The Gathering

I was just telling my Faerie on the phone, I've decided to add a new level to this "read fifty books in a year" challenge. I'm going to attempt to write down my thoughts on the books after I read them!

So, first.. The Gathering by Anne Enright.

I was really excited to read this book. It looked so good. However, it took me a while to get into it. I think that Enright was trying to hard to make the beginning a mystery that I got very confused. I didn't know what she was talking about half the time.

But, when I got further into the book and started to figure out what was happening, the words made much more sense and I could relate to it a lot better. This is about when I started to realize the best part of this book: the beautiful one liners. The incredibly insightful, gorgeously written passages that seem to come out of nowhere - or out of the most ordinary things, anyway - and take you by surprise and make you whisper, "Oh."

Some of my favourites:
"I realized, too, that I was not in love with him, but condemned instead to a lifetime of such false intensities, that I would have to love each man I slept with in order not hate myself."

"..where men are men and their hearts are easy. I know that these men exist, I have even met them, it is just that I could never love one, even if I tried. I love the ones who suffer, and they love me. They love to see me sitting on their nice Italian furniture, and they love to see me cry."

"It seems that the years of my adolescence were years of increading innocence, because by sixteen I was completely passionate and completely pure. We would all become poets, I thought, we would love mightily, and Liam, in his anger, would change the world."

"I try to believe in something, just for the heck of it. I pluck some absolute out of the air, some expanding thought that will open in my head like either - God, or the future, or the greater good. I bow my head and try to believe that love will make it better, or if love won't then children will."

The Gathering is about memories and loss and love and sex. It is unflinchingly sexual, bringing up the idea that all things are really about sex.