FATES AND FURIES

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Note: Due to requests from a few followers, I am resuming reviews of the books I read. Thanks for caring and especially for letting me know you do!

Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff, Riverhead Books, 2015, 390 pp

Description from Indiebound:

From the award-winning, "New York Times "bestselling author of "The Monsters of Templeton" and "Arcadia," an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception.
"Fates and Furies" is a literary masterpiece that defies expectation. A dazzling examination of a marriage, it is also a portrait of creative partnership written by one of the best writers of her generation.
Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years.
At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed. With stunning revelations and multiple threads, and in prose that is vibrantly alive and original, Groff delivers a deeply satisfying novel about love, art, creativity, and power that is unlike anything that has come before it. Profound, surprising, propulsive, and emotionally riveting, it stirs both the mind and the heart.

 

My review:

There is truly not more I can ask of an author than the power of her story to engross me completely. Despite a few times when I could not comprehend why Lauren Groff did what she did in structuring this novel, I knew I was in the grip of the truths and weirdness that make up any long term relationship.

 

In the first section, "Fates," which by the end I realized was from Lotto's point of view, the story of how he came to be the person he was kept me riveted except for the endless round of parties during the early years of their marriage. But even though reading about those parties became tedious, I later saw how she used them to build many of the main characters giving the reader a developing picture of who they really were and who they were pretending to be.

Then in the second part, "Furies," when we learn who Mathilde really is, the formative events of her past come to light. You may wonder how a woman can keep so many secrets from a man she truly loves, but looking back on my own marriage it seems to me that any woman is compelled to secrecy, to certain lies and misdirections, to all of the pulling of strings behind the scenes. It is the way we find agency in what is still a man's world.

There were times in Mathilde's section when I had to suspend my disbelief in order to assimilate incidents. During the many times shifts I sometimes felt lost and adrift. But Groff never forgets her reader. In fact, she gave me courage to own up to my own rage and sorrow and mistakes.

This is a book about marriage but ultimately it covers many things: creativity, secrets, effects of early loss and abuse on later life, but best of all the absolute rage of a woman. Even in a happy marriage, the role of wife is no bed of roses.

Mathilde is a mighty character worthy of Shakespeare. The novel reminded me of others I have been deeply moved by: Joyce Carol Oates novels, Hild by Nicola Griffith, The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt, Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood and all of the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante.

(Fates and Furies is available in hardcover on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)