Anne Enright's The Gathering

The Gathering by Anne Enright
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When was the last time I had my orange highlighter when I try to read a fiction? Aahh, David Nicholls - and Emily Bronte.

Anne Enright may not deserve all the love, but this novel of hers deserve a credit. After all, she made a challenge - to assess how true I am in feeling different emotions.

The composition is like puzzle pieces that needs to be put together, piece-by-piece, for you to understand its bigger picture and its message. Chapters are illustrated in one era to another, one generation to another, one memory to another. And you will get annoyed because at the first part, you tend to get bored. Enright dared me at page 52 of Chapter 9: DROP THIS BOOK NOW IF THIS IRRITATES YOU:

Spell: PENIS ON A TRAIN TO BRIGHTON
Hay, Harmless, harmless, harmless.

Is this page 52 even relevant? I told myself.

But I have to continue. Because I haven't seen it yet.

And as you get along in the middle part of the novel, the pace gives an upbeat. And yeah, there were moments when I cannot stop: The ghost-like apparitions, paranoias, and tears where I cannot compel myself to relate because I am not depressed in the first place.

I cannot believe my skill in understanding psychographs will be challenged here; honestly, I read most of the chapters more than once, because I need to review and get to know the relevance of one stage to another. If you are a psychology student, you should read this novel for you are to test your own wit, your own logic, and your own way of thinking as you immerse yourself on the depths of loneliness and how a person sees the light after all those episodes of darkness.

I give it not of the same rank as of David Nicholls because I cannot make this as my "life manual". There are lessons, yeah, there are also things to consider and quotes to remember. But to see myself as an undersexed individual who had a close brother died via suicide, I cannot seem to picture myself in one. One, because I see sex as an ultimate surrender and insignia of love (PLEASE DO NOT BUTT IN, THIS IS A PERSONAL NOTE ANYWAY), and for me to remain sexless as of to-date is a personal choice. Two, because I have a brother like Liam who fell in love with a girl once but cannot-seem-to-continuously-love-her-because-he-has-seen-the-light-and-he-will-never-be-like-Liam-who-had-a-hidden-past-that-cannot-be-told-easily-because-he-is-happy-in-the-first-place. And three, my grandma has had no secrets hidden from dad, from mum, and from us.

There's humor in this novel too. If you cannot spell penis, you have to read this. This is one intelligent porn like Murakami's.

Just a side note: I do not know where Djerba is, but based on Google, it is in North Africa. And yeah, Gatwick airport sucks, but Heathrow sucks more.

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