February 10, 2017
This book was a HUGE disappointment. I mean, holy purple prose, Batman! I really loved Lauren Groff’s writing in Arcadia - it was beautiful and touching, with gorgeous metaphors. But Fates and Furies is pretentious and overwritten. It tries so hard to be a literary masterpiece that you end up with asides like this one:
If you like convoluted metaphors and improbable life stories, you will enjoy this book. If you like reading descriptions of fictional avant-garde plays that add modernist touches to ancient stories (think Antigone transformed into “Go”), you will enjoy this book. But most importantly, if you like the grotesque, you will enjoy this book. The entire thing is a bizarre parody of what two people’s life stories could actually be like, and the fantastical, absurd elements are what really stand out.
The narrative constantly asks us: what is given up by each party in a relationship? What is worth giving up for a marriage, and how can two people stay together? There were a few poignant scenes where I really felt like Groff had captured this for Lotto and Mathilde, and I actually felt invested in their relationship:
But even that fell apart for me given how ridiculous I found most of the book. Serious “plot” spoilers behind tags: I probably should have stopped reading this in the first hundred pages, when . Or when I realized that Chollie (god) was a character who was actually going to stick around for awhile. Or when I got to Mathilde’s half of the book, which is supposed to humanize her and round out the narrative, when really it just had me raising my eyebrows for a solid 200 pages.
The implication that married couples have secrets from each other is a sensible one; the idea that . And something about Mathilde’s self-sacrifice really rubbed me the wrong way.
Ultimately I really hated these two people, hated the amount of dubious underage sex presented as normal, and came away thinking the entire novel just tries too way, way too hard.
Her mother had smelled of cold and scales, her father of stone dust and dog. She imagined her husband’s mother, whom she had never met, had a whiff of rotting apples, although her stationery had stunk of baby powder and rose perfume. Sallie was starch, cedar. Her dead grandmother, sandalwood. Her uncle, Swiss cheese. People told her she smiled like garlic, like chalk, like nothing at all. Lotto, clean as camphor at his neck and belly, like electrified pennies at the armpit, like chlorine at the groin.
If you like convoluted metaphors and improbable life stories, you will enjoy this book. If you like reading descriptions of fictional avant-garde plays that add modernist touches to ancient stories (think Antigone transformed into “Go”), you will enjoy this book. But most importantly, if you like the grotesque, you will enjoy this book. The entire thing is a bizarre parody of what two people’s life stories could actually be like, and the fantastical, absurd elements are what really stand out.
The narrative constantly asks us: what is given up by each party in a relationship? What is worth giving up for a marriage, and how can two people stay together? There were a few poignant scenes where I really felt like Groff had captured this for Lotto and Mathilde, and I actually felt invested in their relationship:
Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.
But even that fell apart for me given how ridiculous I found most of the book. Serious “plot” spoilers behind tags: I probably should have stopped reading this in the first hundred pages, when . Or when I realized that Chollie (god) was a character who was actually going to stick around for awhile. Or when I got to Mathilde’s half of the book, which is supposed to humanize her and round out the narrative, when really it just had me raising my eyebrows for a solid 200 pages.
The implication that married couples have secrets from each other is a sensible one; the idea that . And something about Mathilde’s self-sacrifice really rubbed me the wrong way.
Ultimately I really hated these two people, hated the amount of dubious underage sex presented as normal, and came away thinking the entire novel just tries too way, way too hard.