The Forgotten Waltz
Anne Enright, 2011
W.W. Norton & Co.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393342581
Summary
A new, unapologetic kind of adultery novel. Narrated by the proverbial other woman—Gina Moynihan, a sharp, sexy, darkly funny thirtysomething IT worker—The Forgotten Waltz charts an extramarital affair from first encounter to arranged, settled, everyday domesticity....
This novel’s beauty lies in Enright’s spare, poetic, off-kilter prose—at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It’s built of startling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another.
Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who've ever lived. (From Elle Magazine.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 11, 1962
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., Trinity College (Dublin); M.A., University of
East Anglia
• Awards—Awards—Rooney Prize, Irish Writing Award, Royal Society
of Authors Encore Prize, Booker Prize
• Currently—lives in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland
Anne Enright is a Booker Prize-winning Irish author. She has published essays, short stories, a non-fiction book and four novels. Before her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favourably reviewed and widely praised. Her writing explores themes such as family relationships, love and sex, Ireland's difficult past and its modern zeitgeist.
Enright won an international scholarship to Lester Pearson United World College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, where she studied for an International Baccalaureate for two years. She received an English and philosophy degree from Trinity College Dublin. She began writing in earnest when her family gave her an electric typewriter for her 21st birthday. She won a scholarship to the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course, where she was taught by Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury and earned an M.A.
Enright was a television producer and director for RTE in Dublin for six years. She was a producer for the ground-breaking RTE programme Nighthawks for four years. She then worked in children's programming for two years and wrote at the weekends. The Portable Virgin, a collection of her short stories, was published in 1991. The Portable Virgin won the 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Enright began writing full-time in 1993.
Enright's first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, was published in 1995. The book explores themes such as love, motherhood, Roman Catholicism, and sex. The narrator of the novel is Grace, who lives in Dublin and works for a tacky game show. Her father wears a wig that cannot be spoken of in front of him. An angel called Stephen who committed suicide in 1934 and has come back to earth to guide lost souls moves into Grace's home and she falls in love with him.
Enright's next novel, What Are You Like? (2000), is about twin girls called Marie and Maria who are separated at birth and raised apart from each other in Dublin and London. It looks at tensions and ironies between family members. It was short-listed in the novel category of the Whitbread Awards.
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) is a fictionalised account of the life of Eliza Lynch, an Irish woman who was the consort of Paraguayan president Francisco Solano López and became Paraguay's most powerful woman in the 19th century. Her book Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004) is a collection of candid and humorous essays about childbirth and motherhood. Enright's fourth novel, The Gathering, was published in 2007, and The Forgotten Waltz in 2011.
Enright's writings have appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, London Review of Books, Dublin Review, and the Irish Times. She was once a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4, and now reviews for the Guardian and RTE. The 4 October 2007 issue of the London Review of Books published her essay, "Disliking the McCanns", about Kate and Gerry McCann, the British parents of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in suspicious circumstances while on holiday in Portugal in May 2007. The essay was criticized by some journalists.
Enright won the Davy Byrne's Irish Writing Award for 2004. She also won the Royal Society of Authors Encore Prize.On 16 October 2007 Enright was awarded the Man Booker Prize, which included a cash award of £50,000, for The Gathering.
Enright lives in Bray, County Wicklow. She is married to Martin Murphy, who is director of the Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoghaire. They have two children. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The Forgotten Waltz is a nervy enterprise, an audacious bait-and-switch. Cloaked in a novel about a love affair is a ferocious indictment of the self-involved material girls our era has produced. Enright's channeling of Gina's interior monologue is so accurate and unsparing that reading her book is, at times, like eavesdropping on a very long, crazily intimate cellphone conversation. It's a testament to the unwavering fierceness of Enright's project that I mean this as high praise. We've all met people like the characters in her book. Neither evil nor good, they're merely awful in entirely ordinary ways. And it's impressive, how skillfully Anne Enright has gotten them on the page.
Francine Prose - New York Times Book Review
[S]o beautifully written that you could read it once just for the dazzle of the prose, then start over for the content…The sensibility is subtle and complex, as the narrative explores connections between desire and responsibility…and the complicated ways in which duty is refracted into the rest of our lives. It's about love, and sex, and the sinuous, unexpected paths they create, and the way they are inevitably entwined with family. It's about fear and obligation and passion and ways in which we explain our actions to ourselves. The way we give up something we thought essential, for something that is. It's hard to say which is more satisfying about this book: its emotional complexities or the frugal elegance of its prose.
Roxanna Robinson - Washington Post
A new, unapologetic kind of adultery novel. Narrated by the proverbial other woman—Gina Moynihan, a sharp, sexy, darkly funny thirtysomething IT worker—The Forgotten Waltz charts an extramarital affair from first encounter to arranged, settled, everyday domesticity.... This novel’s beauty lies in Enright’s spare, poetic, off-kilter prose—at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It’s built of startling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another. Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who've ever lived.
Elle
In this gorgeous critique of Ireland as the Celtic Tiger draws its dying breaths, Enright chronicles an affair between 32-year-old Gina Moynihan, and Seán Vallely, a rich, dutiful husband and a devoted if somewhat inept father to the otherworldly, epileptic Evie, not yet 13. Set against a backdrop of easy money, second homes, and gratuitous spending, the dissolution of Gina's and Sean's marriages is both an antidote to and a symptom of the economic prosperity that gripped the country until its sudden and devastating fall from grace in 2008: "In Ireland, if you leave the house and there is a divorce, then you lose the house.... You have to sleep there to keep your claim.... You think it is about sex, and then you remember the money." There are, as with any affair, casualties, but what weighs most heavily on Gina is not what will become of her husband, Conor, but rather Evie, who sees Gina kissing her father, and innocently asks if she might be kissed too, oblivious to the fact that this moment heralds the end of her family. She eventually becomes all too aware that her father is gone and that she's stuck with her sad, neurotic mother. And so the question that remains at the end of this masterful and deeply satisfying novel is not just what will happen to Ireland, but what will happen to Evie?
Publishers Weekly
She's a sharp-tongued home wrecker who doesn't try to ingratiate herself. But in this corrosively beautiful novel from Man Booker Prize winner Enright (The Gathering), you want to drag back Gina Moynihan as she recounts plunging headlong into the affair that will change her life. Gina met Seán Vallely at sister Fiona's house and first made love to him, without much preamble, while drunk at a business conference. Lectured by her sister, who proclaims that their just-deceased mother would have been mortified, Gina silently disagrees. Surely Mum would have appreciated this affair, which has liberated Gina from…what? The dread of domesticity with teddybearish but somewhat dense husband Conor? Boredom with a lock-step job in Ireland's grim economy? Writing with cool, clear-eyed logic, Enright is brave and persuasive enough to paint Seán as less than ideal; he's a rigid bully and not overwhelmingly attractive. Through Gina's determined pursuit of their relationship, we see the stupefying nature of desire, which Enright deftly contrasts with the sometimes equally stupefying nature of parenting; Gina's big competition is not Seán's wife but his sweet, not-quite-right daughter. Verdict: A breathtaking work that will surprise you; highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
(Starred review.) This stunning novel by a Booker Prize winner....offers up its brilliance by way of astonishingly effective storytelling.
Booklist
In rueful, witty, unpredictable and compassionate prose, Enright gives expression to subtle, affecting shades of human interaction.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How does Gina’s relationship with Sean evolve throughout the story? Is she ever truly in love with him? What does it say about Gina that she was "slightly repulsed" by Sean after they slept together for the first time?
2. In what ways does the book’s setting, that of early 2000s boom Ireland and the recession that followed, intertwine with Gina and Sean’s relationship? Is the setting a metaphor for their affair or is the affair a metaphor for Ireland?
3. Gina says that she was "properly in love" with Conor and that falling in love with him "was the right thing to do." Can you call what she had with Conor love? What does this say about love?
4. What role do Gina’s parents play throughout the novel? What do you think about her saying of her father, "it was the right parent who had died"? How does it relate to "the right thing to do" in the previous question about Conor?
5. How much agency does Gina have as a character? To what extent is she making her own decisions versus letting Sean and outside forces dictate her life?
6. At first it seems as though the story follows a chronological timeline. Then we discover that there are several time arcs. How does Enright move her characters backward and forward through time to better tell the story?
7. In what ways does Evie’s character evolve throughout the novel? Or is it Gina’s perception of her that changes? How does Evie’s development into a full-fledged human being force Gina to confront the effects of her affair?
8. There is a lot of unsold real estate at the end of the story, including Gina’s mother’s house, for which Gina and Fiona had high hopes. Trace the ways in which the characters’ aspirations for wealth and love are forced to contend with the reality of a broken housing market and a flawed lover. Do Gina and Fiona react in the same ways?
9. It becomes clear that Sean has had other affairs and that his unfaithfulness began well before Evie’s first episode. What does this say about Sean? How do both he and Gina use Evie’s sickness to account for Sean’s relationship problems with Aileen? Will Sean be faithful to Gina?
10. Enright makes distinctions between passion and love, between lust and passion. How do these different emotions come into play throughout Gina’s affair with Sean? What sentiments did she experience with Sean that she never experienced with Conor?
11. Is Gina truly happy with Sean? What is she searching for? Does she find it?
12. At one point Gina says, "I think we should own up to what we know. We should know why we do the things that we do." In what way is the novel Gina’s attempt to own up to and explain what she did?
13. Gina is constantly describing and noting what the children around her do, although she is not a mother. What makes her so interested in them? Why is she so negative about women who have children?
14. At the end of the story, Gina seems to have come to terms with her situation. Is it because she believes her affair was inevitable and that meeting Sean was destiny?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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