crabbygirl reviewed The Gathering by Anne Enright
Review of 'The Gathering' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
initially i was put off by this book's heavy focus on the blood and biology of sex - if the author had been a man, you'd have thought there was something wrong with him - here are a few tidbits:
p. 7
i am a trembling mess from hip to knee. there is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig between my thighs, it is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.
p. 35
...the dark light in her eyes as she looked at him, like she saw right through to his bones. his own puberty going unnoticed - almost to himself - as her little breasts swelled under the nightdress. she moved towards death and womanhood at the same pace, the nipples like a spreading bruise, the breasts growing, and failing to grow, …
initially i was put off by this book's heavy focus on the blood and biology of sex - if the author had been a man, you'd have thought there was something wrong with him - here are a few tidbits:
p. 7
i am a trembling mess from hip to knee. there is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig between my thighs, it is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.
p. 35
...the dark light in her eyes as she looked at him, like she saw right through to his bones. his own puberty going unnoticed - almost to himself - as her little breasts swelled under the nightdress. she moved towards death and womanhood at the same pace, the nipples like a spreading bruise, the breasts growing, and failing to grow, over lungs hard with disease.
...that is when he holds his penis in the nighttime, it feels like her thin skin; always damp, never sweating.
p. 52
the man beside me on the train lifts his pelvis slightly, and settles it back down. he is dozing in the flickering, sexual sunlight, lulled and unsettled by the movement of the train. i can sense the blood pooling in his lap; the thick oblong of his penis moving down the leg of his suit
but no, the author is a woman, and irish.
and by the time i realized that her turns of phrases were NOT disgusting or overly/unnecessarily sexual but were actually a distinctive irish prose, i was already 1/2way through the book and was too lazy to start re-reading it. but boy this book deserves a second look.
and man, what balls it takes to be a woman and set down such stripped, naked thoughts.
