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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
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. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The blessing and the curse of family bonds have been addressed by some of our best writers, perhaps never so movingly as by William Kennedy in his Albany cycle of novels. Now Irish novelist Enright, whose intense lyrical style recalls Kennedy's, gives full voice to another tale of familial agony: Veronica's grief in the wake of her wayward brother Liam's suicide. Past and present merge as Veronica recalls their childhood growing up in Dublin in a family of 14, with never enough money or enough attention from their overburdened parents. She's convinced it all went wrong when Liam was sexually abused by a family friend, and her recollections of that day alternate with sunnier ones of their endless roughhousing and joking. When Liam drowned himself, with a tide of "blood, sea water and whiskey" running in his veins, he took Veronica's sense of purpose with him. Inconsolable, and suffering from insomnia, she spends her evenings driving and writing, trying to come to terms with the fact that "someone you love is dead, and the world is full of people you don't." Enright's hypnotic prose turns her desperation into something fierce and beautiful. Wilkinson, Joanne
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Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a complicated book,
By
This review is from: The Gathering (Paperback)
One that requires more than one reading with which to fully come to grips. There's a lot going on here, about family, about the ties that bind, about the fact we can never escape the past. Everyone will not like this book, it's too grim and rambling and unfocussed for that, but I did. The story, which is set in Dublin, revolves around Veronica Hegarty, a 30-something wife and mother, who has escaped the clutches of her huge Irish Catholic family She has eight siblings and suffers hardships when her brother, Liam, kills himself. Closest to him in age, Veronica is the one who must pick up the pieces and bring back his body from England, where he drowned himself off Brighton Beach.The first-person narrative is told in a stream-of-consciousness manner from Veronica's perspective. She flits backwards and forwards in time, exploring her family's dark history. She goes as far back as her grandparent's generation as she tries to unravel the story. During the course of the book, which spans Liam's death through to his funeral, Veronica traces the history of the family. But through this we glimpse Veronica's obsessions and see how her personality has been slightly damaged by her rough-and-tumble crowded childhood. Her pain and her anguish is never expressed to the outside world (she cannot even communicate with her husband), but is buried deep inside where it finds expression in Veronica's self-loathing. If nothing else, The Gathering is a portrait of a lost woman coming to grips with her past, her present and her future. Help raise awareness; support cancer research!
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
"All I have are stories'",
By Friederike Knabe "“We write to taste life twi... (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Gathering (Paperback)
. . . writes Veronica, the narrator of this unusual family saga, in the opening pages, ... "night thoughts, the sudden convictions, that uncertainty spawns." It will be important for us, the readers, to keep this in mind as we get increasingly drawn into Anne Enright's award-winning novel. While it is a family saga of sorts, it is much more a psychological study of a woman in crisis. Written in a straightforward, sometimes witty, conversational tone which later may sometimes prove deceiving, Veronica's thoughts and ruminations move in apparently haphazard fashion from her childhood experiences in the 1960s to the present. The present being some months after the funeral of her brother which brought her together with the rest of the Hegarty clan.Veronica's crisis centres on Liam, her favourite brother who has died in untoward circumstances. She wants to tell his story, yet finds it difficult to come to terms with who he has become since their intimate childhood years. Did his troubled life commence with an event she recalls observing when she was nine and he eleven at their gran's? Did it actually happen or is her memory playing tricks? Did something happen to her too at that time? In her reminiscences of that carefree long summer holiday with Liam and younger sister Kitty at their grandmother's, a dark cloud was hanging over them. Enright contrasts this special summer with the usual life in the Hegarty family: "Mammy" always pregnant, the father rarely seen around the increasingly large family. Poverty is hinted at in many ways, without being overplayed. Among Vee's shorter or longer introductions of her large family, Ada, the grandmother, stands out as the most important character. Veronica imagines her as a young girl of 18 in 1925, when Irish women had very little freedom to choose which way their life should go. Vee clearly feels drawn to her as she tries to lift the mystery of Ada's relationship to the two men in her life. While she remains a presence beyond her death, others, like the parents, pale to almost nothingness. "Sometimes I don't remember my mother. I look at her photograph and she escapes me." Returning to that crucial time of Veronica's childhood quite often, Enright's ability to draw out her protagonist's uncertainty as to what actually happened and her emotional turmoil that accompanied the ambiguity of her recollections is exquisite. For Vee, the reverberations of the past appear to stack insurmountable obstacles in the way of her present life, in particular in her relationship to nice and kind husband Tom. Is a way out, a conclusion, possible? In the end, "The Gathering" that Enright exposes the reader to is not primarily the physical coming together of the family for the funeral, as it is Vee's gathering of memories and reassessments of events and people of the past. The description of the wake, the interaction between the different Hegarty siblings, nonetheless, brings the diverse strands in the story together in a satisfying manner. [Friederike Knabe]
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Uncovering of a Family's Secrets,
By Ian Gordon Malcomson (Victoria, BC) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME) (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Gathering (Paperback)
Enright is one of those writers who has made it her calling in life to understand the intergenerational complexities of the modern family institution. To do this, she writes about awkward and troubling familial relationships that encompass at least three generations. In her stories, it is usually one person who needs to know the answer to the inscrutable, and, invariably, it is that same individual who has to live with the answer. "The Gathering", her latest work, showcases the Hegartys as a modern dysfunctional family who has enormous difficulty coming to grips with its tainted past. Every member, from as far back as three generations, is in a state of denial, or doesn't care, or is constantly hung over or suffering from dementia. However, there is one important exception. The protagonist, Veronica, is a daughter who comes home to Dublin to bury her brother, Liam, who has just committed suicide near Brighton. Everything she encounters during this ordeal flies in the face of who she sees herself as: orderly, passive, submissive, normal and tidy. Her brother was one of those doomed personalities who soaked up a lot of affection from others but never gave anything in return. His mission in life was to destroy himself faster than kind-hearted people like Veronica could build him up. During the week of the wake, Veronica goes on a search to discover what caused Liam to become self-destructive. She fights through constant distractions and disruptions to find what has caused her extended family - the heart of her existence till now - to become unglued. What she discovers is a dissolution of a relationship that likely started years ago with Liam being sexually abused by a border living with the Hegartys. While such knowledge helps explain the present family straits, it also clarifies her view of herself as a sister who cared for a dying brother and wife and mother who cares for her immediate loved ones. Eventually, she finds her voice as a compassionate and sensitive person, who can now move ahead in her life to be an effective person to those who really need her.
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