I think I’m going to have to file this one away on the “admired but unloved” shelf. It was definitely an interesting read because whether you like Fates And Furies or not, you can’t deny that Groff is a great writer doing some innovative things with structure. She was clearly very influenced by the theatre, especially old school tragedy. I think for this story to truly resonate, you need to have been married. It just didn’t hit me emotionally, but I think it might have if I’d had similar experiences.
Fates And Furies is the story of a marriage between Lotto and Mathilde. The reader gets to learn about what led them to each other and the ups and downs of their relationship. The first half of the book is Lotto’s perspective. We get to see him struggling to find his way to a career he excels at and the way he sees Mathilde. I was led to believe that the second half would be the same story over again from Mathilde’s view and while I would have loved reading that, it was more like a companion story. We get some of her view of the marriage, but there’s lots of additional stuff about her life that doesn’t involve Lotto directly.
Although Lotto was strongly written and his characterization rang true, I found it so hard to get through the first half of the novel. Privileged white boy struggles aren’t exactly groundbreaking… or terribly interesting because we’ve seen it all before in a million iterations. The second half picked up the pace, but while I loved Mathilde, I didn’t really understand her motivations. Her story is murky, even after it switches to her perspective. There is a crazy amount of sex in this book and not in a titillating way like a romance book. Groff makes many of them very visceral and uncomfortable. Not sure if that’s what she was going for, but I found the sheer number of those scenes off-putting.
It’s fascinating the way Groff sometimes zooms into the action with intimate narration about what the main characters are thinking and feeling and other times it zooms out for a bird’s eye view of their marriage. It really felt like I was watching a play spanning decades.
I’m not sorry I read this even though I didn’t love it. Groff is definitely an author I would read again just to see what she does next. Your mileage may vary with Fates And Furies. I could definitely see it being a good choice for book clubs. Whether you end up liking it or not, you’ll probably want to discuss it with someone.
