Taking Pictures,
Anne Enright
Jonathan Cape, Rs 471
Anne Enright’s stories dissect sadness, its quieter forms

Irish writer Anne Enright’s fiction looks searchingly at the dark side of family relationships. In her Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering, she wrote about how tragedy exploded devastatingly into the life on an ordinary Irish family. In Taking Pictures, sadness comes into the lives of women in other, quieter forms: cloaked as envy, betrayal, bitterness, loneliness, or a lingering disappointment. Sometimes it is men who betray these women; sometimes it is their bodies; often, as in the first story, the women betray themselves. The narrator’s sadness lies in the knowledge of her guilt: guilt over entering a loveless marriage, abandoning the friend and lover who loves her and needs her. “I am sick now. This life does not suit me,” she says, but remains unable to leave the new life she has chosen.

Sometimes the sadness comes just from the inability to say the right thing, or to stop saying the wrong thing. Such as Alison, an Irish student in an American college, whose inability to communicate with their Chinese dorm-mate ends unfortunately. Often grief comes in the form of physical or mental illness, affecting the entire family and sometimes lingering on even after the sick person has died. In “Honey”, a woman tries to deal with the long, painful end of her mother by escaping for illicit sex and a hotel weekend, but finds that she cannot escape her loss. In “Little Sister”, a girl tries to come to terms with the slow disintegration of her anorexic sister’s life, and with the effect it has had on her family: “So she died. There is no getting away from something like that. You can’t recover. I didn’t even try. The first year was a mess and after that our lives were just punctured, not even sad — just less, never the same again.”

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