold. It's not the adultery that galled me, but how it was carried out and presented. Even after finishing the book I found the main character, Gina, elusive. She never came to life for me as a real, whole person. I can't imagine what her conversation is like, how she walks, what she likes to eat, or even what she does at her job, which is only vaguely explained. I couldn't even really More...

Saying that this novel is about an affair is like saying a home is about bricks and glass. That's true enough, in a way, but it's not getting any where near the substance within. I have never read writing like that of Anne Enright's. It is powerful, and funny, and thought provoking all at the same time. I read ever so slowly to capture every phrase and reread sentences or whole paragraphs over again to contemplate their meaning which resonated deeply within me. She'll write something profound i More...

There are two ways to read Anne Enright’s novel “The Forgotten Waltz”: The first, as a sexy page-turner filled with feigned nonchalance between instances of passionate hotel room hopping; The second, as one woman walking into the middle of life-as-she-knows-it with dynamite stuffed into her Wonder Bra.

The premise is that Gina Moynihan is going to meet up with the daughter of her lover. Along the way she considers the events of the past few years that have brought her to this point, starting wit More...

David Lodge’s fictional biography of H.G.Wells, and Anne Enright’s latest novel The Forgotten Waltz, both published in May, share a theme: the emotional politics of marital affairs. A Man of Parts (Random House UK, $34.95) is a 560-page life of HG, the self-made novelist, social reformer, and Free Love advocate. David Lodge is a British novelist with some 14 novels to his credit, many of them parodies of the academic life. He also has penned ten works of essays and literary criticism, but A Man More...

I'm sure I have read Anne Enright's "The Gathering" which won the Booker Prize back in 2007. But, if so, I can't remember much about it...unfortunately. If I could remember it, I might have some comparison for "The Gathering" which has been much-hyped as Enright's first post-Booker novel. I think any author would be buried under the weight of such expectations. It's probably just as well that it took Julian Barnes four shots to win the Booker...he's been working up to it.

I don't know if I liked More...

I spent the summer reading plenty of novels by smart, young, cutting-edge writers. It was fun and exhilarating. But as fall approached and the days grew shorter, it felt appropriate to read a novel about adultery and its consequences by a seasoned author who knows the pathways of the heart.

The Forgotten Waltz, set in and around Dublin, encompasses those incredible years when Ireland, after all its sad centuries of impoverished outsider status, finally got to be a player in the mad scramble for w More...

I had trouble deciding what I thought about this book. I changed my rating three times before even starting to write the review. This is a book about rationalizations. I'm not one to moralize book characters. After all, I'm along for the journey, to vicariously experience other people's lives. I feel like I'm missing out on something vital to the experience of the book if I judge a character for her decisions and choices. But I couldn't help but hate Gina a little bit for being both selfish and More...

The Forgotten Waltz is the story of an affair, told in detail from the perspective of one of the participants, Gina Moynihan. “I met him in my sister’s garden in Enniskerry” she tells us, in the first sentence of chapter one. And already we know that a child is involved and will play a key role, because Evie is the subject of the preface. So the key building blocks are in place from the very beginning, and we know in general terms how the book will end. However, in this book it is the journey th More...

I love Anne Enright’s writing, and having heard her speak in a radio interview, the voice in her books always sounds like her voice in my head. She used a brilliant expression about the time setting of her book at the end of the Irish boom: “The bubble had burst but we hadn’t yet heard the pop.” That’s exactly what this book describes, as the characters enjoy the boom years, spending up large on homes (they’d call it ‘property’) and Krug, dashing off to Poland on business. The affair is a symbol More...

I've just finished the ARC of this wonderful new novel by the author of "The Gathering." (For which she won the Man Booker Prize.) I had the pleasure of hearing Anne Enright speak recently at Book Expo America, and I am thrilled that her delightful Irish voice comes through loud and clear in this book. It's a recollection by Gina Moynihan, a thirty-something Dubliner, about her life and loves. Seemingly happily married, she nevertheless begins an affair with a married neighbor of her sister's, a More...

Fill a bucket with water; dash in some Ireland, some mild alcoholism, some men, a heaping spoonful of adulterous sex, two neglectful fathers and two cups of fragmented conversations; sprinkle the name Seán liberally into the brew. Stir. Abandon chronology and good sense: hey presto, The Forgotten Waltz. Badly in need of some ruthless editing, a fortnight of copy-pasting and a serious reconsideration of the protagonist’s actual net worth, and oh, the audacity of taking first-person narrative to s More...