So, I finished Anne Enright's The Gathering last night. I wasn't sure how I felt about it until the final paragraph:"Gatwick airport is not the best place to be gripped by a fear of flying. But it seems that this is what is happening to me now; because you are up so high, in those things, and there is such a long way to fall. Then again, I have been falling for months. I have been falling into my own life, for months. And I am about to hit it now."
Haven't we all felt like that? Of course, the entire novel is very well written. Enright plays masterfully with notions of truth and memory, Veronica's memories slipping through our hands like water. She struggles to distinguish fact from fiction just as much as we do.
But it's that moment at the end that did it, that moment when Veronica realizes that whether she likes it or not, she has to step out of her head and back into the real world - that moment stuck with me. She's been watching her life, distancing herself from her children, her husband; now that life demands her attention. I just really loved that ending. It (and this book) caught me pleasantly by surprise.
No comments:
Post a Comment