Anne Enright is a so lovely. We sat and had coffee in a downtown Toronto hotel two weeks ago and she told me all about what it’s like to write a new novel after winning the Man Booker prize, how having kids changes you, and what’s wrong with Vivian Westwood’s clothes. We also talked about The Forgotten Waltz, which has just been released in Canada. Here’s a bit from the profile of her that was in Saturday's National Post:
In 2007, Irish author Anne Enright was handed a second job. She won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering and spent 2008 touring around as an award-winner, not writing.
It was a lot of work, she says, and when she was finally relinquished to her desk, she had a new novel already churning in her mind. Enright wrote The Forgotten Waltz in 2009, the year in which the novel takes place and the year Ireland’s economy imploded.
“There’s nothing I can say about Ireland that’s uplifting or fine or, you know, redeeming,” Enright says. “The situation is astonishingly bad.”
With that as a backdrop, Enright’s novel about an affair is worlds apart from gossipy tabloid culture. In the context of financial disaster, Gina and Seán’s betrayals seem both insignificant in scale and even more hurtful to their families — one more element of their lives that was not as stable as it looked — and The Forgotten Waltz is Gina’s attempt to understand and piece together everything that happened over the six years since she first met Seán Vallely.
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