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Thanks for all that info, Bookworm_Girl. It's very interesting to learn Enright will be the first Laureate for Irish Fiction.
In the end, I really liked this book. As with you, Bookworm_Girl, I was iffy on the first half but the last half really brought it together for me. It's also interesting that I never really thought of the 'gathering' as anything more than the family together, but her comments in your post now have me thinking on gathering feelings, like with her use of 'gathering sense of dread' in the interview you quoted and which word usage I don't think was accidental.
With the vulgarity, I can easily understand how both of you were put off by it, fantasyfan and Bookworm_Girl. I tried to think of it in terms of this one specific person who may have thought patterns that go this way. Perhaps it is unfair of me, but I couldn't get past thinking that this woman might not be the safest left around children because of the way her mind works combined with what she'd experienced (it's often said abusers had childhood experience with abuse themselves). Some of the things she thought when near some of the children seemed borderline to me.
On the other hand, I suppose we all have private thoughts of many different sorts of things and even if our minds don't go where hers goes on this, everyone has some thoughts that would be embarrassing or thought of as strange if others could hear them and it's just that in this book we see hers. That's one of the things I liked best about the book, the sense of seeing her unvarnished thoughts. I'm not so sure I agree with Enright's assertion in the interview Bookworm_Girl quoted though ('I feel that I'm reclaiming or repossessing some territory that's been taken away from women by male writers'). This seems rather accusatory to me.
One thing I loved about the novel was the ghostly imagery, as I could vividly imagine those scenes set more present day when she's seeing people already dead here and there. Her writing can be lyrical and I especially found it so with those passages.
I also enjoyed the unreliable memory, and the progression of those strange imagined quasi-flashbacks towards the truth of the past.
It's not an easy book to like, as its very low relative Goodreads rating attests, but I found it rewarding and I can well understand how it won the Man Booker by unanimous vote.
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