I’ve seen quite a few mixed reviews of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies and wasn’t so very keen to read it but I got curious about it and had to find out for myself whether it was brilliant or so-so or terrible. It seems that many people don’t like the first half but those who stick with it and get to the second half end up liking that part better. So I began reading with low expectations. Perhaps it was this that helped me fall into the book, I don’t know, but I certainly didn’t struggle to read it or like it. In the end, I didn’t find the book brilliant but I did like it very much.
The story is that of a marriage told from both sides. The first part is told from Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite’s point of view. He grew up in Florida in a wealthy family, his father, Gawain, having made a fortune selling bottled water. But his father died young and left Lotto and his sister to the care of an increasingly distant yet controlling mother and Aunt Sallie who ran the household. Left to run wild, Lotto turned to sex and drugs and alcohol and when his mother found out, she sent him away to an all-boys boarding school. There he had few friends, but this bright, very tall boy discovered the joys of Shakespeare and determined to go off to college and become an actor.
Near the end of his senior year of college he met Mathilde, statuesque, beautiful, smart. The charismatic Lotto gave up seducing women and decided to marry Mathilde. He believed her to be pure and because she was pure he considered her his savior. He failed in the real world as an actor but in a dark night of the soul moment, discovered he had a talent for writing plays. Soon he became a famous playwright and grew wealthy in the process. Until his mother died, he saw not a penny of his inheritance because she was so angry he had married without her permission that she cut him off financially.
In spite of his profligate sex life -pre-marriage, he remained loyal to Mathilde throughout, forever worrying that this pure, saintly woman would leave him:
If she was happy, it meant she wouldn’t leave him; and it had become painfully apparent over their short marriage that he was not worth the salt she sweated. The woman was a saint. She saved, fretted, somehow paid their bills when he brought in nothing.
Mathilde, of course, was no saint. Because of a terrible family tragedy when she was very young girl, her parents basically abandoned her. They shipped her off to a grandmother who didn’t want her and who then shipped her off to another grandmother who made her sleep in a closet. Mathilde was French, born Aurelie, and when she was a teenager she was shipped off to her uncle’s house. He lived in the United States and left her to raise herself. He was wealthy, however, so she was never wanting for anything but attention. Unable to make friends at school, she became Mathilde, a girl who was angry and hard, who would not let the world take advantage of her, and who was very, very lonely.
She was also terrified of Lotto abandoning her like everyone else in her life did. She never talked about certain parts of her life:
Great swaths of her life were white space to her husband. What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did. Still, there are untruths made of words and untruths made of silences, and Mathilde had only ever lied to Lotto in what she never said.
Any husband paying attention might wonder what she was hiding, but that is one advantage to being married to a charismatic, rather self-absorbed man. She did quite a few things he was never even aware of not least of which was edit his plays to make them better. And how she managed to hide the ongoing and ferocious war between her and Lotto’s mother without Lotto once suspecting a thing is beyond me.
As much as they both feared the other leaving them, in the end Lotto does leave Mathilde by an untimely death. She is devastated and her grief at losing her husband and once again being left is uncomfortable reading as well as heartbreaking.
I thought the book’s structure worked really well with clueless Lotto in the first half of the book and revelation after revelation from Mathilde’s part of the book. Still, as much as Mathilde knew and kept secret, Lotto had secrets too, though certainly not of Mathilde’s caliber. I liked getting both sides of the story and seeing how each one created and navigated their marriage. It is a more complete picture than we would ever get in a real life marriage and I found the completeness satisfying. From the outside, one would think their marriage would never work, and some of their friends even took bets on how long it would be before they were divorced and some, even after the pair had been married for years, tried to sabotage the relationship. The ending with an elderly Mathilde reflecting back on her marriage made me a little teary.
Contributing to my enjoyment of this book was a personal connection. Mathilde and Lotto were married at the age of twenty-two ( I was twenty-three when Bookman and I got married) and they married a year before my own wedding. So in many ways it felt like I was reading the story of a couple I might have known, except of course I didn’t and wouldn’t have known them if they were real, they not being the sort I would generally be friends with. Nonetheless, there was a certain happy friction, a bit of voyeurism and self-satisfaction regarding my own good fortune that smoothed away some of the annoying bits about the book (like the bracketed narrative intrusions, what the heck were those about?).
I’d like to say wow, you should read this book, but it isn’t that sort of book. I think it is one that will appeal to many, be enjoyed by some, and really liked by a few. Which one of those you might be, you’ll have to decide for yourself.
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Barack Obama’s favorite book of the year was, Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff, according to People.
A finalist for the 2015 National Book Awards for fiction, the novel tells the story of a marriage from two perspectives — the husband’s and the wife’s — over the course of twenty-four years. The title was NPR Morning Edition’s first book club pick.
Michelle Obama’s favorite book of the year also focuses on marriage. Obama selected, The Light of the World, by Elizabeth Alexander, a memoir about the sudden death of her husband.
The Amazon editors have revealed their picks for Best Books of 2015. According to the press release, 22 debut authors were selected for the Top 100 Books of the Year list. Follow this link to see the full list of 100 titles.
We’ve listed the top 10 books below. In addition to a general list, the Amazon team has also put together “top 20 lists in over two-dozen categories.” Did any of your favorites make the cut?
Amazon Editors’ Top 10 Books of 2015
1. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
2. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
3. Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt
4. An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
5. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
6. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
7. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
8. Purity by Jonathan Franzen
9. Hold Still by Sally Mann
10. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
My first job was as a babysitter when I was 11. Now that I'm a parent and look at the 11-year-olds I know, one of whom is still dressed by her mother in the morning, this fact appalls me. It's true that when I was 11 I looked 14 and the parents must have been [...]
In January of this year, eight months before its release date, the buzz was already starting to build for Bill Clegg's Did You Ever Have a Family. Bookseller colleagues were passing around the few advanced reader copies we could get a hold of and telling each other, "You have to read this!" Four major review [...]
The free digital Publishers Lunch Buzz Books have proven themselves accurate predictors of bestseller and best-of-the-year titles, before they are published. This season Publishers Lunch has gathered substantial excerpts from 54 of the most buzzed-about books scheduled for publication this fall and winter in two exclusive, free new ebooks, BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Fall/Winter and BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Young Adult Fall/Winter, offered in consumer and trade editions.
Book lovers get an early first look at new books from New York Times bestselling authors Mitch Albom, Geraldine Brooks, Alice Hoffman, and Adriana Trigiani, and popular and critically acclaimed writers Lauren Groff, Janice Y.K. Lee, Elizabeth McKenzie, and Belinda McKeon; columnist and television host Jason Gay’s first book, the \"whip-smart\" fiction debut of Academy Award-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg; an unprecedented look at feminist and legal pioneer Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik’s Notorious RBG; Dick Van Dyke’s memoir Keep Moving; Jesse Itzler on living with a Navy SEAL; and the first novels from essayist Sloane Crosley and award-winning short story writer Claire Vaye Watkins.
Following its highly successful introduction last year, Publishers Lunch again is presenting a stand-alone volume previewing exciting and outstanding material from publishing’s powerhouse sector, young adult and middle-grade novels, in BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Young Adult Fall/Winter. This edition holds a taste of eagerly awaited books like new work from bestselling and award-winning leaders in the field including James Dashner (The Maze Runner series), Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light and Revolution), Patrick Ness (A Monster Calls and the Chaos Walking trilogy), and Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall, Panic); authors best-known for their adult books (Eleanor Herman and Cammie McGovern); and a good number of exciting debuts (Tessa Elwood’s Inherit the Stars, Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s The Accident Season, and Estelle Laure’s This Raging Light, among others). Aaron Hartzler, author of the critically acclaimed YA memoir Rapture Practice, makes his fiction debut with What We Saw. In what appears to becoming a YA trend, four Buzz Books entries are highly graphic or archival-looking in form via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations and more. These include Hannah Moskowitz’s History of Glitter and Blood, a lyrical fantasy with an unusual graphic format.
Of the 24 adult books previewed and published to date in the 2015 Spring/Summer edition, 19 have made \"best of the month/year\" lists and five are New York Times bestsellers.
BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Fall/Winter and BUZZ BOOKS 2015: Young Adult Fall/Winter are available for free download now on Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple’s iBookstore, the Google Play Books store, and Kobo.
The finalists for the 33rd annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize have been revealed, and we’ve collected free samples of all their books below–some of the best books released in 2012. Here’s more about the awards:
“The winners of the L.A. Times book prizes will be announced at an awards ceremony April 19, the evening before the L.A. Times Festival of Books, April 20-21. Held on USC’s campus in Bovard Auditorium, the awards are open to the public; tickets will be made available in late March.”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
The ninth annual Morning News Tournament of Books (ToB) will commence in March 2013.
So far, 15 finalists have been revealed. Three titles from the “pre-tournament playoff round” are currently in the running for the sixteenth and final slot. We’ve included the two lists below.
Here’s more from the announcement: “The ToB is an annual springtime event here at the Morning News, where 16 of the year’s best works of fiction enter a March Madness-style battle royale. Today we’re announcing the judges and final books for the 2013 competition as well as the long list of books from which the contenders were selected.”
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Sarah Landis has been named senior editor at HarperCollins’ Children’s Books. She will work primarily on teen fiction titles and report to editorial director Farrin Jacobs.
Landis served as an editor at Hyperion Books/Voice for almost five years. Prior to this, she held positions in editorial and marketing at Penguin Group (USA).
At Hyperion Books/Voice, Landis edited several novels including The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff, The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan, The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club by Gil McNeil. Some of the memoirs she has edited include Perfection by Julie Metzmoir and Just Who Will You Be? by Maria Shriver.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
