Being a writer and Irish means carrying the legacy of a transcendent narrative in whatever genre you finally indulge in. But Anne Enright assumes the challenge from the naturalness of someone who already has personal baggage and narrative motivation to delve into that lake in which they have already submerged since James Joyce but also John Banville.
The result is that intensity projected to each scene. A mixture of successful tragic imposture and constant vital dilemma for characters run over by their pasts. Or, in another case, assaulted by spirits always in debt that float through the scenes where the protagonists move, as if with the sound of planks under their feet.
Perhaps it is something of that intensity that prevents regularity in their publications. It is necessary to be convinced of having the opportune history on which to dump that torrent of crude sincerity weighed down by aromas of guilt, to ignited passions on embers of memory; or sinister shadows impossible to get rid of completely ...
Anne Enright's Top 3 Recommended Novels
Actress
We may overreact, especially when we lie. Histrionics would then be the defense that remains for us to divert attention from our miseries on the stage of life. Similarities like this appear to us when we contemplate Katherine from the eyes of her daughter Norah, a daughter willing to reveal everything about her idolized mother.
In that of acting, without a doubt, an actress like the great Katherine O'Dell can take it forward under any circumstance. She was able to lead the most sophisticated interpretation in reality with the absolute solvency of a few opportune tears or whatever she has to contribute with her chameleonic interpretive virtues. But as Dorian Gray himself well knew, the portrait of oneself is always there, waiting for us to return to visit it in the old attic.
On this occasion, as I say, it is the daughter who dusts off the portrait and recovers what her mother saw of herself as the great secrets were piling up with the stench of death and the moral misery not only of her but of everything that her. surrounds.
The meeting
The strange moment of a wake has an immeasurable literary juice. It will be a matter of the impossible balance between those who leave and those who stay, the separation of two worlds, the valley of tears in which those who still have a word and therefore literature remain and the sky where little remains to be told. beyond the delight and the glory ...
At that starting point (pun intended) the plot of Five hours with Mario, and also here the departure from the scene of an actor whom we do not know is tracing everything that nevertheless left marked in people and even objects, with that aroma of unforgettable memories in each place where he was for those who remain and invaluable for those who do not. they met the deceased.
This novel tells the dark history of the Hegarty clan. When its nine members gather in Dublin for the wake of his brother Liam, everything seems to indicate that the drink was not the only cause of his death. Something happened to him as a child at his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. Something that his sister Verónica always knew but never dared to admit until now ... A novel about memory and desire, about destiny written on our body.
The Madigan Way
Every family branch is the same path. Every sum of destinies undertaken from the personal will of each person ends up diluting into a single branch that descends directly from an original point that gathers around a memory. The turning point where each person marches towards their particular claim rejuvenates and recovers the idea of belonging when sometimes the path seems lost or the bet defeated.
No matter how much nothing of the material is created or no place is that starting point. Everything is the memory of a touch, a landscape seen in common. Nothing that remains, nothing tangible occupies that moment that continues to link everything ...
Rosaleen Madigan's four children long ago left their hometown on Ireland's Atlantic coast in pursuit of lives they would never have dreamed of, in Dublin, New York or Segú. Now that their mother, a difficult and fascinating woman, has decided to sell the family home and divide the inheritance, Dan, Constance, Emmet and Hanna return to their old home to spend their last Christmas there, with the inescapable feeling that their childhood and their history is about to disappear forever ...
There are few writers who, like Anne Enright, know how to endow language with such tension and such brilliance that they can show how the lives of its protagonists explode into a thousand pieces and then melt back into a perfect crystal. Or in the words of the author herself: «When I look at people, I wonder if they are coming home or fleeing from their loved ones. There is no other type of trip. And I think that we are a curious class of refugees: we escape from our own blood or we go towards it ».
