Fates and Furies in Our Shared Shelf

May 01, 2015 Amanda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: knock-your-socks-off, good-covers

Brilliant.

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Jul 05, 2016 eb rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: adult, audio-book, female-narrator-audio, female-author, fiction, male-protagonist, female-protagonist, multiple-viewpoints, relationships, queer-ancillary-characters

Disclaimer: I know Lauren personally. She is a genius who reaches for Nabokov with her language and who works at writing harder than anyone works at anything. I wish I liked this story more.

I feel fairly certain that, like Landline, Fates and Furies is another story only married people can appreciate.

I disliked privileged, presumptuous, and arrogant Lotto, the way he squeezed the life out of Mathilde as if her energy were owed to him. When he passes off her childhood story--of growing up so lon Disclaimer: I know Lauren personally. She is a genius who reaches for Nabokov with her language and who works at writing harder than anyone works at anything. I wish I liked this story more.

I feel fairly certain that, like Landline, Fates and Furies is another story only married people can appreciate.

I disliked privileged, presumptuous, and arrogant Lotto, the way he squeezed the life out of Mathilde as if her energy were owed to him. When he passes off her childhood story--of growing up so lonely she allowed a leech to remain stuck on her for days and considered it a friend--as his own, Mathilde is furious with him. At first he has no idea why, but when he finally figures it out, he subjects himself to the most dramatic and manipulative of self-flagellation, making a spectacle of his guilt without ever once recognizing the depth of his presumption or showing an ounce of remorse. In fact, when he crawls into bed with Mathilde later, he whispers to her, by way of explanation, "What's yours is mine, and what's mine is yours," even though it is crystal clear in the text that he only ever takes.

Lotto's actions reverberate beyond even his death, into Mathilde's story without him, when she is enacting revenge against the people who stole Lotto's happiness (as if her own happiness were not of consequence). Ultimately, she cannot destroy Cholly, Lotto's supposed friend, because Lotto had a secret child--unbeknownst to anyone-- with Cholly's twin sister. So, even Mathilde's fury is choked off by the spectre of Lotto in his son. Just as her potential and brilliance as a person was continually choked off by various white males who sought to use and control her.

It's a well done narrative, as are all of Groff's narratives, though Mathilde's half is told in a non-linear scatter that is frankly nearly impossible to follow. There's much language play, and unflinching exploration of complicated characters, but not a single one is someone I would want to spend an ounce of time with. Not Lotto with his expansive, empty attention seeking. Not Mathilde, with her calculating desperation to belong. Not any of their friends, by turns vapid, cruel, and boring.

Again, my criticisms of contemporary literary fiction bubble to the surface, even in a shining example of the genre: why does every story and every character in them have to be so reprehensible? Is it really impossible to write a literary story populated by characters who are interesting and complicated without "complicated" being a synonym for terrible?

If Lauren Groff can't do it, then no one can.

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