Anne Enright is a Booker Prize-winning Irish author. She has published essays, short stories, a non-fiction book and four novels. Before her novel
The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favorably reviewed and widely praised.
Her latest novel is
The Forgotten Waltz.
One of her five best books with a love triangle, as told to the
Wall Street Journal:
Embers
by Sándor Márai (1942)
For a love triangle to really sing, all three people must love each other, gender notwithstanding. The classic configuration involves two male friends who fall for the same woman. In "Embers," the great Hungarian writer Sándor Márai shakes out this old standard, writing a book that reads like a psychological thriller, though it is written, quite simply, as a conversation between old friends. Two men sit at a table where they last ate together 41 years before. One is a general, the other a soldier. In the story the general tells, the high ideal of male friendship is undone by the even higher ideal of true romantic love. And yet they remain friends. The woman is something of a cipher. As a modern reader, living in the age of crass, you might wonder why guys in this situation don't just pair off. If so, this book is too good for you.
Read about
the other books on the list.
Embers is on
Arthur Phillips's list of Five Novels That Make You Feel Like You Might Know Something about Life During the Collapse of the Hapsburg Empire.
Also see: a
top ten list of literary ménages à trois.
--Marshal Zeringue
Anne Enright is a Booker Prize-winning Irish author. She has published essays, short stories, a non-fiction book and four novels. Before her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Enright had a low profile in Ireland and the United Kingdom, although her books were favorably reviewed and widely praised.
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