Fates and Furies
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. 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. 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 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 sometimes it's what you don't say-- to protect your partner's vanity, their reputation, their heart-- that makes a marriage hum. Until it doesn't...
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5mentions
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2015–2021years
60% recommend40% critical
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What Hacker News says
- Through a newspaper article I discovered Lauren Groff. I read and liked The Monsters of Templeton, Fates and Furies and Florida.
- Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff Brilliant. It's considered "literary fiction" but I found this book to be an absolute page-turner, much more so than what is usually described as a "page-turner". The summaries / back-cover marketing copy can't do it justice.
Florida - Lauren Groff Sublime, poetic, haunting collection of short stories.
Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang Exhalation - Ted Chiang Being released in May 2019 (I got an advance copy), but many of the stories are previously published and/or available online. "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" is just wonderful. Ted Chiang's work is the definition of economy in storytelling. Absolutely quality over quantity.
The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death's End - Liu Cixin I’m not sure how fulfilling it would be to just read the first one. They really feel like a single (big) novel. Worth it.
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O - Neal Stephenson, Nicole Galland Kind of Stephenson-light(?). Smart, entertaining and seems destined to be a TV series.
The Secret History - Donna Tartt A bit slow to get going. Lots of Greek, snow, and booze at a private liberal-arts college in Vermont.
The Grownup - Gillian Flynn (short story)
- Those are editors' picks - unrelated to customer sales or ratings. This is a pretty common phenomenon in the world of literary fiction where (a) some are clearly just disappointed that the book in question isn't an easily digestible genre work and (b) many people are inclined to be especially vociferous about their opinion of something they've sunk 8 - 20 hours into.
FWIW, I thoroughly enjoyed Fates and Furies in audiobook format, although it isn't without it's flaws. Critic James Wood gave it a tepid review in The New Yorker.
- Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe by Wright Morris, a memoir of spending part of 1932 and 1933 in Austria, Italy, and France. Not on the whole as rewarding as his other memoirs Will's Boy and A Cloak of Light, but interesting enough.
Adolphe and Le Cahier Rouge by Benjamin Constant. The former a devastating short novel, the latter a memoir, a portrait of the artist as a young twerp. (The things we boomers would say if something comparable had been published by a millenial!)
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff, a novel read for a book club. The less said, the better.
Autobiography by Henry James. Very slow going, but rewarding, a mind at work.
My Promised Land by Avi Shalets. A history of Israel and the Zionist project by an Israeli journalist. It covers a lot of ground that most Americans (I infer from my book club) don't know. It seemed to me that it could have been maybe 15% shorter, and that David Remnick should have impounded Shalets's thesaurus.
Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder by Isaiah Berlin. Well worth reading, but requiring more time than just its own reading, for now I have to read some Herder. I have already fought my way through some Hamann; the translation is heavily footnoted, as necessary for those of us who aren't handy with Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and don't have the Bible memorized.
Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (vol. ii) by Egon Friedell. Clive James's recommendation in Cultural Amnesia put me onto this one. Most interesting, but slow going because my German is rusty.
[Edit: got rid of most of the "most interesting"s.]
- I haven't read it, but interesting that "Fates and Furies: A Novel" a 3.5 star novel on Amazon makes the top 20 list. Is this purely a function of sales, not ratings?
