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The Gathering | 
| Author: Anne Enright
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy Used: £0.01
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Avg. Customer Rating:  80 reviews
Sales Rank: 5934
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 0099501635
EAN: 9780099501633
ASIN: 0099501635
Publication Date: March 20, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 75 more reviews...
 Dull dull dull January 4, 2009
It must have been a lean year for the Booker prize if this is the pinnacle. The story is laboured and without aim, the characters boring and the whole thing rather a waste of paper.
I have a theory about book prize winners - the more you include unnecessary mentions of genitals and "the act" the more likely you are to win. Jane Austin wouldn't stand a chance these days.
Oh and another thing - along with books that are described as "magic realism", I am now avoiding books with reviews that include the word hallucinogenic.
 The Gathering January 3, 2009
The angry and restless Veronica Hegarty is in the middle of a journey back to her childhood memories, searching for the true reason behind her favourite brother Liam's death in Anne Enright's fourth novel The Gathering.
The death of her brother did not only bring Veronica's unhappy family together at his funeral in Dublin, it woke her up from the shallow life Liam often blamed her for - the perfect house, daughters and golf-playing husband - while he walked a different path leading him to become a useless messer who put rocks in his pockets and slipped into the sea at Brighton.
In her muscular and depressing psychological novel, Enright has created a dark environment which reflects the life of the big Irish family Hegarty. Although the book is as dark as the night, you will find a deep story about a sister's behaviour having lost her brother, her urgent search for the truth and how some survive better than others. A story about denial versus "the little thoughts in your head that can grow until they eat your entire mind."
Whether you will like the book or not depends on whether you like the narrator Veronica, who escapes her present life and cuts of her family to recover. Recover from what? Her brothers death or her own past experiences? Personally, I did not like the narrator. She made me confused. At the end, Veronica tells her little daughter that she did not even like her brother. Then, why so urgent about telling the truth behind his death? The real question is what happened to her and the secret behind her hate to the world. Veronica's empty personality lies in the truth behind her brothers death. This is what makes the book special.
Gathering too much hard work. January 2, 2009
When setting down to read The Gathering, I was intrigued by the back page setting the scene for an enchanting book; full of mesmerizing characters. Previously I had never read a booker prize winner, I believe I probably never will again. This book does contain brilliant prose and really wonderful use of the English language. However when I sit down to read a book I want to never put it down, I want to only stop reading it because I fall asleep from sheer tiredness. When reading The Gathering I struggled to get through every single page, often having to read pages twice to simply keep a grip of characters I really had no empathy for. Getting to the end of this book was a mission not an enjoyment and for me it is not what reading is about at all.
I would recommend this book to someone wanting a real challenge. To someone who believes reading a Booker Prize winner means more to them than to read a book that comes alive on every single page. I am sure it has a place on the shelves of a reader that cares for the politics of book awards, for me such politics have no place on my book shelf. Simply because out of the many books I have read, this is the first book I did not have the energy to complete and I hope it is the last.
 Good, but not amazing... December 21, 2008
The Gathering is a story about an Irish family which struggles with significant issues caused by past experiences. All what happened in this family from the beginning of 1925 made the Hegarty clan dysfunctional and unhappy. The narrator of the book is one of the family members, Veronica Hegarty. Thanks to her, the reader can travel though the Hegarty family's past and understand the meaning of the present situation.
We meet Veronica and her family for a sad occasion which brings them back together. They have to face their brother's funeral and the dramatic aspect of his death. Liam Hegarty, by the age of forty, drowned himself in the sea in Brighton. The family can not accept his act, especially Veronica, who had always been very close to him. She starts to remind herself the time of her childhood with Liam at her grandmother's house. It is how we get to know the history of the family and discover that an incident which happened in this house in 1968 had a major impact on Liam's suicide.
The author of the book presents this story in a very sharp and dark way. The reader has to face deep and crude statements of Veronica's feelings towards her family, especially the one touching the sexual sphere. We do not find soft and romantic explanations in this book, mainly because of the language used by the author. An interesting aspect of this book is its organisation. We do not follow the story in a chronological order and because of that we have the impression that Veronica is telling her story directly to us.
The Gathering is the fourth novel of Irish author Anne Enright. The book published by Vintage has won the 2007 Man Booker Prize.
what a drear-fest December 16, 2008
I wish I'd read the reviews here before buying 'The Gathering' because then I wouldn't have wasted my money.
What a dreary little book about nothing at all.
If this what commissioning editors and prize judges think is literature then heaven knows what future there is in publishing - it's not particularly well-written, the characters are totally unengaging and unlikeable, nothing much happens, the 'gathering' itself is under-whelming, the main character is selfish and unpleasant and prone to distasteful imaginings about her grandparents' sex lives, and above all the author is obsessed with writing tedious descriptions of sexual body parts and smells.
Totally pointless. I couldn't wait to toss it into the charity bag, and I certainly won't be buying another Enright book.
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