I have been a fan of Anne Enright since she won the Booker Prize in 2007 with The Gathering. However, it was her 2015 novel, The Green Road that she described as “… very much more like a proper book …” that for me, is her best.
This collection of essays came out last year and it’s full of wide interest as its sub-title proclaims. There are essays on writers (Helen Garner, Angela Carter, Alice Munro, Toni Morrison), books, (The Pornogapher – 1979 by John McGahern, Ulysses – 1922 by James Joyce) and places (Canada, Dublin) but it is her essay On Consent that I found the most interesting and stimulating …
“The burden of ‘yes’ makes the woman responsible for what happens to her, and sex should involve a release from responsibility.“
This essay, On Consent, along with Time for Change: Ireland’s referendum on abortion reform, The Monsters of #Me Too and Unruly Bodies: Women and their doctors, are essential for thought provoking reading by readers from all angles of the debate about the agency of women.
Her style is conversational not academic, although her vocabulary is challenging: sacerdotal, aperçu, and climacteric – which if you apply the negative, non climacteric, I discovered can refer to pineapples … and also some men: they don’t get sweeter after you pick them. These are just a few of the words that sent me scurrying to a dictionary. Don’t skim over them; we should always look up new words until our dying day.
I’m such a fiction nerd, I don’t read non-fiction very often. But I’m very glad I read this one. And will dip into it again and again. Highly recommended.
Michael K Freundt 