The Gathering

By: Anne Enright

Narrated by: Terry Donnelly

Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 2007

Regarded as one of her country's foremost voices, Irish author Anne Enright makes a fresh mark on a rich literary tradition. The Gathering is a deeply insightful family saga, steeped in secrets and intrigue, unfolding over three generations.

©2007 Ann Enright (P)2008 Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"Enright's hypnotic prose turns...desperation into something fierce and beautiful." ( Booklist)
"A melancholic love and rage bubbles just beneath the surface of this Dublin clan, and Enright explores it unflinchingly." ( Publishers Weekly)

Dark side of large families

Not just fun & games. The insiders view to a grieving family with secrets within secrets

Story drags on...and on and on!

After two hours I had to admit defeat--the story still hadn't begun to take off. The narrator within the story (Veronica?) was not one with whom I could empathize. It might eventually have gotten better, but I don't have enough years left in my life to find out.

Told well, Narrator is a bit slow

The narration was a bit slow and the pauses too long for me. I put it at a speed of 1.70X and it was much more natural.

Good narrating could not salvage this book!

Terry Donnelly does a very good job with the performance of a difficult novel. I liked her voice, but could not really enjoy it because of the writing. I hope to be able to find Terry Donnelly doing other narrations that will do her performance skills justice.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the book itself for reading or listening because of the story.

Unconvinced

I'm not sure why but ultimately, I think I was not convinced of the authenticity of the main character, Veronica. Do people really think like that? Has Enright really captured the careering collapse of the mind of the grieving woman? Essentially, this is a "blame-the-past" story. The suicide of Veronica's brother goes back two generations to the household of her grandmother and trauma of the family. The whole dysfunction of a family (3 children, 12 grandchildren, and a few of the next generation mentioned along the way as well). All of this is narrated through the flawed and unreliable mind of Veronica, who goes into depression and starts to invent possible explanations, some of which may be true, but she doesn't know. The book takes a hopeful turn near the end and really it gets more interesting as it goes, but even at the end I found the character of Veronica problematic and unconvincing.

Beautiful, but hard to finish

Beautiful language, less than compelling story. I didn't feel engaged or care about the characters. Author is an exceedingly skilled writer, but I left this feeling less than satisfied.

Didn’t like this book

I found this book very disjointed and hard to follow.
I would like to return it. I did not finish it

The story began well, but then was about dull sex

I enjoyed the beginnimg of the story bery much, but then was disappointed by numerous descriptioms of dull sex. The male organ is mentioned exhaustively. A story of pedophilia is part of the last seberal chapters. I can't recommend this book.

Depressing and tedious

This is tediously written and the narrator is depressed and depressing. It seems to touch on all the stereotypes of the Irish: alcoholism, dysfunctional families, abuse. More than half way into it, I just couldn't take the narrative any more or the constant switching from present to past and the it-might-have-happened-this-way approach. Ugh!

You can not libel the dead

“I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

I grabbed a couple of my Irish writers to read while traveling back and forth to Ireland for pleasure. Ha. Pleasure. The Irish know how to feck, fight and die. Oh, and write.

Both novels centered around drownings, death, and memory. Both were Man Booker Prize winners (born two years apart). Both were very different looks back. Banville's The Sea was more poetic, more soothing; a search for the correct word, the proper memory. 'The Gathering' was angrier. It was a picked scab, a hot wound, a shout into a dark wet cave; tea without sugar or cream, aged whiskey without the water. Banville's novel was almost elegiac and poetic in its mourning. Enright's was a primal, woman scream. It was less of a memory than an imagined history, a search for meaning in loss, a desperate search for who and why in family.

'The Gathering' was very good, just not great. I'm almost apologetic about making Enright's novel seem an Irish twin to Banville's. It is a bit unfair. She deserves to have her book examined alone. But the themes, the Irishness, the Man Bookered. Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore Man Booker hath joined together, let not man put asunder. I have hung the seabird of the second read, second published, around her book. Oh well, life moves forward and so do reviews and cranky critics.