Lauren Groff

In Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff asks us readers to pay attention, maybe more attention than I’m able or willing to give to this book. I’m expected to remember many names, which may come up again, pages later, maybe in scenes from earlier or later times or from someone else’s viewpoint.
Every sentence, complete or incomplete, though, is glorious. Each leads me on and keeps me wanting to find out what follows. But, the sentences, especially the early ones, come so quickly that after the first fifty pages they became too much for me, and I had to put the book away for a while.
A few days later I picked it up again and began skipping and skimming, to the end at first, then here and there, piecing stories together by reading parts for as long as they still seemed interesting, then going back or forward to catch more of this story, leaving flags wherever I left off, not keeping notes, trying to slow-read this fast reading novel, and finally covering it all.
The novel itself skips back and forth, explains events before or after they are told, may tell the same event from at least two perspectives, plays deftly with time and place, so invites the reader to look ahead and back too.
It’s a story of two people in love, in a long marriage, who do and don’t understand each other, who we learn about slowly as the book progresses. In the first half of the book, "Fates", we learn mostly about Lotto, who becomes a playwright and who is pretty much one thing. Then in "Furies" we get to know Mathilde, who is much more complex and interesting.
This book is filled with layers of meaning, versions, explanations, twists. It’s not like Groff’s earlier "Arcadia", not like her later "Matrix" or "The Vaster Wilds". It almost cries out for a re-reading.… (més)

I expected to enjoy this book far more than I actually did. The hero, Marie de France, is someone known to have existed, but very little of her history is known. Which pretty much gave Lauren Groff carte blanche to write her story as she chose. In short, Marie, a bastard of noble birth is big and ungainly. Sent as a prioress to an impoverished and unimportant abbey, she successfully devotes her whole life to making it large, beautiful, and extraordinarily wealthy, Groff's research is impressive: she clearly understands the mediaeval religious life well. Her writing is striking, luminous. But I was entirely uninvested in the life of Marie de France and in the lives of her fellow-nuns. Dramas were quickly resolved: whole years, or even a decade or so passed in a single sentence. I didn't care for Marie a great deal - for her visions and her acquisitiveness - apparently for the glory of God. And really, it was matter of some indifference to me whether I finished the book: I did - for the quality of the prose, rather than the uninvolving narrative.… (més)