Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff | Review

Up next in my #20BooksOfSummer challenge I review Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff. This is the second time I've read it and I'm still not quite sure how I ultimately feel about it. I don't doubt that I'll read it again in a few years, but I also might use it for skeet shooting. If I ever take up skeet shooting.

***********

Be Internet Friends with Me!

[andyy]

I usually read a novel relatively fast, yet with Fates and Furies, it just wasn't the case.... There's nothing wrong with the narration or even the story, but for me, it was so annoying in general, like when you're really interested in someone's story but the exaggerated way it is told makes it so hard to swallow... Idk how to explain it, but I hate the book much yet I think it was a good book somehow? That book had me so confused about my feelings that I wouldn't be able to reread it ever.
Nice review and you got a new subscriber :)

[SupposedlyFun]

"Pre-blown" and "re-blown" just got added to the lexicon. Thanks for that.

[rachelh]

I hated this book SO MUCH but you know what, you raise many good points. It leaves an impression. I probably remember it more vividly than most of my favorite books from 2016.

[insertbookpunhere]

I've tried to read this book a couple of times and keep ending up putting it aside. After eyrolling my way through some of the stories from Florida, I'd decided that Lauren Groff probably just isn't for me. But this video has TANTALIZED me, Rick! Maybe I'll have to give it another try

[chriskohanik]

Rick: “I found filters. And I’ll be damned if they don’t help me make my point.”

[WhitneyDahlin]

I think that both types of books have their place. Sometimes you need a frivolous book to give you an escape from life and some relief from the boring or even tragic day to day of ordinary existence. But sometimes you also need a book that you hate but that sticks with you. There's a reason this particular book has stuck with you and made you think about it again and again. Your subconscious is trying to learn something from it. Humans learn by experience and reading a book can give that same learning experience to our brains. Books arent just for entertainment, they teach valuable lessons even if that lesson is hey don't do this.

[reginalemoine]

Ha! I’ve seen some glowing reviews of this novel, but your take on it is probably the first that actually made me want to read it. I think there’s value in grappling with a novel that makes us think. I’m not here for fluff. :D

[JasmineReads]

Wow, what a reaction. You have me interested in this book in a way no one else has, ever. I'm curious to see how I'd find it.

[chrisbookishcauldron]

I tried to read it a long time ago. Before I had the channel. And I made it half way through the book before I gave up on it. And tbh, I can’t remember why. Like I have no real memory of what I read just that I didn’t connect to it. But this review made me want to give it another try. Have you read Ties by Domenico Starnone? Another dual perspective marriage story that is just searing in its honesty. But it also has the perspective of the adult children of the married couple and it just adds another layer of brutality and tragedy to the story. Great review! 😊

[edmundolee]

I didn’t like the book, but Ms Groff’s short story published on The New Yorker, ‘Ghosts and Empties, ’ is a delight to read.

[justjuanreader]

Literary efervescence, I agree! I this book, really nice review Rick

[TheJtul]

Ha, I do remember this being a really divisive book. I didn’t get to it at the time but now I want to- thanks!

[jessicafoster]

Just read it recently. Yeah the way Groff makes these points in her fiction is so contrived. Marriage doesn't look as drastic as that. Sure there're secrets and untolds but one is usually closer with that person than anyone ever, and so often that is enough, and anyway that kind of dishonesty doesn't hold for long, we can intimate a lot about someone we spend so much time with... as you say Mathilde's story is ridiculous. She so absolutely cold, surreal.The book is really not memorable for me. I'm happy to have forgotten it. Everything is so stretched and blown up that nothing holds up to truthfulness, so it's unrecognizable and because it's unrecognizable it has nothing to say to me about marriage--it becomes its own freakish spectacle of, as you say, melodrama. And made worse by all the publicity she did happily talking as if she wrote with this aim to explore marriage as institution. But even just as a story it was laboured. And I went in a fan of Groff before having read her, I love the way she talks about books, her passion. No doubt you've read the James Wood review in the New Yorker? I post this quote of his I love only 'cause I've pulled up my Goodreads review, where he sums up my feelings on the book better: '[T]he novel’s second half squanders in quick moments what was slowly accumulated in the first half’s careful pages. Reviewers get coy around narrative secrets: spoilers make them tongue-tied. You might imagine, from this novel’s shy reviews, that the second half of “Fates and Furies” functions as a kind of necessary reality check, in which the wife supplants the epic male vision with a more accurate and un-illusioned perspective. That is wanly true... [But] the energy of the novel’s second half is not, in fact, torqued toward a furious corrective analysis of the married state. (Or even toward an unfurious one, which would doubtless be as interesting.) Disappointingly, this part of the book becomes a lurid fairy tale whose heroine is not so much furious as a Fury, not so much disillusioned as a Devil. ...a novel that can be truly “spoiled” by the summary of its plot is a novel that was already spoiled by that plot.'

[rebecafahey]

I also wanted to burn the book after I started to read the second half of the book. The second part of the book seemed ridiculous to me.
I picture Lauren Groff painting a beautiful picture with her hands, and then erasing it with her elbow. The second half was more like a soap opera full of messy and over the top plots.

[walkingaspractice]

Currently suffering through the second half. 😂 *Almost* done.

[boringbonding]

I appreciate this review, I think the book sticks with me even though i was very disappointed by it also. I think her premise is interesting and poignant and could have made a very good novel. That’s what sticks with me. But the actual storylines and prose and forced allusions are extremely contrived and juvenile to me.

[PopleBackyardFarm]

love your channel. I am a big reader :) new subbie

[LauraFreyReadinginBed]

So, you watch Days of Our Lives In 1995 to... This is a great video, and the comments are very high-quality as well. I think that's how you know you're doing something right. Especially that one with the quote from James Wood...dang!
So I got this book at a library sale or something, and then completely lost interest in it, and I think I gave it away. I remember the publicity and hoopla about it being like this feminist deconstruction of marriage... Do you see any of that?