[ book tip by Antje Flemming ] It is a beast with many heads and limbs. It devours, jealously watches over, and hoards the air we breathe. And we’re not talking about Hydra here, but about the family, that beast which is at Veronica Hegarty’s throat in Anne Enright’s splendid novel The Gathering: ‘… just at this moment, I find that being part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive’.

At the Hegarty’s, a big Irish family with piercing blue eyes and a strong penchant for alcohol, Eros and Thanatos are next-door neighbours. Here the only thing left for people to inherit is pain. Young, beautiful Liam, who always danced at the edge of an abyss, has drowned himself - without his socks and underwear but with stones in his pockets. Veronica, who was always his favourite, is trying to give her brother a dignified burial as well as come to terms with what made him walk into the sea. In a breathless monologue, the Hegartys’ story in ultra-Catholic Ireland unfolds, encompassing Ada, the grandmother, who loved one young man, but married another; and the mother, who after a dozen births and seven miscarriages, lives in a stupor. She addresses her children as ‘Darling’ since she has long forgotten their names (‘…Midge, Bea, Ernest, Stevie, Ita, Mossie, Liam, Veronica, Kitty, Alice, and the twins, Ivor and Jem’). Veronica herself is on unsteady ground – her husband and daughters are slowly turning into strangers: ‘It is like Christmas in Hades. It is like we are all dead, and that’s just fine.’

Author Anne Enright, who was born in Dublin in 1962, won the 2007 Booker Prize, the ‘kingmaker among international literature prizes’, for her fourth novel. The Gathering is ‘a genuine attempt to stare down both love and death, to anatomise their pains and fears and peculiar pleasures’, as A.L. Kennedy puts it. Anne Enright has written a gem of a novel, a book that is angry and touching, unforgiving and tender, and ranks among the great reads of recent years.

[ book info ] Enright, Anne: The Gathering. (Book language: English) Black Cat, 2007 . ISBN: 9780802170392.