What Are You Like?

by Anne Enright

Book Overview

Anne Enright is one of the most exciting writers of Ireland's younger generation, a beguiling storyteller The Seattle Times has praised for the ... way she writes about women ...their adventures to know who they are through sex, despair, wit and single-minded courage. In What Are You Like?, Maria Delahunty, raised by her grieving father after her mother died during childbirth, finds herself in her twenties awash in nameless longing and in love with...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802138896
• ISBN13: 9780802138897
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

rewards

I found this book an intriging mix of confusion and satisfaction. There were long stretches where I was utterly confused about what was going on or why the author was telling me such things interspersed with really beautiful descriptions or some other really satisfying passage that was truly enjoyable.Do I recommend this book? Sure. Just remember that the disjointed feeling is intentional. If that sort of thing does not put you off, then you will enjoy this book for the hidden treasures it contains.I can also say that despite the fact that Maria "sleeps around" quite a bit, it was not sexually explicit. I appreciated this. I get so sick of reading books that boldly refuse to leave any of the details to the imagination (or not as the reader chooses).

something extraordinary

This is the kind of thing that can get you a bit knotted as a reader but when I put it down I realised that I think I had read something that was extraordinary. It is full of echoes that bouce around from one twin to another. The language is really beautiful, I thought it was actually closer in some ways to poetry because althought the story is quite simple, it is also very hard to pin down. As an Irish reader I felt it was really out there and it touched me in a way the more cliched stuff doesn't. Yes you have to work at it, but in the end you have something that is really rich. I actually immediately wanted to read it again.

Like, like

At first, I didn't like Anne Enright's novel at all. I found it very hard to identify with any of the characters. Anne Enright's style of writing is quite singular, and takes some time getting used to. It took about a hundred pages before I really started to enjoy this composition. Enright's narrative jumps forwards and backwards through time, leaping from one perspective to another. The restless nature of this novel makes it very hard prey to track down. Anne Enright's prose is very subtle too. Incidents flash by, but the gun kicks very little. I admittedly found myself lost in the early part of the novel, especially when minor characters came to the forefront, and then disappeared. This novel either seems as though it has been culled too well or not enough. There's quite a lot of extraneous material that hints at a broader narrative, with good ideas dispatched all too soon, so that you almost never get a handle on them in the first place. This novel stands comparison with Trezza Azzopardi's Booker nominated 'The Hiding Place'. Azzopardi also has a quite developed and unique style, and her narrative also flits through time, and from person to person. Yet, even although Azzopardi doesn't give a time and date for each chapter as Enright does, you're never ever lost in 'The Hiding Place' as you are in 'What are you Like?'. Enright's novel is mostly the tale of two identical twin sisters divided at birth: Maria and Marie. One gets the impression that maybe Enright thought about keeping these two very similar names for her main protagonists: thankfully, Marie is also called Rose. When their mother dies during labour, Berts, their father, decides that he can only cope with one of the twins. It doesn't seem to matter particularly which one. Thus are the twins divided. Rose is adopted, and brought up in an English middle class home. Maria, brought up by Berts and new wife Evelyn, rebels and runs off to New York and goes a little mad. We seem to get more of her childhood than Rose's. Maria falls in love with the wrong man, and comes across a photograph of herself in his wallet when 12 - but the background and the "parents" are completely unfamiliar. Rose contemplates marriage with a Yuppie, and has an urge to find the mother who gave her up. Her quest brings treasures she never quite expected... This novel is mostly viewed through the eyes of women, with Berts the only strong male character. It's almost as if Enright has to remind you of his presence towards the end, by his having a drunken kiss with a female co-worker at a Christmas party. It's a well-told incident, but I've a suspicion that it's only been included to add a bit of melodrama. Evelyn, Berts' wife, is considering leaving him, and then she finds a letter from a strange woman... There are so many perspectives from the women characters that you can often put the book down, and forget where you were when you start to read again. Towards the end, the twins' mother