A Midweek Haul

Back in 2008, I came across an article in the New Sunday Indian Express (which is one of the many papers I read on Sundays) in the month of February. It was about the Man Booker Prize Winner of 2007 so naturally I cut it and kept it in my scrap book. The writer of the article was Bob Thompson and the subject of the article was Anne Enright whose novel ‘The Gathering’ fetched her the ‘Booker’ that year.

No other Booker winner captured my imagination as much as Anne Enright and I very badly wanted to read ‘The Gathering’ as soon as I could lay my hands on it. A couple of weeks later the ‘The Gathering’ appeared on the bookshelves in Indian book stores. The book, if I remember correctly, was priced somewhere around six hundred and fifty rupees. I wished I could come across a second hand copy for which I don’t have to spend in the hundreds. It was until last week, more than two years after learning about the book, that I found a second hand copy.

Last week at the second hand bookstore where I had spotted a minor treasure consisting of a handful of books that I planned to buy one or two books at a time, I found Anne Enright’s ‘the Gathering’ and had to pay only seventy rupees for it. The book is almost in new condition. Though I waited more than two years to find the book, now I cannot seem to wait any longer to read it. I am fighting off a strong urge to begin reading it right away. But I’m biding my time until I get a full day without any distractions or demands on my time. I flipped through the book and read a few lines at random and found that the book was of a kind I had never read before.

Maybe that was why Colm Toibin’s blurb on the back cover of the book made out Enright as a combination of Joan Didion, Alice Munro, Alice McDermott and Edna O’Brien. I cannot wait to discover for myself how true it is.