The Green Road Anne Enright

[hollyisalovelyname]

Has anybody read it ?
If so, what did you think?
I preferred it to The Gathering, which I disliked

Bump

I am waiting to get this from the library but there's a long waiting list for it. I liked The Gathering but preferred one of her earlier books-What are You Like. It's about twins who are separated at birth. I really must get around to reading more of her older books.

Just finished it. I enjoyed it - mostly for the evocative writing about the west of Ireland - very close to home for me. LOVED the description of Constance shopping for Christmas. The emmet and hanna characters were a bit less well realised for me. I felt we needed a bit more of the 1980s section to understand how they ended up as they did. And the scenes between hanna and her husband seemed a bit excessive to me - Althigh I know that alcoholism is still rife and ignored in Ireland that seemed too much.

The contrariness of Rosaleen was beautifully put together. She was the best developed character (unsurprisingly).

All in all, I felt that if was a little too sparse to completely successfully tell the story and while that is her style, a bit more development would have rounded it off.

That's said, I'll definitely try her other stuff.

I much preferred The Gathering, which makes me sob and gasp and is probably one of my all-time favourites.

I must have missed something but I didn't really get why Rosaleen was so 'fascinating' and 'dazzling' and all the other things the reviews have told me she is.

It all felt a little too fragmented as well, geographically and in terms of all the different things happening to all the different characters. And I agree the alcoholism stuff with Hannah was not quite credible.

Having said all that, I still like Enright and think she's one of our best writers.

I've got a library copy that I'm starting next week. Will report back soon.

I agree the Ireland scenes were evoked well, but I didn't like this book apart from that. The stories felt so disjointed to me, and I felt there were too many characters.

Glad I didn't buy this one.

I was disappointed in it, while acknowledging she's a wonderful writer. She set up so many cliches in this one - family gathering in west of Ireland childhood home, matriarch, promiscuous gay man, failed priest, flighty actress with PND and a drink problem, humorous 'coping' eldest daughter, embittered aid worker etc etc - and didn't do anything much to complicate or undermine them the way she did in The Gathering or The Forbotten Waltz. Rosaleen seemed in some ways like version 2 of the mother from The Gathering, and I really didn't care for the slightly self-conscious camp of the AIDS in 80s NY chapter, which did have about twenty characters too many...

I thought the single best chapter -admittedly brilliant - was Constance waiting in the hospital.

From anyone else I would think it was a damn good novel, but it's not up to what she did in The Gathering or The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch.

I was disappointed with it as well. Constance and Dan were convincing characters but Hanna didn't add anything to the story. Emmet seemed like he wandered in from an entirely different novel altogether. I totally agree with OnlyLovers about Rosaleen-she was charmless and the hold she had over Dan and Emmet wasn't believable.
I did enjoy the parts about Constance in the hospital and doing the Christmas shopping. This book wouldn't put me off reading more Anne Enright but I think it might be time for her to move on from dysfunctional Irish families.