About the Fates and Furies affair you don't even know what to say. However, no, not even so. You don't really know what to say about the novel by Fates and Furies, because everything that could be said about this novel has been said for a long time, by everyone and many times - for other reasons and other books, but still it is said, It's so detailed and meticulous that no matter what thread you pull in search of a cause, it will be followed by either a pretty old Ariadne, with her nails hooked by the infinite tremor in the hands of a ball of critical theory, or - a cat.
Thus - despite all surprising secondary character of the novel (the right word, the book reminds caricature to essay of T.S. Elliot about tradition and individual talent) - Fates and Furies not only became a bestseller, which, of course, was helped by the praise of President Obama, but also collected a significant number of nominations for various serious literary prizes, which, in general, can be explained only by one thing: The idea that your husband or wife has a second bottom from which to knock at any moment in your marriage, apparently, works perfectly at the emotional level, at the level of the stomach, even if it is wrapped in a pretty wrinkled wrapper from Gone Girl.
The wrapper, however, is gilded, but practically according to Strindberg. In the role of gilding - on the distinctly pork skin - acts almost all the European literature, from Euripides and Shakespeare to the brothers Grimm and Virginia Wolf, and the gold layer of this at some point becomes so dense and breathable, then threatened, if not strangle the stunted plot, then at least to appear on it a reminiscence crust.
In the cage, however, there is a fairly simple - at least from a structural point of view - story. Lancelot, forgive me, and Mathilde are married for more than twenty years. It's a story. The story of their marriage is divided into two equal in volume, but different in content (Groff originally wanted to publish them in two separate books). "Moira" - the story of Lancelot (Lotto), a golden boy, a failed actor, a talented playwright who covers the world with a golden glow of his libido and sincerely believes that the whole world extends his legs towards him. "Erinia" is the story of Matilda, an ideal wife with a dark past, who has been rolling the world towards her husband for twenty-six years, knowing that when the world goes down, not only will it go to the toilet with a whistle, but it will also turn into a yeast on the way.
The narrative scheme, you see, is simple, run-of-the-mill and has been a favourite of readers since Gone Girl - with one important exception: Lotto and Mathilde really love each other, which is probably even worse - for both the characters and the story. All the way through, all these four hundred hemispheric pages, two adults and clearly mature people behave exactly like book characters - they get well-coordinated sentences, fall in love at first sight, brilliantly and even suffer somehow excessively literary: then the genius composer sweeps through their marriage red hair faunom, then for forty years will hold a grudge best friend, then pass a passage from the genre of literature, some ominous uncle, if not - the shadow of Humbert Humbert muscles lust for the plot, which as a result of all tragically and will cover.
On the one hand, this narrative conventionality is obvious - too obvious - due to the material on which Groff builds the novel. It's like not a modern novel today, it's a universal, narrative construct. These are all those geological layers of the previous literary material, which grow out of the text stalactites and stalagmites, instead of bearing fruit. There is also "Coriolan" here, retold by modern Volumnia. There are gloomy shadows of German fairy tales and Greek tragedies: Matilda, for example, and the child-substitute, and the prisoner of Bluebeard, and the forced beauty at the laborious rich monster, and Medea, who strangles her children still in the ovaries, and Pygmalion with herself and her living husband. The trouble is that if someone does not count all these allusions at once, Groff will point you to them with a finger the size of a police rod - and mention Volumniya (and if the first time it does not come, and mention the second time), will persistently draw a parallel with the Greek tragedy with his nail (the author is in square brackets between the sufferings or the legs of Lotto and Matilda) and even put the modern version of "Antigone" - a control shot, at the same time settling his heroes in a cherry garden.
But it turns out that this purposeful book, fairy tale, past conventionality completely refuses to work in the conditions of modern time and modern novel, which at the same time at the same time writes Groff. Intrigues, passions and genre spells, which were sewn by the standards of queens, gods and great military leaders, are resolutely slipping away from the two uninteresting, rich and beautiful people who, in general, the whole book is engaged in themselves, then sex, and who are not raised above the level of vulgarity of the universal, even what some of them had when there was a hard life.
This is a good entertainment novel, overburdened with the first course of the lit-institution.
Quote:
“My mother smelled of cold and fish scales, my father smelled of stone dust and dog. She thought that her husband's mother, whom they had never met, was a soul of rotten apples, even though her letters smelled of baby powder and pink water. Sally smelled of starch and cedar. Her late grandmother was a sandalwood. Her uncle was Swiss cheese. She was told that she smelled of garlic, that she smelled of chalk, that she smelled of nothing. Lotto's stomach and neck smell like camphor, pure smell, his armpits smell like electrified copper, his scrotum smells like chlorine”.