Book 81 - Anne Enright "The Gathering"
Oct. 13th, 2016 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveAnne Enright "The Gathering" (Vintage)
Genuinely incredible book. In the wake of the her brother's suicide a women remembers a terrible event from their childhood, an event that dislocates her from her life and her large family of brothers and sisters as well as her husband and two daughters. Her own memories and imagined events from her family's past intermingle with the return of her brother's body to Ireland for the funeral and the freefall fallout months later. Enright writes the heart out of this with painful fidelity to truth while wrestling with the difficulty, the impossibility, of truly knowing it, but also her compassion and insight into the frail and flawed humanity of her characters.
This is a searing portrait of family in modern Ireland that hurts and haunts and gets under the skin. I found myself utterly caught up in Veronica's voice and life and perceptions, immersed in her memories and imaginings as she fights to make sense of the fear and pain and strange damage in her life and her brother's which may or may not spring from something awful that happened one summer in her grandmother's house. A book about damage that does its fair share in the mind and heart and psyche of the reader.
Genuinely incredible book. In the wake of the her brother's suicide a women remembers a terrible event from their childhood, an event that dislocates her from her life and her large family of brothers and sisters as well as her husband and two daughters. Her own memories and imagined events from her family's past intermingle with the return of her brother's body to Ireland for the funeral and the freefall fallout months later. Enright writes the heart out of this with painful fidelity to truth while wrestling with the difficulty, the impossibility, of truly knowing it, but also her compassion and insight into the frail and flawed humanity of her characters.
This is a searing portrait of family in modern Ireland that hurts and haunts and gets under the skin. I found myself utterly caught up in Veronica's voice and life and perceptions, immersed in her memories and imaginings as she fights to make sense of the fear and pain and strange damage in her life and her brother's which may or may not spring from something awful that happened one summer in her grandmother's house. A book about damage that does its fair share in the mind and heart and psyche of the reader.
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no subject
Date: 2016-10-14 01:09 am (UTC)Stupid question, is this non fiction or fiction?
Hugs, Jon
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Date: 2016-10-14 08:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-10-14 08:57 am (UTC)