The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright

by Anne Enright

The Forgotten Waltz is a memory of desire: a recollection of the bewildering speed of attraction, the irreparable slip into longing, that reads with breathtaking immediacy. In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. A woman recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life." As the city outside comes to a halt, she remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and the stillness and vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, she awaits the arrival on her doorstep of his fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie. In The Forgotten Waltz, Enright is at the height of her powers. This is Anne Enright's tour de force, a novel of intelligence, passion, and real distinction.

Genres: Fiction, Ireland, Literary Fiction, Irish Literature, Contemporary, Book Club, Romance

Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has published three volumes of stories, one book of nonfiction, and five novels. In 2015, she was named the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her novel The Gathering won the Man Booker Prize, and The Forgotten Waltz won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Reviews

[Paromjit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did I enjoy reading this award winning Anne Enright's novel set in Ireland, the brutal answer is no, I did not, and I certainly did not like or have empathy with the childless Gina Moynihan who on a snowy Dublin day, looks back on her memories of Sean Vallely, the love of her life. However, here's the thing, I could not stop reading, which is a tribute to Enright's compelling writing of an extramarital affair that takes place amidst the background of the rise and fall of Ireland's 'tiger' economy, shattering the lives of so many. The everyday dramas are exquisitely captured, Gina's lust and obsession with Sean, meeting him at a party held by her sister, Fiona, followed by their numerous encounters of bliss at hotels, parking her car outside his home in the dark.

Gina is oblivious to her husband, Connor, or Sean's wife Aileen who looks after their daughter, Evie, who suffers from seizures, her care taking over her life, and anyone else who might be impacted by their affair, she is consumed by Sean, he is all that matters, although I have to say I could not see what she saw in him. When her mother, Joan dies, the affair becomes public knowledge, met with opprobrium from the community, Gina is on tenterhooks as to whether Sean will move in with her, which takes some time to happen. However, what Gina had not forseen was the 'cuckoo' in her nest, Evie, who has a bigger claim to Sean's love than her. This is a fascinating picture of what is far from uncommon in society, extramarital affairs and their repercussions, examined with compassion and humanity. This might not have been the most enjoyable of reads but Enright made it a thought provoking experience.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just can't believe it. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft! Gone. It's the nearest thing to magic I have yet found.

Don't be fooled by the sentimental title, or the romantic songs that lead off each chapter—these are sly and brittle ironies that ping emotional soft spots like a volley from a peashooter to the back of your neck. The Forgotten Waltz is pitch-perfect social satire that mirrors adultery with the reckless love affair of the Irish economy in the mid-late 2000s. Illicit sex, easy money—two sides of the same tarnished coin of lust. Sean and Gina pursue the former in a series of hotels around Dublin, while the Irish middle class strives for the latter in their gated communities and German sedans.

This is not the cozy Ireland of peat fires and Catholic guilt and rain on rose petals. This is boom-time Ireland, with all its flash and well-cut suits and Chardonnay and vacation homes and holidays in Spain. This is Ireland built by IT and pharmaceuticals and foreign investment. This is Ireland rising. This is Ireland falling. In The Forgotten Waltz lives are destroyed as fortunes and marriages are lost, as you would expect, but everyone survives and carries on, without really having learned a thing. As you would expect.

Narrating with pithy self-awareness, Gina embarks upon an affair with Sean, a married man with a little girl who is just slightly off-kilter, a bit fuzzy around the edges. Gina herself is married, to Conor, who is also fuzzy around the edges—solidly built, hairy, good-natured, a bit like a big hedgehog—not at all her type, yet somehow they marry and buy a condo. Her caustically funny voice is so natural. She is genuinely making an effort to get herself sorted, to atone, to be a person of compassion. At least she thinks she is. Gina is a woman in love, catastrophically; but she is not a bad person. She is outrageously, maddeningly human.

Years later, in the middle of a snowstorm that shuts down Dublin, Gina recounts how and where and when things went awry. But not why. You may find yourself scrabbling around the plot, looking for the reasons Gina and Sean risk their settled lives for the starched anonymity of hotel rooms and the pretense of nodding acquaintances when their social circles cross, which they frequently do (it is a small island, after all). Love doesn't seem to be the point. And of course it isn't. The point is the selfishness of the new Ireland and the new Irish within it. By the end, it's all turned to custard.

We listen to it . . . the rumour of money withering out of the walls and floors and out of the granite kitchen countertops, turning them back to bricks and rubbles and stone.

Anne Enright is one of the bravest writers I've read. Readers and publishers alike will take an author to task for characters whose behavior leaves our wells of empathy dry. And yet Enright writes without apology, pretense or false redemption. She isn't afraid to depart from cause and effect to acknowledge the universal truth that shit just happens. You fall for the right person at the wrong time. You take out a bank loan to support a lifestyle beyond your means because they are just throwing money at you, anyway.

The Forgotten Waltz is not without its moments of beauty and grace. Enright is so skilled, she knows how and when to thread in humanity, sometimes with self-deprecating humor, sometimes with visceral emotion. I love what she does and how she does it. I love that it drives readers crazy and occasionally, drives them away. With fierce and candid and gorgeous prose, Enright writes life's madness and makes us feel all the saner for it.

[Jennifer Steil · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected to love this book, given Anne Enright's reputation and my love for all things Irish. But it left me cold. It's not the adultery that galled me, but how it was carried out and presented. Even after finishing the book I found the main character, Gina, elusive. She never came to life for me as a real, whole person. I can't imagine what her conversation is like, how she walks, what she likes to eat, or even what she does at her job, which is only vaguely explained. I couldn't even really see what she looked like. I kept trying to grab hold of her, of who she was, and coming away with nothing. More critically, I failed to see what she saw in her lover Sean. He didn't seem to have any redeeming characteristics and was wildly unsatisfying as a romantic partner. If you are going to ruin your marriage and someone else's over an affair, it should at least be with a fantastic person with whom you have a soulful connection. It was also hard to work up empathy for the way the characters handled everything. Sean lied for years and years while Gina simply left her husband without even telling him she was leaving. Which I found rather inexplicable. Ultimately, I just did not find the affair credible, and thus the whole book failed to come together for me in any meaningful way. There was just too little to care about.

[Peter Boyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Man this is a hard book to like. It's told from the point of view of Gina, a married woman, who embarks on an affair with a married man. I didn't know who to root for, or if I was even supposed to be rooting for anyone.

Is it well-written? Undoubtedly. Enright is strong on the theme of adultery - the illicit thrills, the nagging shame, the incalculable, inevitable cost of it all. She also paints a faithful portrait of Ireland in the late 2000s - a country wealthy for the first time, having no idea what do with its unexpected windfall. By the end of the story the Celtic Tiger is on its last legs, the overzealous spending a fading memory: "the rumour of money withering out of the walls and floors and out of the granite kitchen countertops, turning them back to bricks and rubbles and stone."

However, did I enjoy reading it? To be completely honest, no. I had zero sympathy for the adulterous, family-wrecking characters and I didn't find the plot compelling. Anne Enright is an author I hold in high regard (I loved The Green Road) but I'm afraid this novel didn't do much for me.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are things I like and dislike about this novel. The style of writing is revelatory in places. Enright's ability to dig into the psyche – to reveal the truths about a woman aged 32 – to 40 approximately, and yet there is this sense of a composite in our female narrator; as if Enright's own background filled in the basics, her family home in Terenure, (a suburb of Dublin), a sister she argues with, compares herself to, a difficult father, dying whilst she was still quite young, her insistence on a career. Enright is happily married, she corrects an interviewer - to the person she met at UCD - so clearly Gina is not a character based on herself!

I watched a short video where Enright receives the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; and comments on The Forgotten Waltz: “... Gina, who is the narrator is either somebody you like or don't, but I hope that you enjoy not liking her … the reader I discovered was my friend and I wanted to give my friend the reader something to argue about, something that would annoy her mostly (and him) and be a cause for dissent and great, I hope, pleasure.”

And again in another interview she talks about this narrator, who may not be to everyone's taste. And yet I think, there is nothing to dislike about Gina except the fact that she represents every young woman at the age of 32 – they are into men, sex, and clothes, and if possible a decent job (career). I couldn't dislike Gina, I just wasn't particularly interested in her experiences – and O.K, sometimes I was - I loved The Office infatuation, losing half a stone from sheer – yearning. The thing is, when you get to 52, you don't have a lot of interest in the kind of exploits that stimulate young women – that infatuation with the male species for instance. That - I cannot live without him! By the time you get to 52, you have long since realized it is all hormones.

I mean Gina is an idiot – but that is totally to be expected – she wants hot sex; she thinks about her beloved Sean Vallaly, all the time, she can barely get through a week, without hearing his voice. And more importantly, some might point out – she is married to Conor, has bought a very expensive house with Conor.

And just when you are thinking where can this old, old story go – we all know it, been there done that; Gina's mother, Joan dies, and things, have to shift a gear. Her sister, finds his letters in the family house: “How could you do that to me?” And Gina says “... it's nothing to do with you. This is for me.” Some of the characters just felt so stereotypical, or maybe it's the plot? There is a limit, I think, to what you can do with the arc of an affair.

Gina also makes all sorts of mean comments about kids, but then again she doesn't have them, so. She criticizes her sister for 'settling'; Sean's wife, Aileen for being paranoid, a helicopter parent with Evie – “Aileen is very difficult,” says Sean. Aileen has to take care of a child with epilepsy. All Types, one could say. The overly anxious mother, the career mother. Aileen slaps the au pair when Evie falls from the swing and has her first fit – the au pair was not looking and more importantly Aileen was Not There.

Aileen is one of the victims - the one who "loses" her husband. She is never given a voice, and yet we hear a great deal of her story - indirectly. There are elements in Sean's story which suggest the unhappy marriage of Evie's parents may be the cause of her epilepsy - and I found myself agreeing. Enright is suggesting that not all marriages do in fact work - she is challenging the - sanctity of marriage.

I took care with the above quote from Enright – and as I copied it verbatim from the video, I realized there is a community – a Catholic Irish community – that is very much in Enright's field of view. Are these the readers whom Enright suggests will be "annoyed" by Gina?

I am not that reader: I did not dislike Gina from a moral perspective.

The story is structured so that we empathize with her, we follow her progression from infatuation to recognition of Sean - in all his realities:

Next door in the bathroom, Sean sighs and, after a waiting pause, starts to pee. There is another pause when he is finished. Then a little rush; an afterthought. It worries me, this sense of difficulty, surely there should be nothing simpler than taking a leak? And I remember my own father leaning like a plank over the toilet bowl, his hand braced against that bathroom wall, the side of his face nuzzled into his arm. Waiting.

Gina's story of her father - shows a man dying from alcoholism.

And so, this is the difficult bit for me: there are many things I liked about this book, the style, her voice, the character of Gina, young, idealistic, in-love, learning. The awful self-centred Sean, the story about Gina's sister, and their parents; Sean's story of Evie's diagnosis; Aileen and Sean's marriage; the boom and bust years of the Celtic Tiger, Enniskerry, Bray, Brittas Bay, Dublin – so much to love and admire … and yet for me there is this moral finger-wagging; this theme that emanates from Enright, through Gina's progression - which is that we should not judge her.

This undercurrent makes me feel that Enright is addressing a reader – who needs to liberate some of her moral values - this irked. I had to mull it over before I could write this review.

Joan, the mother is 'killed off' early in the plot. She would have been the obvious moral voice – but Enright doesn't want her heavy-handed preachiness. Enright wants Gina's voice to predominate, and we hear first hand, how Gina suffers:

The 'Four Last Songs' with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. Surely he wasn't pounding the tread mill to the 'Four Last Songs'? I sit on the floor and listen for another while, before switching the thing off and throwing it back into the staleness of the gym bag. I do not linger. I do not unzip the side pockets, or check his toiletries, or lift the rectangular base of the bag to see if there is a condom under there, long forgotten, or freshly stashed. I just pause the iPod and push the lot back under the stairs.

Her beloved - Sean Vallaly.

So, Gina learns. In fact the novel is written backwards with Gina in the present at the end of the book, looking back over the affair, and asking herself - how did it all start? And this is where I am now - with Evie, asking the daughter where the father is?

At the end of my reading experience – I was able to admit, it took awhile - but I admit it was a PLEASURE to relive all that hot romance and even more of a pleasure to be able to say - that is a stage we all go through and is now firmly behind me.

I enjoyed this book, in a quirky sort of way; but I do admire Enright – for tackling a difficult, and taboo topic. Maybe the “here is a lesson” whispering its way around Gina will put some readers off, but you might just enjoy all that intense "falling in love" phase - from the safety of your armchair.

[Jola · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Not again!’, I muttered under my breath when I started reading The Forgotten Waltz. The topic of marriage betrayal has been exploited so many times that I thought it took courage to choose it one more time. It’s difficult to say something original about ‘stolen love’ as Anne Enright put it, after Flaubert, Tolstoy, Galsworthy and many, many others. And truth be told, I haven’t found any revolutionary discoveries in The Forgotten Waltz. I guess the author hoped that Evie would make the story unique but in my opinion she didn’t succeed.

Don’t be put off by my grumping. I suppose as for Anne Enright not WHAT she talks about matters most but HOW she does it. As I’m not an English native speaker, the level of my sensitivity to language nuances probably isn’t high but I really enjoyed her witty, ironical style. It made me think of a crispy winter morning when the outlines of objects and people are so sharp and accurate that it almost hurts.

Anne Enright is a born storyteller. I suspect that if she ever wrote a book on polymers or stick insects it would be intriguing. Besides, it doesn’t happen often to read a novel which plot can be summarized in two or three trivial sentences and find it unputdownable. And it was really nice to read a few nice remarks about Poland: ‘I just remember it as a mood; how language would give such pleasure? And those Polish men, my goodness, so proud and sexy as they bowed’.

The author analyzes a love affair thoroughly, financial aspects included. It made me think of a painting by Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp . Yes, I know it’s a weird association but I couldn’t help it. Here instead of a corpse we have adultery, pulsating with life, desire and passion. The autopsy is performed in rather cold blood. Readers surround the author in silence, doing their best to get emotionally involved but most of the time fail.

Don't let the title of this novel and its chapters deceive you. I presume irony is Anne Enright's trademark and I enjoyed its melancholic taste. It's not a sentimental book. Quite contrary, it's bitterly realistic, sometimes harsh and painful.

Anne Enright writes with sharp psychological insight but I faced a problem which has been already described in Angela M.’s brilliant review of The Green Road by the same author. Angela wrote: ‘I just didn't like these characters very much , who didn't seem to like themselves very much either.’ Angela’s words exactly reflect my opinion. I know that likeability of characters shouldn’t be a criterion but I prefer to be fond of people I spend a few days with. I’m not judging Gina and Sean and I appreciate the fact that the author is never patronizing either. I just have a feeling that if I met them in person we wouldn’t make friends. Gina is too predatory for my liking, while Sean is not my type in general. Only Evie touched my heart.

I don’t hate The Forgotten Waltz, I just feel a bit disappointed. According to Elie Wiesel "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference". Unfortunately this lukewarm feeling accompanied me most of the time while reading The Forgotten Waltz.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book. I think I did, anyway. I mean, perhaps I didn't but I just forgot. On the other hand, maybe I didn't forget and I'm just being coy about memory. But then, maybe I do remember everything completely, but I'm just lying outright. I think I liked the book.

If that is an irritating introduction to a review, try reading 230-odd pages of a book written entirely in that vein.

Enright plays with the nature of memory while her protagonist forward slash narrator plays with the nature of an extra-marital affair. It is at times poignant and tender; and at many other times irritating, annoying -- and downright provocative. It provoked me to toss the damn book across the room, at one point.

Just when you think you know where you are in the narrative, she changes the game-plan and re-invents a character, complete with new motivations, desires. I was sometimes amused, sometimes not.

The next year, I was happy as I'd ever been. ... But this was later. Or perhaps it had happened already, perhaps it was happening all along.

I don't think I saw the way he was threatened by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little thing he wanted. For example, me. Or not me. It was hard to tell.

Now I know him better; that inward look as he tries to catch his pleasure, the thing that puts him off his stroke, I realise, is age. Or the fear of age. As if I cared about age. Or perhaps this is not how it was in Montreux. I might be imposing the lover I know now on the memory of the man I slept with then.

This book would be so easy to spoof, Stephen Colbert style, that it is almost frightening.

On the other hand (ha ha, see, I'm using my Anne Enright voice) the nature of art is to provoke -- something -- anything. And she certainly has done that.

Perhaps she was successful in this book, in some way I could not realize.

The thing is, I really like Anne Enright's writerly ways.

At least, I think I do, but if this book is any indication, I'm really not sure any more.

Can someone please tell me?

[Lea · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is surprising how close you can get to someone, by staying very still.

4.5 stars

I read Anne Enright's "The Gathering" almost a decade ago and remember loving it, so when I saw "The Forgotten Waltz" in a charity shop I bought it on a whim.

When I love a novel, despite there being obvious flaws, I tend to find it really difficult to articulate why. I don't like the characters, not because they're cheating on their partners without feeling too bad about it, no, I just don't think I'd like any of them if I met them. The fat shaming in the stream of consciousness narrative, the way aging skin is described, how fucking depressing these lives are... I didn't like any of that.

And still I loved the first page and didn't want to stop reading. As the blurb on the back says, it's really a "literary page-turner", something that doesn't happen very often. However, it's not a poetic kind of prose, it's just a woman telling us about the married man she fell in love with, their affair (but not in that order) about his daughter, about meeting her husband, about her family, too. It feels very very true to life.

I should not wait another decade to read Enright's other novels.

[Fionnuala]

It took me a few days to realise how good The Forgotten Waltz really is and it is very difficult to pin down why it is so good. I didn't warm to any of the characters, and some I actively disliked. There isn't much in the way of plot, certainly no surprises or unexpected twists. But the reader knows as she reads that this piece of writing is different and exceptional. There is a quality of real life about it, a sort of brutal honesty in the voice of the narrator, Gina that sets it apart from other fiction. I cannot explain it any further so all I can say is try it yourself and see if I'm not right...

[Vivian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring. Other than a few well-constructed, lyrical paragraphs, I never grew to care either way about these characters. You would think a novel about an affair would have some romance, or give some deeply felt reason for the attraction. But here we see this relationship from the beginning to its current, undefined state of both partners having left their marriages, and now - what? We never really know. Even the partners don't seem convinced about why they've started up with each other: we get the impression that, because they fell into bed together after drinking too much one night on a business trip, they began the affair to justify the one-night stand. To prove they are not the kind of people to just have "one-night stands". The woman, Gina, tells us how much she desires Sean, but we never feel her passion. Or his passion for her, if it even exists. I found it very sad, while not at all profound.

[Cam Mannino · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book taught me a couple of things about myself as a reader. First, I don't enjoy first person narratives like I used to. The characters are naturally too self-absorbed and unless they are complex, insightful people, their view of the other characters and their situation is too limited. In this story, a married woman with little self-knowledge begins a relationship with a married man - a man she never seems to fully understand and so we, as readers, don't really understand him either. Enright can compose a terrific sentence, but her main character lacks so much substance that she can't express why she's so taken with her lover. I gather that the author's intention was to write about desire – mostly the sexual kind (the character is very focused on sex) and indirectly as a metaphor for the desire that generated the economic collapse, which effects her (but rather at arm's length, I thought) in Ireland. But as a reader, sexual desire necessarily begins in the head; to experience what the character feels, I have to know what's so exciting about this guy, what makes him so attractive – and seriously, I didn't come close to understanding her attraction to this older man philanderer with an obsessive wife and a psychologically (and possibly physically?) damaged daughter. The character clearly loves sex and is always hungry for more, but she seems to have no idea what turns her on.

Secondly, I learned that I enjoy novels more that take me a little bit beyond the everyday, that somehow make life more intense, slightly heightened in some way, that make my world bigger. Enright probably does a fine job of describing the everydayness of sexual temptation and its consequences (though surprisingly there are no actual descriptions of sex in the book) – but I don't want to descend down into everydayness. I have that, well, every day. I want books that introduce me to characters that I might never know otherwise, people who live larger than I do, even slightly larger, but certainly not smaller. Even Ireland, in Enright's book, is bland and could be any suburban setting in America. A lot of modern novels end up being like Facebook posts but longer and better written – a rendering of the quotidianl, but not much more. Give me characters like Anna Karenina to explore the consequences of passion, not a mundane, pablum version of desire, but the big, wild, risky tough kind, especially one that plunks me down in a setting wholly different from my own. No more "brilliant evocations of the everyday" for this reader!

[Bellezza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saying that this novel is about an affair is like saying a home is about bricks and glass. That's true enough, in a way, but it's not getting any where near the substance within. I have never read writing like that of Anne Enright's. It is powerful, and funny, and thought provoking all at the same time. I read ever so slowly to capture every phrase and reread sentences or whole paragraphs over again to contemplate their meaning which resonated deeply within me. She'll write something profound in a long paragraph, and then bam! follow it with a single sentence as reinforcement.


The Forgotten Waltz is a story about an affair. About marriage. About a family whose child's needs have divided the parents; or the parents' needs which have divided the child, because who can tell, really, what was the cause and what was the effect? It is a story which makes us look at our parents, at our loves, and most importantly ourselves.


It makes us ask if we are willing to accept the responsibility for the choices we have made, and were they, after all, worth the cost?


I loved it.

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vivid and engrossing first person past tense internalised narrative ostensibly of how somebody came to have an affair but going deeper in to the complexity of the ties that bind us; told with great skill and managing to evoke the sense that actually you’re just having a conversation with your narrator over some wine as she tells you this intimate story of her life, doubling back, getting sidetracked, drawing parallels, remembering the anguish and delight, in turns cold and passionate and always compelling.

Gina is an Everywoman, there’s nothing special about her, no catalyst for her behaviour that makes her extraordinary, these are choices and decisions we could all make at any point, she is not demonised but neither are her actions forgiven through the redemptive factors of romance and I think that’s the true strength of Enright’s story.

Quite a remarkable experience from a book I took on a three day holiday with 6 others from my “probably shouldn’t have purchased” pile expecting to dismiss it after a chapter.

[christa · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are two ways to read Anne Enright’s novel “The Forgotten Waltz”: The first, as a sexy page-turner filled with feigned nonchalance between instances of passionate hotel room hopping; The second, as one woman walking into the middle of life-as-she-knows-it with dynamite stuffed into her Wonder Bra.

The premise is that Gina Moynihan is going to meet up with the daughter of her lover. Along the way she considers the events of the past few years that have brought her to this point, starting with the first time she saw Sean Vallely standing by a fence at a party. Him: her sister’s neighbor, middle aged, married to an unspectacular woman with a daughter who is quietly rumored to have something wrong with her. Gina: fresh from a trip to Australia with the boyfriend who will become her husband, hiding deep in the yard because her niece and nephew have never seen someone smoke a cigarette. It’s an insignificant moment at the time, but one that Gina will revisit and paint with poetry once things ramp up between the two a few years later.

Before that, though, there is a one-night stand. Gina and Sean end up at the same out-of-town conference, part of a crew of party people who move seamlessly from all-business to afterbar. It’s a poorly conceived drunk idea, last two standing, that lands them in bed playing bumbley fumbley. Then they ignore each other. Gina comes loathe him -- but it’s not a real loathing, and it feels a lot like watching a babysitter in a horror movie take a flashlight into the basement to check out a noise. Of course it happens again. He’s been brought in to her company as a consultant, which can only mean its a matter of time before one stands too close to the other or her shirt drops a notch and they’re busting loose toward a hotel near the airport.

The truth is, Sean’s kind of a creep, though not in an obvious way. A real charmer. Has he done this before? Definitely. It’s in the gifts he gives her: perfume, a scarf. Generic tokens. Once with a 22-year-old, although they encounter a power suit bulldog who seems to have a curious familiarity with him, too. Does his wife know? She would say no, but the truth is probably more layered. She might just be choosing not to know. That shrapnel from Gina’s life? Good guy. Maybe a little too into the whole online scene.

It’s a juicy little story, it is, but it tugs at the eye roller and the inner “Aw, grow up already. Figure it out.” Eyes covered, begging Gina “DO NOT GO INTO THE BASEMENT!” A lot of books end and you assume that is how it ends. Not so much “And they lived happily ever after” as “I’m satisfied where you people are right now in your lives, and I trust if I checked back in ten years you would still be doing just fine.” Not so much with this one. This one gets even messier when the book closes.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few authors can write as intelligently, honestly and subtly as Anne Enright about relationships within families - particularly the relationships women have with their fathers, mothers and siblings and partners. The foreground relationship in this novel is a love affair between the narrator, Gina and Seán. Gina's narrative voice is wonderful - spikey, urbane, passionate and often uncertain.

However at the heart of the novel is the love Seán has for his daughter, Evie and the guilt he feels for abandoning her. As a child, Evie had seizures; the novel charts the years from when she is three until she is on the cusp of puberty. Although Gina and Sean are the main characters, Evie - and the anxiety her medical condition evokes - are presences in the novel that cannot be denied. What relationship can - or even should - a woman have with the child of her lover? Evie eventually emerges from the shadow of Seán's guilt to find her own voice - with Enright even giving her the final words of the book.

It's hard to find the Waltz of the title - a passing reference to the Elvis Tennessee Waltz that Gina's parents used to dance in their living room before they went off to a 'do'. Gina returns to her childhood home after her mother's death and the memories that she has (often when she has drunk too much wine) are both tender and acerbic. Enright is able to capture so well the messy connections between people and the way completely opposite emotions about family members can actually co-exist. Irritation and tenderness, anger and love, disappointment and consolation.

Enright is able to bring these same skills to her exposition of the love affair between Gina and Seán - longing and rejection, lust and gentleness, anger and forgiveness. She is a brilliant stylist. Her description of a kiss is one of the best I think I've ever read. "I walk through the Christmas city lights, not a taxi in sight and the town going crazy all around me, and I think how kissing is such an extravagance of nature. Like bird-song; heartfelt and lovely beyond any possible usefulness." Every page brings treasures of this sort - the pleasures of language used to full effect.

Another thing worth saying about this superb novel is its setting in Dublin and in the seaside holiday homes of the people who made money when Ireland was 'the Celtic Tiger'. It passes into the time when the property bubble burst and Ireland became an ailing member of the Eurozone. Gina and Seán are part of the boom - by the end of the novel they are part of the collapse, living together in a house they cannot sell. Their greed for each other - at the expense of others' happiness - mirrors the greed of the money-makers, their carelessness reflects the 'live for the moment' mentality of the times. But Enright is no moralist. She is a writer who makes us feel all the emotions of an illicit love affair and makes us see, through her unflinching eye, the consequences it entails for the protagonists and those who care about them.

[Carl R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Enright won the 2007 Booker for The Gathering I liked it, liked it, liked it, always meant to get back to Anne, and here she is with The Forgotten Waltz. Check out the cover, above. A perfect statement of the book. The woman represents Gina Moynihan, the chairs her husband and her lover. She’s got a hand on each, chosen neither. That’s part of the mess she creates. I’ll follow up on the rest a bit later. First, a word about language and voice, since those are the elements that make this book work. This is a piece from the novel’s opening passage.

It is half past five on a Wicklow summer sunday when I see Sean for the first time. There he is, where the end of my sister’s garden becomes uncertain. He is about to turn around--but he doesn’t know this yet. He is looking at the view and I am looking at him. The sun is low and lovely. He is standing where the hillside begins its slow run down to the coast, and the light is at his back, and it is just that time of day when all the colours come into their own.

What an avalanche of feeling and exposition from this simple description of a coastal sunset. The ragged boundaries of the garden and the hillside slope foreshadow the ragged boundaries of the relationships to which we are about to be introduced. We don’t know what they are yet, but there’s a sense of danger in Gina’s obvious hungering for this guy. There’s a touch of pathetic fallacy in the phrase about the colours coming into their own.

What she does with visual imagery, Enright also does with time, switching tenses and thoughts back and forth between now and then, between what was (or maybe was. One can’t always be sure, you see.) and what will be. And there’s the wonderful economy with which she treats some of the cliche scenes required of such stories of love betrayed.

You always.

You Never.

Pretty much sums it up.

As we follow Gina’s heart and thoughts through the affair and the breakups, we know and appreciate her for a brave and impulsive soul determined to taste and smell all of life she can whatever the consequences. For her or the others involved. Even when she screws up horribly, you’re on her side. Even when she can’t quite figure out what side that is.

Of course, Enright sprinkles the text with a number of delicious Irish words and phrases: “skint” for “broke;” “kit” for “house” or “apartment”

“gone on a wander,” “snogging” for “making out.” Some of these might just be British and not entirely Irish, but they give the book a Dublin flavor quite beyond our obligatory visits to St. Stephen’s Green and Trinity.

Ordinarily, if you hand me a book as character- and voice-driven as this, I’m going to hand it back and ask for something with more juice. But The Forgotten Waltz has juice aplenty. And yet.

In the end, I have to conclude that there’s not enough “there” here to support a novel. At bottom, it’s a pedestrian story of love, sex, adultery. Of a woman who can’t help herself from stepping into a situation that’s bound to fail. Even if everything could be solved between her and Sean, the problem of Evie, her paramour’s troubled daughter, will continue unabated. Evie will obviously never accept Gina, and she will always stand between Gina and her lover. If they stay lovers, which is by no means certain.

So, though the writing is superb, I don’t think the action is sufficient to carry the book. A scene or two between Conor (Gina’s husband) and Sean? A complication at work? A bigger reaction when she learns that she is not by any means Sean’s first conquest? I don’t know. Just something more. This is an excellent book that falls just short of being superb.

[sarah gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I close this book thinking to myself, "why? Why did I love it so?" and not having concrete answers. It has all the elements of a book I shouldn't like: too much sex, too much philandering, everyone rather miserable in the end, too much materialism, many essentially unlikable characters. But -- it was perfect. Ideal, really, in the way that Ford Madox Ford's A Good Soldier has long been my ideal English novel. I pick it up again, and read it, and think to myself, "why?" Who knows. It is.

It's so, so much like The Good Soldier, in its not-just-circular-but-spiraling design, in its central narrator -- flawed, the instrument of so much that's wrong and has destroyed, through infidelity, a group of friends and family -- in its way that the author has of picking through the wreckage of a group of people and looking for the good in them. Of finding not much. And then, of finding good in everyone.

I loved Gina. Loved Evie. Loved Conor. Loved the mothers, loved the children, loved Fiachra. They all held their flaws so close to their heart, they wrapped up the statement "I love you" with so much desire and hope and stubbornness that it could, of course, never be let go. Even when it was not true. Was it ever true? This is what we keep asking and kept saying the answer, "no," to ourselves, murmuring it to the narrator as she says it. "No you don't," we want to say. "You don't love him at all."

Of course, I didn't love Sean. I -- we -- we're not supposed to, are we? Sean is the everyman. The worst of each ordinary married or not-married-anymore man laid out in the unforgiving white light of the snow. Cold, quick to blame others, not loved enough as a child. Loves but does not give attention. Needs to be in control, and once he gets control, then what? Does he know what to do with it? Tell all involved he deserves the control, bash heads, blame others for the dents and blood.

This is not a review so much as a journal, a response, an echo of my own. The book deserves more, or deserves this just.

Here is what I want to say about this book: that Enright has that sight, that ability to describe with the smallest detail, the sound of snot being sucked back into a nostril or the bad spelling in a text exchange or the rewriting of our own stories -- how fair we are, when we back up and retell it, getting it right, trying for unbias -- the way people are. To make everyone real. To make everyone shockingly real, to make everyone you. To see your own self in her light, and somehow, not mind very much about your flaws but to love them.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spent the summer reading plenty of novels by smart, young, cutting-edge writers. It was fun and exhilarating. But as fall approached and the days grew shorter, it felt appropriate to read a novel about adultery and its consequences by a seasoned author who knows the pathways of the heart.

The Forgotten Waltz, set in and around Dublin, encompasses those incredible years when Ireland, after all its sad centuries of impoverished outsider status, finally got to be a player in the mad scramble for wealth that characterized the early years of the millennium. Gina Moynihan, recently married career woman, feeling she can have any kind of life, house, job, or husband that she wants, falls in love with an older married man over a period of five years and infrequent encounters.

At first it is simply lust, drunken indulgence, meeting Sean Vallely in hotel rooms. The kissing is more transporting than the actual sex; the sneaking around more exciting than the man himself. In what Gina suspects is an attempt by Sean's wife to check out the competition, she receives an invitation to the Vallely's annual New Year's Day party. Something about the encounter with her lover's wife and daughter Evie raises a dalliance into a full-blown affair. An almost innocent air of just fooling around becomes the messy business of adultery.

The novel begins in 2009, after all the dirty deeds have broken up two marriages. Gina, who narrates her own tale, is looking back in an effort to understand how she came to be living in her deceased mother's house with a man who now seems rather ordinary. She tells us, "I can't be too bothered here with chronology. The idea that if you tell it, one thing after another, then everything will make sense. It doesn't make sense." The style of Enright's discerning look at many types of love is in tune with the above quotation. Gina looks back over the past seven years like someone awaking from a dream or coming out of an obsession. It does not all make sense, even to the reader.

In the first sentence of the preface we learn that, "If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened, but the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive." We also learn that there was something peculiar about this child, Evie. That preface is an almost too subtle hint that Evie is a central and important character, but not until the very end of the novel do we find out why and how.

What did Gina want? What did Sean want? It is not clear and I found myself fascinated and puzzled but unable to stop thinking about those questions until I had found my own answers several hours after turning the last page. What appears to be a story of adultery has a secret layer. In her Booker Prize winning novel, The Gathering, Anne Enright told a dark and shameful family saga. The Forgotten Waltz is perhaps lighter, but it is nonetheless an examination of Irish family life as it plays out in our fractured contemporary world.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great example of why not to choose books based on the reviews - most people have been really ambivalent about it, and I think I only decided to read it today because it was the only book from the Orange Prize shortlist immediately available to me, and the prize gets announced tomorrow.

This book gutted me. I'm not sure I have ever read a more realistic portrayal of the inner journey of guilt, and of how we retell stories of our own lives to ourselves. There were also moments of humor that rang true.

I wasn't actually interested in the character of Evie, which seemed important to the author. I was far more interested in Gina and her relationships.

I loved the prose at the beginning, the way the author moved in circles.

"There was... a sense in which we were reclaiming ourselves for ourselves, after some brief theft."

"If love is a story we tell ourselves then I had the story wrong. Or maybe passion is just, and always, a wrong-headed thing."

[Leslie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book of social criticism and satire, seriously weakened by its uninteresting, dimly described, humanoid characters. Anne Enright depicts this generation of Irish yuppies as vacuous nonentities, almost psychopathic in their disregard for conscience. This does not add to the strength of her indictment. Instead, it produces a dull book, very easy to abandon.

Taken paragraph by paragraph, this is a well-written book. As a whole, it disappoints.

[Dirk · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the second book I've read recently where an important element of the book was the fraught relation between a woman and her lover's daughter by another woman (the other was True by Riikka Pulkkinen). This book is narrated by a 32-year-old Irish woman beginning in Ireland's early 21st century economic boom and ending in its bust. She is married to one man, but drops the spoiler early in the text that in the end she is living with another. Thus the plot, which hinges on how their relationships will develop, is not very tense. She narrates the events of several years in roughly historical order with many flashbacks and slips forward so I was not always sure when I was reading about. This process of spiraling around the plot is marred by empty places and crisscrossing. The text devotes good deal of time to history of her family, but that history never feelingly flows into the main plot. The limitation of this book is the voice and mind of the narrator. She's lively, bouncy, successful in business, horny, drinks too much at times, and is not stupid but not very insightful. The prose is the ordinary conversational style of such a person heightened a little for literary effect. There's nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't do much. There are five characters drawn as fully as it is possible for this narrator to draw them: herself, her lover's daughter, her husband, her sister, and her mother, but all exist only within the limits of her intelligence and insight. For me she brings to life her feelings about her lover, but not his person. Thus, the reader never has a satisfying or intriguing account of why the characters do and feel the things they do: she doesn't know. Certain good authors have dealt with this problem; Huckleberry Finn comes to mind, or solved it by making the narrator a minor character who has the perspective the protagonist lacks; The Great Gatsby comes to mind, but Enright seems satisfied to sacrifice resonance for immediacy.

[chantel nouseforaname · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay, first 1 star review of 2024.

I hated this book. I hated that I wanted to DNF and I didn’t. I hate the storyline. I hate Gina-the main character. I hate that I don’t know if it’s reality that I couldn’t even find a modicum of empathy or understanding for any of the shit that happened in this book. This was a level of entitled nonsense that just didn’t translate or resonate.

It’s cool that the main character is not likeable; I love unlikeable women. It’s just that she’s not logical or interesting that grinds my gears. I really loved Anne Enright’s essay in This Woman's Work: Essays on Music, but this novel makes me want to never read any of her fiction again— and honestly, I don’t think that I ever will.

How did I get here… this book is recommended in the 52 Award-Winning Titles Every Book Lover Should Read: A One Year Journal and Recommended Reading List from the American Library Association .... This was Week 15: April 10th. Real talks, that book is getting tossed too. More thoughts on my reading experience with this book here.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very close to being a five. I think Enright is an amazing writer at the sentence level. You don't even care, that much, that nothing happens in this book. It's an in-depth almost molecular examination of a lot of really big things: love, betrayal, desire, losing your parents, ambivalence about maternity, and the fearful truth that a lot of growing up has a "careful what you wish for" aspect to it. I especially liked the honest open-eyed writing about female desire -- so rare to read about "forbidden" lust from a woman's perspective, and that blinding totalizing quality that kind of attraction can have. Similarly, the push and pull of finding yourself in a relationship with another woman's child, with your lover's child... Francine Prose in the New York Times called Gina an unloveable monster, and she is most certainly selfish, but I also found her refreshingly real (and much more loving and vulnerable than I think Prose wants to give her credit for being).

An amazing writer diving into material that will make all of us a bit uncomfortable, and sometimes more at points. I found it enthralling, even gripping. Not a five only because I felt that the end -- Evie's story and Gina's story with Evie was a bit rushed --the pacing got a little bunched up at the end.

[Célia Loureiro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sou um bocadinho snobe no que diz respeito a literatura. Bom, é verdade, admito. Eu própria me envergonho disso por dois motivos que considero válidos; primeiro porque a leitura é extraída da escrita, e a escrita, como arte que é, é subjectiva. Toca uns e passa ao lado de outros.

Mas este A Valsa Esquecida intrigou-me. Foi nomeado para um Orange Prize, tem uma capa que apela à melancolia, à reflexão e aos valores morais e enraizados... não? A mim foi essa ideia que passou. Agora adivinhem? Eu não entendo porque é que o livro tem este título - nem valsas, nem convenções, nem um passado para esquecer, nada que se lhe associe. E a capa? Bom a ideia que tenho da protagonista é uma trintona de ganga e cabedal, cabelos curtos, álcool e maquilhagem a mais. Onde é que isto combina com a saia e os sapatinhos clássicos da senhora na capa?

Ponto positivo: a escritora e o cenário são irlandeses e, visto que vou à Irlanda em Setembro, teve para mim, um interesse particular.

Ponto negativo: fiquei na mesma quanto à Irlanda, a escritora não aproveitou a visibilidade para falar de nada que não da crise e do sector imobiliário.

Personagens: mas que azar é este que tenho com as personagens? Perguntei-me, ao terminar o livro, se sou eu que embirro. Senti-me ligeiramente decepcionada por ter a certeza de que ia gostar do 2º livro da Balogh publicado em Portugal. Perguntei-me se seria o género: será por amar tanto os romances históricos que me aborreci de morte com este da Enright? Mas tive a minha resposta: na segunda página do Um Verão Inesquecível, já eu estava a rir. Já o personagem masculino foi apresentado, com toda a margem que há-de haver para as suas inconstâncias e imprevisibilidades. Já os homens na multidão tinham mais alma, mais profundidade, mais dimensões, do que a cabecinha oca da Gina e o canalha do Seán deste A Valsa Esquecida.

A dado momento o romance resvalou do foco do romance extraconjugal para a filha do adúltero, que tem epilepsia. Ora bem quando o casal esmoreceu - alguma vez houve chama? Aí pela página 160 de 225 (aprox.) a autora lembrou-se de remexer na filha. De "inventar" uma relação entre a adúltera e a filha do adúltero. Relação cliché, mal explorada, vazia, até porque a Gina não tem nada de terno, vulnerável ou maternal. A cabeça do Seán? Nunca entendemos. O porquê daquela atracção mútua? Idem.

O que salva o romance - muito repetitivo em cenários, muitas festas com os mesmos convidados, álcool, pseudo-dramas e rotina doméstica aborrecida - são os trechos, as associações espirituosas ocasionais que sugerem que a Anne, de facto, tem talento. Este só não é um livro que eleve o seu potencial.

PS - Voei sobre as últimas cinquenta páginas...

[Susanna Rautio · Rating 2 out of 5]

Miksi kutsutaan minäkertojaa, joka on niin kiinnostunut itsestään, että jättää lukijan totaalisen ulkopuoliseksi?

Minäkertoja on vaikea valinta, jos strategia puuttuu. Onko lukija fani, siipiveikko, etääntyjä, ymmärtäjä vai ihan sama mikä?

Unohdetun vartin lukija nimeltä minä oli hyvin pitkästynyt tähän yhden naisen vaikean suhteen tilitykseen. Ei oikeasti kovin vaikeaan, kun kyseessä on aikuinen rakkaus ja muiden äänet unohdetaan.

Ehkä ankeinta kirjassa oli lukujen otsikointi. KISS ME, HONEY, HONEY, KISS ME , MONEY (THAT'S WHAT I WANT), KNOCKING ON THE HEAVEN'S DOOR...

KYLLÄ. ISOILLA KIRJAIMILLA. JA NE OVAT BIISEJÄ?

Muuta isoa en huomannut.

Aioin antaa Enrightille silti toisen mahdollisuuden. Sen nimi on Booker-palkittu Valvojaiset.

[Jo Case · Rating 5 out of 5]

With her Booker-winning novel The Gathering, Anne Enright gained a raised profile and a new following. This, her first novel since, again takes up the theme of family connections and domestic secrets, in a story that centres on an affair.

Gina meets Sean, her sister’s neighbour, at her niece’s birthday party – and again on a beach holiday. There are prickles of interest, but no real connection. When Gina’s employer needs to hire a management consultant, she suggests Sean, and the wheels are in train for a relationship that will break up two marriages, divide sisters against each other, and set a child, Sean’s daughter Evie, adrift between her separated parents.

Enright is a master of taut domestic realism – she has a forensic eye for the way people interact, and the meaning that attaches to seemingly irrelevant things they say and do. Cleaning up after another party at which they’ve collided, Gina reflects, ‘When the last small guest was gone and the rubbish bin full of packaging and uneaten lasagne the thought of him – the fact of him – happened in my chest, like a distant disaster. Something snapped or was broken.’ This blend of ordinary, even dull detail and epic event recurs throughout the book, creating the sense that this is an ordinary, even clichéd happening, yet also extraordinary for those it is happening to. This self-awareness is mirrored in Gina’s wry narration: ‘The office game was another game for us to play, after the subur- ban couples game, and before the game of hotel assignations and fabulous, illicit lust.’

This is an anatomy of an affair – how and why it plays out. And all the while, as it constructs the clichéd players, it goes behind those clichés and dissects their reality. With charismatic, flawed, beautifully realised characters and exquisite prose, this is a wonderful book.

This review was first published on www.readings.com.au.

[Wendy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The prose is gorgeous but keeps its distance. With Gina as the sole narrator, we only hear her perspective, and from what I can gather, she is a difficult person to know. Clues to her shallow, self-absorbed behavior are revealed in bits about her childhood and her relationship with her "pretend everything is perfect" mother (who even hides her declining health from her family). Even Gina's sister is too concerned with pretenses to feel authentic.

As I type this, I can't help but wonder if Enright made her characters purposely vague and unreachable... to convey the spoils of a booming Ireland before the economic crash, where people found comfort and joy in trivial things like vacation homes or fancy cars.

As for the affair between Gina and Sean, I wasn't convinced of their passion because I wasn't convinced either of them were capable of such intensity. Gina's complete disregard for her husband is pathetic, though understandable given her weak character. And Sean just seems like a flawed man in a marriage strained by his ill child and his wife's reaction to her--I think he would have chosen anyone to sleep with if it meant forgetting about his life for a while. And it just so happened he picked Gina, who wanted more. And so the two fell into a relationship destined to fail once the pretenses fell away and the hot sex fizzled into resentment.

I suppose it sounds like I didn't like this book and that isn't completely true. The writing is gorgeous, like I mentioned. The depiction of Ireland during this time period was interesting and the characters all amusing and sad in their own ways. It just wasn't a love story I believed in.

I think there could have been more made of the economic crash in Ireland and more time spent developing the characters' reactions to their abruptly changing futures.

[Kris McCracken · Rating 2 out of 5]

A dour tale of an unlikable adulterous couple, told from a female perspective. It should be noted that he is somewhat more odious than she is - and despite the constant reference to how witty and charming this fellow is, we never actually see it - and the narrative that follows is their negotiation of the pitfalls of their lying and cheating over the years.

Perhaps my disdain for this book lays in the utter lack of any tension, as the prologue reveals everything up front. We know how it ends, and all we have left is the bleak journey towards a - if not exactly unhappy - dreary ending.

However, I suspect that it is more my own antipathy for the dishonest adulterer. The lying, the cheating, the disrespect. Adultery is a dull, selfish affair. Even moreso when you know the ending from the very beginning.

Give this one a miss, unless you like spending hours trapped in a room with some very awful people moaning about how bad their lot is.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of the First Reads books I've won and read so far, this is definitely my favorite. I found it ceaselessly entertaining, but I was also brought up short by its wisdom many times. The narrator was undoubtedly annoying at times, but that was probably on purpose, and frankly, it made her more believable as an actual human being. I'm definitely going to check out other books by this author.

[Valmir Almagro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uma história bem honesta sobre relacionamentos, infidelidades entre casais e a existência dos filhos.
Anne Enright escreve com muita crueza e transparência os mecanismos das relações humanas.
O que resta de um casal quando acaba a paixão? Qual o espaço de um filho na intimidade do casal? Como lidar com filhos de casais separados? Essas são algumas perguntas sugeridas por este livro.