Review Summaries

• Readers praise the controlled emotion and the way the book layers shifts in memory. It is supported more as a novel of silences and unease than of dramatic turns.

Reviews

• わいひ

  結構性描写多かったです 遺体をどーのこうのもありましたし、最後はそこで盛り上がった感がありましたが どうやって女性を口説き落としたりだとか、なんかエロかったです

• ちょっとレベルが高過ぎて、私には細部が分かりませんでした。

  ブッカー賞はやはり英文学の最高峰の一つであって、我々ネイティブでも専門家でもない人間には難しい部分があるな、ってのを痛感させられた作品でした。中には分かり易いのもありますけど、この作品は正直言って、私には大変でした。 アイルランド人であるAnne Enrihgtが、アイルランド人の目でアイルランド人のことを書いた小説です。９人兄弟の真ん中くらいで生まれた普通の中年のおばちゃんが、亡くなってしまった一つ年上のお兄ちゃんの亡骸を引き取りに行き、そして家族が集まって彼のお葬式をするというお話。お兄ちゃんは飲んだくれでラリパッパで、死んだって仕方のない野郎だったけど、でも彼の死にはもっと別の深い深い理由というかきっかけがあって、それを知っているのは一つ違いの妹で、小さな頃お兄ちゃんと一緒にお祖母ちゃんのところに預けられていた私だけなんだよ、という具合に追憶が続いて行きます。とても重苦しくて暗い話。兄弟もまともじゃないし（主人公は比較的まとも）、親も、祖父母も、叔父さんまでもが変梃りんでどこかにひっかかりがあって。それがどうしてこう見事に、話全体としては最後に、「前向きな生」というものを力強く謳い上げて行くのか。「ブッカー賞作品だから」無理してひいひい言いながら読み進めていただけなんですが、結局は最後に熱く胸を打たれて「やっぱブッカー賞なんだ」としみじみ思わされてしまいました。 素人の英文学フリークとして、たくさんの作品を読んで来たつもりの私ですが、アイルランド人の「英国人はこうだから」と言う呟きを聞いたのは初めてで、余りピンと来ませんでした（英米の違いなんてのはよくあるけどね）。凄い作品ですけど、読むなら頑張って下さい。素人の触れるレベルにはないと思います。

• My first book of Anne Enright: A must read

  For me it is the narration that sets this book apart. The story is told by Liam's sister, Veronica, who in the aftermath of her brother's death decides to write down about what she witnessed as a child that for long has remained a secret. The author has beautifully captured the narrator's psyche: her grief for her brother's untimely death, her guilt on her failure to help her brother as well as her confusion about what actually happened and what she saw. The desperation and emotional turmoil that she is undergoing has been brought out admirably. Nevertheless, despite the dark undertones, the author, through her wittiness, managed to make me laugh. When I started reading the novel, I was initially frustrated by the narrator's erratic and ever changing account of past instances, but by the time I reached the end it all made sense. I was still left with a lot of unanswered questions, but putting myself in the narrator's shoes, I realize it has to be so because such is life.

• Bitter ... Bitter

  Many people like sweet naturally, but bitter is often an acquired taste. Bitter grief. Bitter humor. Bitter chocolate. Bitter greens. Some savor the bitter, playing off the sweet and the salt, and others do not. Some will enjoy the pervasive bitterness and corrosive humor in this book, and others not. Veronica, the eyes, ears and voice of the novel, is named after a saint who offered her veil to wipe blood from the face of Christ on the road to Calvary. She, like her namesake, is attracted to suffering men. Her dear brother Liam, a terminal alcoholic, commits suicide by walking into the sea. She organizes the funeral that refers to the book's title. Veronica also gathers her memories to reconstruct the events leading to Liam's suicide. She tries to recall her life and marriage, her childhood in a large family, and the time when she and Liam lived with her grandmother Ada. She filters scenes from these histories through the fabric of her grief, cynicism, and uncertain memory. Veronica dictates her stories in a seeming random stream of consciousness. In fact, the images and scenes are artfully arranged to play off one another and peel away the bourgeois mask of propriety from family life. Veronica realizes "that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go 'home' where I could 'have sex' with my 'husband' just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn't seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died." Her abundant cynicism mocks the polite fictions of Irish-catholicism, respectability, family life, gender roles, and consumerism. The commas point especially to the hypocrisy of socially accepted gender roles that are supported by an unspoken confusion of lust with love. Of her 'modest/ardent' grandmother Veronica observes that "Ada is the wraith and Lilith the lovely girl, the fallen woman the sad whore." (Lilith is the mythological feminine embodiment of seductive youthful lust, leading men astray "against their will." ) Veronica's unhappy marriage to Tom and Ada's illicit arrangement with Lambert, may remind readers of Shakespeare on lust: "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action ... Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight." A similar insight moves Veronica to caustic observation of middle-class values that appear to support respectability, but actually debase men and women. "Frank Duff ... (who was the actual head of the actual Legion of Mary, a religious organisation dedicated, in 1967, to inanity and making of tea) ... spent his early years rescuing prostitutes off the streets of Dublin. ... This I discovered, as I chased him through the college library stacks, working on an essay ... which I called ... 'Paying for Sex in the Irish Free State'." A fitting alternate title for Enright's book. Ada was likely one of those rescued prostitute. The marriages of Veronica and her mother, Ada's legacy to her daughter and granddaughter, look uncomfortably like prostitution. Fortunately, just as the bitterness begins to cloy, Enright provides relief in Veronica's lover Michael and Ada's husband Charlie, who provide more wholesome, although imperfect, relationships. Parallels and contrasts across the two love triangles (Veronica-Tom-Michael and Ada-Charlie-Lambert) tie the narratives together. Shrugging off bourgeois hypocrisy, Veronica believes she owes it to her family to reconstruct the truth about Liam's life and death. Her siblings, parents, and grandparents have averted their eyes from disgusting truths, which must now come out. However, truth that relies on fallible memory is a mirage. Veronica confesses that she "would like to write down what happened in my grandmother's house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. ... I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns ..." What makes Enright's novel an absorbing psychological study and sets it apart from its tattle-tale comrades is its lack of certainty, its vagueness, a fog that sometimes conceals and sometimes partly lifts to reveal the shifting, blurred outline of the 'truth.' This book is for readers who prefer shades of grey to black and white, the bitter to the sweet, and mockery of middle-class self-deception to comfortable illusions of respectability.

• Walking into the sea, his pockets weighted with stones

  Veronica is a 39 year-old Irish wife and mother with nine living siblings (her mother had miscarriages and one child died at the age of three). Growing up Veronica was closest to her brother Liam, just under a year younger than her, and now he too has died, committing suicide by walking into the sea, his pockets weighted with stones. There is to be a Wake and the siblings gathered together at their mother's house include Ernie, a lapsed priest who lives in Peru, Ita, who lives in America, and other assorted brothers and sisters. Veronica thinks back over their lives, particularly Liam's, teasing at distorted memories which might provide a reason for his death, beyond his drinking and his knock-about way of life. The novel opens as Veronica recreates in her imagination the moment in a Dublin hotel when Ada Merriman, her grandmother, met two men, one of whom was to become her husband. The other had another destiny, and was, perhaps, partly responsible for Liam's death. Veronica is created vividly on the page through her words; her thoughts and the events of her life and the lives of her brothers and sisters are filtered through her remarkably honest and uncompromising personality. There is no attempt to put a gloss on events and her narrative is sometimes uncomfortable for the reader as well as utterly fascinating. Enright writes about love and lust, bravery, cowardice and the hurt that can be carried through a life like a weight that cannot be put down. Veronica wants to assign blame, or else to assume shame, but she is not sure that either option can be borne. The Gathering won the Booker Prize in 2007 and is a marvellous book. It is moving, accomplished and full of deep insights into family life.

• Anne Enright writes brilliantly and insightfully

  As with The Green Road, Anne Enright writes brilliantly and insightfully. Her characters are fascinating. Be warned, though. Irish dark pervades throughout. This isn't for you if you're looking for a light summer read.

• El servicio genial.

  El libro lo compré porque es lectura obligada en mis estudios.La historia es muy buena y por desgracia frecuente.No lo recomiendo porque los flashback hacen que pierdas mucho el hilo y llega un momento en que no sabes si estás en el presente ,en el pasado o donde...

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