![]() ![]() ![]() Liam, an alcoholic, had committed suicide by putting rocks into his pockets and walking into the sea at Brighton. The narrator is Veronica Hegarty and it is through her eyes that the Hegarty family story is told as they gather at her brother’s wake in Dublin. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones. I don’t even know what name to put on it. I feel it roaring inside me – this thing that may not have taken place. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I 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 didn’t enjoy it, which is a shame as it’s a book that’s been on my shelves since 2008 and one I chose to read this month as part of Reading Ireland Month, an event to ‘˜to celebrate the wealth and breadth and general awesomeness of Irish cultural life.’ ![]() ![]() It’s a dark and disturbing novel about a dysfunctional family. I’m sorry to say that I think The Gathering is one of the most dreary books I’ve read. The Gathering is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars. It wasn’t the drink that killed him ‘“ although that certainly helped ‘“ it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother’s house, in the winter of 1968. The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. The Gathering by Anne Enright is her fourth book. ![]()
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