‘I was always on the side. Like salad’

Anne Enright on life after winning the Booker, the appeal of flawed women and why her latest novel is a ‘less uneasy’ read I am having lunch with Anne Enright in a restaurant in Dun Laoghaire, which lies between the city of Dublin, where she was born and brought up, and the seaside town of Bray, where she now lives with her husband, Martin Murphy, a theatre director, and her two children. Inevitably, we are talking about Ireland’s ongoing economic crisis. “One thing the crash did was show up just how much blather, both written and spoken, that there is in this country,” she says, laughing. “The national conversation has been going on forever and now it just bores the pants off everyone. And you know what, the people who talk for a living don’t actually do a damn thing except talk. I think that recently there was almost a collective realisation that this was the case and, you know, I was kind of delighted by that.” Enright cackles into her soup and looks slightly guilty at the same time. She has the air of a mischievous and unruly child and her thoughts flow into words with a kind of lateral logic you have to concentrate hard on to keep up. Her irreverence and her easygoing, though often caustic, wit are present in her fiction, particularly in the voices of her female characters. In her new novel, The Forgotten Waltz , the narrator, Gina Moynihan, is a young woman who has tasted, but is now in furious retreat from, everything that is expected of her: early marriage, house, family, the slow erosion of spontaneity for routine. Like her creator, she has an eye for the absurdities of modern Irish life and a gift for describing them with a gleeful attention to detail. Early on in the book, Gina attends “the kind of party where no one ate the chicken skin” and surveys the room with the withering gaze of the natural

Posted by on April 30, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.