The Gathering (Unabridged) | 
 enlarge | Author: Anne Enright
Publisher: audible.com
Category: Book
List Price: $46.95
Buy New: $24.65
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Rating:  132 reviews
Media: Audio Download
ASIN: B0015R1WOA
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, November 2007: Pretty early on in The Gathering you realize that in her lingering portrait of the Hegarty clan (and this isn't hyperbole--they are a family of 12), Irish novelist Anne Enright will wrestle with all the giant literary tropes that have come before her. Family, of course, is the big one, but with equal intensity she explores death and dying, the sea and its siren song, sex, shame, secrecy, unreliable memories, madness, "the drink," and--always in the shadows--England. That said, it's not like any other novel about the Irish that I've read. The story of the Hegartys is indeed bleak, and hard, but it surges with tenderness and eloquent thought which, in the end, are the very things that help this family (or at least her narrator Veronica) survive. Through her eyes, and in Enright's skillful imagination, those small turning-point moments of life that we all know in some form or another--a petty fight, a careless word, an event witnessed--come together in an unshakeable vision of how you become the person you are. --Anne Bartholomew
Product Description
The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. His sister, Veronica was there then, as she is now: keeping the dead man company, just for another little while. The "Gathering" is a family epic, condensed and clarified through the remarkable lens of Anne Enright's unblinking eye. It is also a sexual history: tracing the line of hurt and redemption through three generations - starting with the grandmother, Ada Merriman - showing how memories warp and family secrets fester. This is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars. The "Gathering" sends fresh blood through the Irish literary tradition, combining the lyricism of the old with the shock of the new. As in all Anne Enright's work, fiction and non-fiction, this is a book of daring, wit and insight: her distinctive intelligence twisting the world a fraction, and giving it back to us in a new and unforgettable light.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 127 more reviews...
 A psycological masterpiece December 2, 2008
David Newman (Portland,OR)
Skimming through the reviews that have preceded mine I find myself amused by the passion this book has generated. It seems safe to warn any prospective reader that one thing is certain: you will either love or you will hate this novel. The passionate negativity The Gathering has generated is telling, and is I believe due in part to the uncomfortable depths it brings the reader. Enright's book is not a comfortable read. Her book is about Human emotion. She explores her subject with an unflinching directness and power that left this reader unable to tolerate more than a few pages at a time. The plot is of minor importance, really only a literary device allowing the author a framework within which to do due her real work. The novel uses the death of a sibling and the gathering together of an extended family as a vehicle to explore the intense emotions and distant memories these events provoke in the central character. This Enright achieves with brilliance. She has a seemingly magical talent for using language to evoke in the reader a sense of her character's physic experience with all its ambiguity, ambivalence, and irrationality. Emotion is messy stuff and Enright does not shy away from the refuse and detritus. She takes us into the mist strewn land of child hood memory deftly exploring the boundary lands between reality and fiction. Don't expect definitive answers or tidy explanations for what "really" happened. If you are hoping for certainty at the end of the novel you will be disappointed. This is not an easy read. The comments from reviewers bragging about how they read the book in one sitting left me shaking my head. This book is not for the reader who can only give it 2 hours or for the reader who reads 100+ novels a year. It took me 3 weeks to read, and even then I felt that I needed to re-read it from start to finish if I expected to appreciate its full richness. I will admit that I did struggle at times with where Enright was taking me. There were a number (not many) of times when I simply had to move on because I could not follow her. But because of the richness and truth of the rest of the book I assumed that my failure to take meaning from these passages had more to my own failings as a reader than to the writer's "self-indulgence". I also did not find the novel "disjointed" as many reviewers have complained. I found the shifts between present and past seamless and close to my own experience of consciousness. Please, if you commit yourself to reading this book, take your time, taste and digest each word, each sentence, one at a time, and ride with the emotions that this writing evokes.
I loved it. December 1, 2008
Pilar A. Homiak (Atlanta, GA)
This is the kind of book that you feel you are friends with the narrator... I loved it.
We see our own November 24, 2008
Myfanwy Collins (New England)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read this book slowly. I had to. If I had not, the pain would have been insurmountable. Even so, the pain was there, a dull throb.
If you have ever grieved (which we nearly all have or will at some point in our lives), then this book will speak to you. Directly, honestly. If you have ever grieved a family member, one you remembered as a child, then this book will speak to you. If your family has secrets, then this book will speak to you. If you have loved and lost, then this book will speak to you.
Basically, I can't imagine an adult who would read this book and not find some connection within. Can't imagine who would not experience a moment of "ah ha" as she read.
On the surface, it's a book about grief (a sister for her brother), but beneath there is a lifetime of grieving. Veronica has witnessed much and even that which she has not witnessed, she feels she knows. As she moves through the layers of her life, she shows us how her family fell apart, came back together, fell apart, came back together. For what else is there in a family but the pushing away and the pulling back close?
And in Veronica's large family, we are able to see our own.
Maybe I'm wrong and this book will make no sense to you. Even so, the writing is a glory to behold as is the story it uncovers.
 Simply the Worst November 24, 2008
A. Ross (Washington, DC)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
One of the pleasures of being in a book group is that you find yourself forced to read books you never would have otherwise tried, and as a result, sometimes discover a wonderful work (one such example in my case is Jose Saramago's Blindness). However, the evil twin of that pleasure is the unmitigated pain of wasting precious time slogging through something you can't stand. Unfortunately, not only does this Booker Prize-winner stand firmly in that second category, it is the champion of it: the most hated book of the 70+ I've read for my bookclub, and the least enjoyable work of fiction I've read this year (out of roughly 100 or so books).
Unlike many other haters of this tedious book, I didn't find it particularly difficult reading. The unannounced shifts back and forth in time and place didn't leave me adrift so much as amazed at their clumsiness. Then again, the book is essentially a monologue of remembrance, and human memories are messy things, so I was willing to conditionally accept that messiness as part and parcel of the protagonist. Speaking of the protagonist (middle-aged Veronica Hegerty), many haters seem to focus on her unlikability as the source of the book's problems. Personally, I don't think that a protagonist needs to be likable in any way -- just interesting. But she's not interesting in the slightest, just (like the book itself), annoyingly self-indulgent. I suppose this could be construed as a kind of commentary on her yuppiesh generation, but that seems like grasping at straws. Moreover, there are no other characters to connect with. The entire story takes place within Veronica's head, and even though it's populated with various family members who allegedly mean so much to her (in a love/hate way), the reader never gets a sense of any of them.
The plot -- such as it is -- revolves around the suicide of one of Veronica's brothers, which sends her on a trip to Brighton to bring the body back to Ireland for the funeral (she is gathering the body to bring it back to a gathering of people -- clever). About halfway into the book the "secret" of this brother's lifelong depression is revealed, and it's both jaw-droppingly cliched and wholly simplistic and reductionist. My one hope was that this "revelation" would be the spark that lit a fire under the second half of the book -- but no, it simply plods forward at the same stultifying pace. Ultimately the book has nothing to offer: it has no telling insights into memory or regret, it rehashes the same tired cliches about growing up poor and Irish, its use of the unreliable narrator is rudimentary at best, and its not even notably bleak and depressing. I guess you could make the argument that many of these flaws are actually commentary on the flawed nature of humans, but this doesn't make it worth spending your own precious time on.
 The gathering of dispersive thoughts November 14, 2008
I LOVE BOOKS (Italy)
`The Gathering' happens because Liam Hegarty dies suddenly. Through the words of his beloved sister Veronica who collects his body and organizes the funeral, we learn the tale of the Hegarty family and a terrible secret from the distant past which she shares with Liam. Collecting her thoughts, feelings and memories hopping through three generations I suppose reflects an intrinsic quality, a certain originality in this novel, but it still did not satisfy me.
The display of thoughts and situations that flow and scatter chasing each other in almost every page is often too disjointed for my liking. This probably conveys Veronica's pain and state of mind in an authentic way -facing the irreversible past and struggling with grief, seeking redemption- but I found that past and present interchanging swiftly, with juxtapositional vague memories and some mental images, rendered the whole story a bit knotty. Also, I really did not think that any of the characters were suitably portrayed. There are no standouts one way or the other, which could have added depth to the novel; perhaps this was the author's intention (i.e. a portrait of a very ordinary, numerous, imperfect family) but because most characters seem to just linger in the background, without much purpose, the result was that I soon found the whole thing quite dispersive, bordering boring.
I have finished the book because I always do, but I was expecting more by a Man Booker Prize Winner.
Sorry, sometimes that's the way it goes.
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