"Fates and Furies"

[fiefoe]

The first half of Lauren Groff's novel is frankly boring, (famous playwright, oh please,) except for the part of Lotto's fevered and cloistered collaboration with a young composer. The second part gets more preposterous, plot-wise, but all the work to convince us and herself that the wife isn't a villainess after all seems endearingly earnest.

• The world was precarious, Lotto had learned. People could be subtracted from it with swift bad math.
• Beauty lends grief its grace note. / peacock one's grief
• carbonated with dark ideas / Hot milk of a day
• Grief is for the strong, who use it as fuel for burning.
• Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing.
• "Make me happy," the Frankenstein's monster said, "and I will be again virtous."
• it's less delicious, this badness bred for survival.
• the blaze of her crazed dignity / echoing lack of acclaim
• Mathilde  was a fist, she was only an open hand with Lotto.
• 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.
• (Mathilde once allowed a leech that had latched onto her leg to stay because she was so lonely. Lotto thought this story was so touching that, years later, he began telling it as if it were his own.)
• They had been married for seventeen years; she lived in the deepest room in his heart. And sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself. Abstraction of her before the visceral being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of a sudden. The dark whip at the center of her. How, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning.
• She shouldn't have. She knew it. But her love for him was new, and her love for herself was old, and she was all she'd had for so very, very long.
• A QUESTION OF VISION. From the sun’s seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. Earth a mere spinning blip. Closer, the city a knot of light between other knots; even closer, and buildings gleamed, slowly separating. Dawn in the windows revealed bodies, all the same. Only with focus came specifics, mole by nostril, tooth stuck to a dry bottom lip in sleep, the papery skin of an armpit.
• The word spinster hid behind it a blazing freedom; and how hadn’t Mathilde seen this before?
• Enough decades, and a body slowly twists into one great cramp.
• The lives of others come together in fragments. A light shining off a separate story can illuminate what had remained dark.
• Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts.
• We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped as spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they near, casting off blue sparks, new stars, until they spin past each other. And then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment, and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined but never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss. And then, at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.
• this fresh-cut-grass smell was the olfactory scream of the plants
• The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.
• And they spoke of their Antigonie, who they called Go, as if she were a friend.
  Leo hadn't yet written any music, but he had made drawings on butcher paper stolen from the kitchen. They curled around his walls, intricate doodles, extensions of the boy's own lean, slight body. The shape of Leo's jaw in profile, devastating. The way he gnawed his fingernails to the crescents, the fine shining hairs down the center of his nape, the smell of him, up close, pure and clean, bleaching.
  The ones made for music are the most beloved of all. Their bodies a container for the spirit within; the best of them is music, the rest only instrument of flesh and bone.
• She had never in her life met such an innocent. In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil. There was none in him: she knew it when she saw him up on that windowsill the night before, the lightning shocking the world behind him. His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home.
• Lotto, clean as camphor at his neck and belly, like electrified pennies at the armpit, like chlorine at the groin. She swallowed. Such things, details noticed only on the edges of thought would not return.

I don't agree with Jame Wood's review, given that he liked the first part.
__ This tone, essentially mock-heroic, is extremely difficult to maintain, and it can’t be said that “Fates and Furies” finally succeeds in that maintenance.
__ But tastes in unreality differ.