If you’re looking for a last-minute gift, think about Anne Enright’s book The Forgotten Waltz. Enright, who shot to celebrity when she won the Man Booker in 2007, gave a terrific reading with Lisa Moore at the Winterset literary festival in Eastport in August. The Forgotten Waltz is about an affair. It’s all about sex and what happens to people as a result of it, but it’s not porn: there’s hardly any sex described. There’s no He put his hand on bla or She felt his blablabla: it’s all about passion, about how it makes people feel to be in lust, to be in love, how they go about making arrangements, what they think, how they change their minds, what the people around them are doing. Makes you feel all woozy just reading it.
There’s something audacious about Enright’s writing: on every page you think Oh, that’s an unusual way of saying it, or Oh, that’s a bold statement. Over and over again, these surprises —good surprises, ones that come from a fresh perception, a striking way of putting words together.
It’s hard work, making sentences sound new and exciting. So many people have already written so many things. On every page, this book provides a little jolt of pleasure for the reader, an I-hadn’t-expected-that, the literary equivalent of a blindfold taste-test where everything is delicious. Here’s the narrator describing a woman at the beach: “her odd little breasts screamed ‘breasts’ at you…they looked so tender on her little bony ribs, like they had been grown there specially.” And her boyfriend: “the whole of him — all five foot nine, God help us — was fizzed up with hair, so that he became blurred at the edges, when he undressed.” Fizzed up with hair? Blurred at the edges? I love it. And it’s like that all the way through.
In this way, the book reminds me of Michael Winter’s writing. His fiction always has that quality of audacity; it delivers little charged hits of observation and phrasing that make the back of your neck prickle. Michael’s new book, Minister Without Portfolio, was published this year by Penguin. Two other excellent gift choices were launched together in June: Lisa Moore’s new novel, Caught, and Michael Crummey’s collection of poetry, Under the Keel, both from Anansi.