Lauren Groff

I gave up after reading over 60% of the book on kindle. I am SO disappointed as Lauren Groff is one of my favorite writers, and I was really looking forward to this her latest novel. Unfortunately, it was a painful, tedious read. The main character is a girl, formerly servant to a wealthy family in colonial settlement, who is on the run after apparently murdering one (or more) of her masters. As far as I got, nothing is clear except that she is running, running, running and trying to survive in the snowy wilderness. There are way too many minute details about her packing and unpacking and repacking her sack, trying to find water, tending to her sore feet, looking for a cave or crevice to sleep in, skewering a nestful of baby squirrels and roasting them (their bones taste like butter), stealing a duck's eggs and then breaking her neck, gathering mushrooms that make her vomit, eating a cupful of grubs, pissing and shitting in the woods--well, you get the idea. I guess I was supposed to be impressed by her perseverance in the face of this ordeal, but honestly, it was just too much until it got boring, and I just couldn't take any more.… (plus d'informations)

“In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness” (1).

This somewhat-shorter novel reads somewhat like a longer epic poem: the narrator, an on-the-run servant in her teens, with great courage and swiftness, flees from famine and servitude at a colonial fort to find freedom, to save her life. On this journey (that feels more like Odysseus’ decade of water-weary travel than her weeks-long sojourn) where she’s running for her life into the northern wild, she seems to experience death and resurrection many times over.

From the vastness of the sea to the vastness of the wilds, there’s so much struggle and mourning and darkness. This heavy lit fiction reads like a mix of Piranesi (she’s alone throughout these trials and tests) and Lord of the Flies (she reminisces on actions darker than kids killing kids in isolation) and Mexican Gothic (her fevered hallucinations make those from MG seem tame) alongside some heavy commentary on colonialism. And while there’s much about monsters and men, religion and nature, the thing that sticks with me the most is this needful, yearning you experience alongside her as she runs farther into the wilderness. You desperately want her to be rescued—or even caught—you just want her to be with others, to escape the terrible loneliness, to be seen by another instead of floating by on the watery perimeter like an apparition who, at the end, accepts that “she [is] still a stranger” and “had imposed herself upon this place” and the simple “acceptance of … her was a gift of grace enough” (240).… (plus d'informations)

“In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness” (1).

This somewhat-shorter novel reads somewhat like a longer epic poem: the narrator, an on-the-run servant in her teens, with great courage and swiftness, flees from famine and servitude at a colonial fort to find freedom, to save her life. On this journey (that feels more like Odysseus’ decade of water-weary travel than her weeks-long sojourn) where she’s running for her life into the northern wild, she seems to experience death and resurrection many times over.

From the vastness of the sea to the vastness of the wilds, there’s so much struggle and mourning and darkness. This heavy lit fiction reads like a mix of Piranesi (she’s alone throughout these trials and tests) and Lord of the Flies (she reminisces on actions darker than kids killing kids in isolation) and Mexican Gothic (her fevered hallucinations make those from MG seem tame) alongside some heavy commentary on colonialism. And while there’s much about monsters and men, religion and nature, the thing that sticks with me the most is this needful, yearning you experience alongside her as she runs farther into the wilderness. You desperately want her to be rescued—or even caught—you just want her to be with others, to escape the terrible loneliness, to be seen by another instead of floating by on the watery perimeter like an apparition who, at the end, accepts that “she [is] still a stranger” and “had imposed herself upon this place” and the simple “acceptance of … her was a gift of grace enough” (240).… (plus d'informations)

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.… (plus d'informations)