A book review: "Fates and Furies" by Lauren Groff

By this time of the year, in the fall, after dealing with hotel guests for ten months straight, answering their inane intelligent questions, printing out maps that they won't look at because they have GPS and GPS is ALWAYS correct, after spouting the same litany of words and instructions for the ten thousandth time about the hot tub and the air conditioning controls and the hours for breakfast and on and on and on, I have very little energy for anything mentally taxing.  I read a lot of Robert Parker books because they keep me entertained but need little brain power.  

"Fates and Furies" is no Spencer novel.  It is a very well-written novel, one that is aggressively intelligent, intriguing, well paced and makes the reader work a bit.  The language is dense at times, lyrical at other times.  The characters are clearly drawn and true to their created ways but a little shadowy at the same time.  The story is basically of a relationship between Lotto and Mathilde, a relationship that is strong but flawed, passionate but realistically tempered.  The book is in two parts, the "Fates" and the "Furies" and each part looks at their relationship from a different slant.  Things that are revealed in part two change the reader's perception of things that happened in part one.

It would almost be worth buying this book, and you know I say that very rarely.  I can see reading it again in a year or two.  Listen to this:  But there were tiny miracles to rouse her.  A rosewater macaroon in the brass mailbox, in a waxed paper envelope. One blue hydrangea like a head of cabbage on the doorstep.  Cold, wrinkled hands pressed to her cheeks, passing on the stairs.  Bright lights in the dark.

Or this:  Of course, there was also the worse reason, a darker one that he turned from quickly every time he brushed up against it, a tarry fury that he ignored so long that, by now, it had become too enormous to contemplate. 

Once this book grabbed me, I didn't want to put it down.  It's that kind of a novel.  Check it out.

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