Rating: 5 Cups of Coffee
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.
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.
Natasha’s Experience:
Perception is everything. This story is a story within a story within a story. Sometimes the truth isn't as easy to see as we imagine it to be.
“The lives of others come together in fragments. A light
shining off a separate story can illuminate what had remained dark. Brains are
miraculous; humans storytelling creatures. The shards draw themselves together and
make something whole.”
Lotto and Mathilde meet and fall madly in
love in the course of just a few weeks. Their friends and family are either envious
of their tumultuous love or dead-set against it. We grow into their life,
living out their sorrows and their joys, experiencing all of their successes
and defeats. It’s rare for me to feel so invested in a story and its characters’
lives when I’m reading third person, but FATES AND FURIES was too good to not
fall right into it.
You can’t help but love Lotto, this man
who is inherently good. He grows up particularly spoiled and has a hard time
dealing with failure – he’s never not
a winner. He loves Mathilde with fierceness yet is undeniably afraid of losing
her.
“Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely;
you do know someone entirely.”
Mathilde is a mystery, through and
through. She is enigmatic, lovely, and always outwardly kind. I felt that
Mathilde was always hidden in the shadows, the strong yet silent type, and the
rock that Lotto would rest upon as he fought his way to the top. But you never
really know a person do you?
“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.”
FATES AND FURIES is refreshing, incredibly smart, and gives
you surprises that are like little gems, leaving you gasping in awe. Lauren Groff,
your brain is a mystery and I loved having a glimpse of it while reading your
words. You are brilliant.
Links
Amazon US | Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | iBooks | IndieBound | Books-A-Million
About the Author
Lauren Groff is the author of the novel
The Monsters of Templeton, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers,
Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of stories, and Arcadia, a New York Times
Notable Book, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and finalist for the L.A.
Times Book Award.
Her third novel, Fates and Furies, is
forthcoming from Riverhead Books in September 2015.
Her work has appeared in journals
including the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Tin House,One Story,
McSweeney’s, and Ploughshares, and in the anthologies 100 Years of the Best
American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, PEN/O.
Henry Prize Stories, and three editions of theBest American Short Stories.
She lives in Gainesville, Florida with
her husband and two sons.
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