How could you do this to such a great book? Oh well, life moves forward and so do reviews and cranky critics. I have hung the seabird of the second read, second published, around her book. What therefore Man Booker hath joined together, let not man put asunder. Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.
But the themes, the Irishness, the Man Bookered. She deserves to have her book examined alone. I'm almost apologetic about making Enright's novel seem an Irish twin to Banville's. 'The Gathering' was very good, just not great. It was less of a memory than an imagined history, a search for meaning in loss, a desperate search for who and why in family. Banville's novel was almost elegiac and poetic in its mourning. It was a picked scab, a hot wound, a shout into a dark wet cave tea without sugar or cream, aged whiskey without the water. Banville's The Sea was more poetic, more soothing a search for the correct word, the proper memory. Both were Man Booker Prize winners (born two years apart). Both novels centered around drownings, death, and memory. The Irish know how to feck, fight and die. We live in them instead” ― Anne Enright, The Gathering I grabbed a couple of my Irish writers to read while traveling back and forth to Ireland for pleasure. “I do not think we remember our family in any real sense.
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