I’m reading The Gathering right now.
I’m enjoying it, even though it’s incredibly dark. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for a dark novel when I started, but it’s working for me now. How much I enjoy the book overall will be largely dependent on what happens in the second half. For now I’m impressed with Anne Enright’s style. Her writing is very sharp and unique. It feels like it’s getting into my bones and messing with me.
Here are some passages that struck me as so vivid and honest that I’ve marked my paperback all up with circles and lines:
“And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy – and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.” page 28
“But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.
I think I am ready for that now. I think I am ready to be met.” page 82
“He handed it to Ada and pressed her forearm, like they had lived too much, each of them, to have anything left to say.” page 86
“‘Oh, he treated her like a queen,’ as they would say over the funeral cooked meats. They had a story, Ada and Charlie, that is for sure, in which they each played the most important roles, and when she walked across the room to him, you could tell how fated they felt, as if their love was a great burden to them as well as a joy.” page 103
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