by Anne EnrightMcClelland & Stewart
~ Review in Halifax Herald, January 2009
There’s something thrilling about this new collection of short stories from Anne Enright. The characters in them speak straight to the heart, as if sharing a cup of tea across the kitchen table. These are ordinary, hard working Irish people whose complicated lives are never straightforward. Sometimes they stand at a point in time, not so much regretting the past as wondering how the future looks from here.
Several of Enright’s stories tell of madness, of a slow spiral down. In Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar, Fintan is slowly losing touch with reality. [His friend] leaves the house they share to marry into a comfortable life, and returns to meet Fintan in the afternoons. “He is madder now than he ever was. I think he is quite mad. He is barely there. Behind my back I hear the sound of threads snapping.”
Serena, anorexic and troubled, takes off and is gone for ninety-one days. Her family “lived them one by one. We lived those days one at a time. We went through each hour of them and we didn’t skip a single minute.” - Little Sister.
And through the collection, Enright’s characters deal with the complicated exasperation of marriage. Until The Girl Died is the opening story (and the last story written). An unnamed wife’s husband has an affair with a younger woman. She’s used to it, they’ll get over it, nothing will change. Until the girl dies, and her husband sits crying on the sofa.
Anne Enright is a master of the short story genre. The shape of her words and sentences create a cadence that is a pleasure to read and her ability to convey so much with a word or a very Irish turn of phrase appears effortless. It the mark of a writer at the top of her craft.
Anne Enright has written numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. In 2007, she won the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.
