Fiction - 3.5 stars
As part of my personal challenge to read all Man Booker Prize-winning novels, I bought The Gathering on a whim. Anne Enright won the Booker prize in 2007 for this work of James Joyce-like drama. In this portrait of a large Irish family, the nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering in Dublin for the wake of their drifter brother, Liam, who has recently drowned in the sea near Liverpool, England. Veronica, his older sister, goes to collect the body, all the while reliving the secret she shares with him—something that happened in their grandmother’s house in the winter of 1968. It is a novel about love, hate, disappointment, and how secrets and memories affect us until the end. While it is as well-written as Joyce, it is also as depressing and hopeless as Joyce, giving the book a truly Irish quality.
*Note: The Man-Booker Prize is the British award for literary fiction, similar to the Pulitzer in the US.
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