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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Gorgeous language unlike anyone else,
By Eric Wahl (Bozeman, MT, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: What Are You Like?: A Novel (Hardcover)
To call Anne Enright an "exciting new writer" is, of course, a somewhat backhanded compliment. Her works haven't been available in the states, which is a real shame, as most decent Irish Lit programs in American universities can point to Enright's astounding first story collection, The Portable Virgin, as a major work in Irish Postmodernism. What Are You Like?, her first domestically-available novel, continues in her fine, and, yes, exciting narratological style. I've rarely enjoyed the craft of a sentence as much as I have reading Enright's works, and this novel does not disappoint. In fact, this novel makes a great starting point from which to discover all of Anne Enright's works (check out Amazon.uk), such as her previous novel, The Wig My Father Wore, and, certainly, her mesmerizing story collection. Finally receiving critical notice in the states (including a featured short story in The New Yorker this year), it's surely fair to dub her "exciting and new." Now let's hope this is the beginning of something grand on this side of the Atlantic.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
rewards,
By Mindy (St. Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: What Are You Like?: A Novel (Hardcover)
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).
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Out there.,
By
This review is from: What Are You Like?: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is a strange and fractured narrative of the strange and fractured lives of identical twins separated at birth. When their mother dies of a brain tumor at the time of the girls' birth, their father, Berts, decides he can take care of only one of them. Naming her Maria, he quickly donates the other one, Marie (renamed Rose), for adoption. Maria stays with Berts in Dublin, while Rose moves around the world as the adopted daughter of a British doctor and his wife.
Both girls have big problems. Maria, from her earliest years, is always asking, "What are you like?" and looking into mirrors. Sometimes violent in arguments, she sleeps around, gets stoned, attempts suicide, and suffers a nervous breakdown. She believes she "does not have a talent for life." Rose is a sadist who taunts the foster children her parents take in, goading one boy into throwing a kitten through a window and later trying to drown him. She believes there is "a hole in her head, a hole in her life." Perhaps it is that hole she is trying to fill when she goes on her shoplifting expeditions. Neither girl seems to have profited in any way from "nurture"--only nature counts here, and finding your twin, even when you don't know you are a twin, is so compelling an urge that it overwhelms any attempt to live a normal life. With her very staccato style of short sentences, most having the subject at the beginning, Enright machine-guns her story at the reader. Her in-the-face style is emphatic and unrelenting as her narrative jumps from 1965 to 1985 to 1971, etc., from Dublin to New York to London, and from Maria to Rose and, eventually, to Anna, their mother. The story is sometimes difficult to follow, as the connections which explain some of the episodes do not occur until later in the book. Tellingly, Enright has to rely on several extreme coincidences to bring the strands of her story together and achieve some sort of resolution. The plot, such as it is, strains credulity, and if you don't agree with her thesis regarding the inborn compulsion of twins to find each other, even when they don't know they are twins, you will find this book difficult to accept. Mary Whipple
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