In the end, Mathilde's one true cruelty is, achingly, directed at herself. She spends her life convinced of her own bad nature, unable to extend to herself the type of forgiveness and ease with herself that comes so naturally to Lotto. Groff spends the novel carefully constructing her: devoted, brittle, determined, pathologically unforgiving, only to disclose at the novel's conclusion the devastating tragedy her personality conceals. In the last pages we make a haunting discovery about Mathilde. Their great romance is in their ability to see the good in each other, the tragedy that in the eyes of their spouse the individual is never wholly visible. Lotto considers Mathilde a saint, convinced she is "transparent, a plate of glass", while Mathilde thinks Lotto the kindest person she ever met, despite his evident narcissism. In a way, their story is both romance and tragedy, depending on which way it is read, and this poignant duality is woven through the book. "A woodpecker clattered against a magnolia," she writes, the moment Lotto's father dies. Years sweep effortlessly by as Groff creates richly imagined moments that punctuate key events. At one of their dinner parties, she describes "people lounging around their food like enormous cats, sated from the kill". Groff's language is sumptuous, capturing familiar scenes and details in decadent, unusually observant prose. Afterwards, she devotes herself to Lotto, determined never to "show him the evil that lived in her".
Mathilde was abandoned by her parents at a young age, and in order to escape her limiting circumstances she makes a Faustian-like bargain with an older man who pays for her college tuition.
She observes, "marriage is made on lies kind ones mostly". If Lotto keeps certain secrets from Mathilde, Mathilde's entire identity is constructed on deceit, though her love for Lotto is unfaltering. Mathilde, friendless at college, is distrusted by Lotto's friends and detested by his mother, but their marriage becomes her source of great stability. It is the profoundly divergent ways two people can experience the same reality that drives the delicious tension in this novel.
Events that seemed to have one meaning in Lotto's eyes are reinterpreted by Mathilde, often shattering our assumptions. If the public face of the marriage belongs to Lotto's narrative, its private life is recounted by Mathilde in Furies. Lotto, who never truly doubts himself, is eventually celebrated for his work, while his wife assumes the role of "dramaturge of the marriage". It is Mathilde who identifies and nurtures Lotto's playwriting talent after discovering (and editing) a script he writes in a drunken fury one New Year's Eve.
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