Review: The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright

The Forgotten Waltz
Author: Anne Enright
Published: October 3, 2011
Genre: contemporary fiction
Hardcover: 263 pages
Source: borrowed from the library


My Rating: 2 stars


Synopsis (from B&N): A new, unapologetic kind of adultery novel. Narrated by the proverbial other woman—Gina Moynihan, a sharp, sexy, darkly funny thirtysomething IT worker—The Forgotten Waltz charts an extramarital affair from first encounter to arranged, settled, everyday domesticity. . . . This novel’s beauty lies in Enright’s spare, poetic, off-kilter prose—at once heartbreaking and subversively funny. It’s built of startling little surprises and one fresh sentence after another. Enright captures the heady eroticism of an extramarital affair and the incendiary egomania that accompanies secret passion: For all their utter ordinariness, Sean and Gina feel like the greatest lovers who've ever lived.


My Thoughts: I wish the book that I had read was the same one described in the summary above, because it certainly wasn't anything like what I read above. Told by Gina, a married woman who begins having an affair with a married man, this story is meant to explore how an extramarital affair affects these two individuals. Instead, I read some woman who seems to whine a lot, abandons her husband (he literally just disappears in the middle of the book, as if the author forgot about him), and is unhappy with her life. It just read like one big gripe session told be a middle-class woman who acts as if her life is so difficult. The characters come across as very bland, there was no development, and there wasn't any kind of story being told. It was frenetic at times, jumping all over the place and making my head spin. Anne Enright won the Man Booker prize for a previous novel, The Gathering. I'm interested to see what that book is about, because this one left me feeling like I wasted my time.