Name: Shoob 🧸's review of Matrix by Lauren Groff
Item: Matrix
Rating: 4.5
Author: Shoob 🧸

Lauren Groff

One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies. Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie's vision be bulwark enough? Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff's new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

Matrix

NOW AVAILABLE TO PREORDER: the new historical novel from the bestselling author of Fates and Furies 'Luminous, divine, her masterpiece' DAISY JOHNSON 'An audacious piece of storytelling, full of passion, wisdom and magic' SARAH WATERS 'Lauren Groff is a virtuoso' EMILY ST JOHN MANDEL 'How mesmerising can twelfth century nuns be, even in the hands of Lauren Groff? I had barely started it before I was bloody well blaspheming with delight. Matrix is a gorgeous, sensual, addictive read' SARA COLLINS __________________________________ Seventeen-year-old Marie, too wild for courtly life, is thrown to the dogs one winter morning, expelled from the royal court to become the prioress of an abbey. Marie is strange - tall, a giantess, her elbows and knees stick out, ungainly. At first taken aback by life at the abbey, Marie finds purpose and passion among her mercurial sisters. Yet she deeply misses her secret lover Cecily and queen Eleanor. Born last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, women who flew across the countryside with their sword fighting and dagger work, Marie decides to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. She will bring herself, and her sisters, out of the darkness, into riches and power. MATRIX is a bold vision of female love, devotion and desire from one of the most adventurous writers at work today. __________________________________ 'A thrillingly vivid, adventurous story about women and power that will blow readers' minds. Left me gasping.' EMMA DONOGHUE 'Both epic and intimate, this sweeping novel explores questions of female ambition, creativity and passion with electrifying prose and sparkling wit. A propulsive, captivating read' BRIT BENNETT

the new novel from the bestselling author of FATES AND FURIES

Emiley Jones

Her faith had twisted very early in her childhood. It would slowly grow ever more bent into its geometry until it was its own angular, majestic thing. 

How slow the final flowering of good intentions can be, the poisonous full bloom taking place centuries beyond the scope of the original life. 

…she wondered if in fact this had been the closest she had been to God—not in fact invisible parent, not sun warming the earth and coaxing the seeds from the soil—but the nothing at the center of the self. Not the Word, because speaking the Word limits the greatness of the infinite; but the silence beyond the Word in which there lives infinity.

For when it comes to strength and goodness and brilliance and gentleness and grandeur of spirit so vast that it takes one’s breath away, beauty is nothing, beauty is a mote to a mountain, beauty is a mere straw alight beside a barn on fire. 

Then she rose and stared out the open window at the garden in its cloak of fog, feeling the sun go down inside her. 

It is because this prayer is enclosed within the chapel, she sees, not despite the enclosure, that it becomes potent enough to be heard. Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so.

Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer.

So small, this understanding. So remarkably tiny. Still, it might be enough to live for.

Piper Loyd

Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand. 

abi a

For this community is precious, there is a place here even for the maddest, for the discarded, for the difficult, in this enclosure there is love enough here even for the most unlovable of women. How short and lonely Gytha's life would have been, an isolate lost in the cruelty of the secular world. How much less beauty she would have brought into this flawed and difficult life if she had been forced to be without her sisters who loved her. It is good, Marie thinks, so very good, this quiet life of women and work. She is amazed she ever resisted it so angrily.

Women act counter to all the laws of submission when they remove themselves from availability. 

 The Romans, the Greeks, such giants compared with the Normans, or far worse, the paltry brittle-boned English. In a thousand more years humans will be as thoughtless as the cud-chewing kine of the fields. She longs to be among the greats of the generations before. Marie might have discovered others like herself in that era. She would not have felt so alone.

Johannes Ecker

graceanne clancy

Beautifully written — this book read like an ascending spiral. Time cycles and rises from daily prayers to weekly feasts and stillborn calves through the dramas of the seasons, stifling winters and promising springs. The years pass in collections of wisdom as well as the stamps of historical events, but time always remains a cycle where darkness and light, life and death, faith and doubt can never be left behind, always having to be returned to at another point. Always intricate, never boring. Yes, I am a Lauren Groff fangirl. 

Shoob 🧸

Lindy

File this one next to Laurus in modern takes on hagiography.

If you're looking for insight into Marie de France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, etc., you're not going to find it here. Matrix, first and foremost is an exercise in building a matriarchal utopia. The historical groundings are incidental; the book could have just as easily been set in a fantasy kingdom.

Francine Corry

She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.

It is 1158 and the world bears the weariness of late Lent. Soon it will be Easter, which arrives early this year. In the fields, the seeds uncurl in the dark cold soil, ready to punch into the freer air. She sees for the first time the abbey, pale and aloof on a rise in this damp valley, the clouds drawn up from the ocean and wrung against the hills in constant rainfall.

Thus begins Lauren Groff's Matrix and with that it captured my attention, because MEDIEVAL! in a nunnery! I love anything medieval and so I loved this book.

The characters, their interactions, and relationships through the years are interesting. The story at times stretches belief, but I was able to flow with that.

What held me back from gushing about it is, I really am not sure what it has to offer besides a medieval geek like me and a really strict historian may find objections to it.

Oh Marie my beloved, eternal abbess of my heart. She’s a mother, she’s a saint, she’s a crusader, she’s repressed. Life apparently moves on but I refuse to believe it. 

Jacque

Queer nuns working hard in an abbey hidden within a maze? Sold. Beautifully written story of ambition, community, utopia, and flawed but earnest characters. Both quiet and bold, contemplative and straightforward. I wanted a bit more perspective from other characters and smaller time jumps. While I struggled to connect with Marie, I enjoyed getting to know her nonetheless.

charisa

the vision was there, but the execution was...... mid (—maybe i just need to stop reading books about the catholic monastic life lmao). for example, marie was a formidable protagonist, but she suffered from the mary sue archetype, which left me feeling pretty unattached to (and frankly, bored of!) her as a character. i'm frustrated because there were several intriguing paths to take this novel down (like historical marie's prodigious poetry and translation practice?), but the plot mostly drew from hand-wavey mysticism eclipsing entire decades. i'm sure an abundance of research was poured into the conception of this story, but where did it GO?? sure, feminine utopia is cool, but so are nuanced characters and endings that stick the landing.

Started this on audio and realized it was not going to work for me in that format. Really enjoyed reading this one.

Sarah Erle

Jayme Bosio

I almost gave this book three stars, but it really is well-written. I just couldn’t connect with the character of Marie.

a book about fruity nuns… what’s not to like!

Niki Sotiropoulou-Nassika

Fraser Simons

This was quite great. I was actually quite (pleasantly) surprised how time is treated. It jumps and skips playfully forward at times, and does so exactly when needed. Our protagonist could have dwelled in her laborious solitude when relegated to the abbey for ages upon ages, and you could imagine a writer using the structure to make the reader really feel that time. When it jumps forward at a certain point I was put off balance at first, then felt extremely grateful for the framing of the story being as it is.

It feels crisp and pertinent. Not a single page or line is wasted. The prose are great. The character work, similarly fantastic. Even the pious have character flaws, and it turns out there was a lot more politicking in an Abbey than I ever imagined. But because I wasn’t aware of that at all, it felt new again and easily accommodated. Absolutely every aspect of this was interesting. 

While it does miss the X factor to bump it to a 5 star read for me, it did, obviously, exceed my expectations. I think there is a distance, which is necessary for the framing to work, but does make it more difficult to appreciate at a character level. Or perhaps I was too busy marvelling and the craft work in the structure.

I was really into this book, until… I wasn't. An interesting story for sure, well-written and very evocative, but I found myself struggling to sit with it for very long, which is probably why I lost interest after a while and couldn't wait to get over the finishing line.

Kwan Ann Tan

this one really knocked the wind out of me, how was it so good?? how???

Stephanie Cox

I think I'm coming to terms with my love of melodrama. Are passages of this book unlikely and even unbelievable? Probably. Did I love it anyway? Yes, absolutely. Give me more lavishly-written stories of big, ugly ambitious women please.

Elli

Matrix is unlike any other book I have read. The story is quiet but fully engrossing. The writing is beautiful and urgent. There's no distinguished dialogue, similar to how Sally Rooney writes, which some might not like, but I never found it confusing and it definitely added something to the tone/mood of the book. I love historical novels. Matrix does something special that I've never seen done before. It drops us into the time without any historical context beyond the year. What we learn about the time and place is only what comes up in the narrative. People are referred to by characters but we're not given any additional detail about who they are. Some might find this disorienting, and I did my fair share of curious Wikipedia-ing. We get all the information we need to follow and be in the story, but it's like the book thinks we are also in that time and place and therefore don't need to be given additional context. It also makes the story and characters feel closer and more real. They aren't people from a faraway time and place, they're right here with us. 

Marie, the main character, is wonderfully complex. She's loving and intense, prideful yet motivated by a deep care for her community and the women she loves. The community of women- nuns and secular- around her feel equally fully realized. They can be kind and harsh, they love and disagree with each other. Matrix feels like a story about a strange and imperfect attempt at a feminist utopia, something that would seem fascinating set in the modern-day but feels even more exciting and interesting set in the late 12th and early 13th century. It feels like the kind of story that will only get better on second or third reading. I loved it.  

Daryl Houston

Groff heads off in yet another direction in this book, showcasing again her ability to write in different modes. I had just the tiniest bit of trouble getting into this one, but once I did, I was hooked. It bears the tiniest of resemblances to Smiley's Greenlanders in how it offers minute details of a fascinating generally history-adjacent past, which isn't something I've seen a whole lot of in literary fiction. I like a book that keeps sending me to look up vocabulary or word origins or facts about the olden times, and this one paid off. Matrix was well worth a read.

I liked it a lot. Came in with no expectations and was surprised to find out what this actually was about. I have seen some reviews talking about how the historical fiction was loose at best when it came to Marie, but I had no knowledge of her before this so it read like a more sarcastic, realistic historical fiction to me. I really enjoyed the sometimes biting sarcastic and "heretical" aspects of the nun life. It hit me as an extremely watered down Terry Pratchett in some ways.

erin s

Matrix is a strange, quiet novel about late 12th century English nuns written in lyrical, meandering prose. Lauren Groff runs with the theory that the medieval poet Marie de France was Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury, and fleshes out the woman behind the influential work. (Though fans of The Lais of Marie de France may be disappointed that the lais only make a brief appearance; I know I was.) 

Sent into the dilapidated Shaftesbury Abbey by Eleanor of Aquitaine, the awkward, hulking teenage Marie de France feels imprisoned by the rigid structure and rampant poverty she encounters. She gradually grows accustomed to her fate, using her strategic ambition to rise in the abbey's ranks. Matrix lacks a more substantial plot; the story's core purpose is to watch Marie ripen in experience and the abbey grow in renown. 

3.5/5: Sometimes the pacing was slow and the time-jumps harsh, but once I accepted the book's structure, I did like it. The novel is also very queer, which is always welcome in medieval historical fiction (and relevant when one considers the homoeroticism embedded in Marie's lais). Overall, an interesting, immersive work of literary fiction with elements of mysticism and female resistance.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Jales

liz long

Katie elliott

Bianca Miller 

Charlie Beckerman

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION “A relentless exhibition of Groff’s freakish talent. In just over 250 pages, she gives us a character study to rival Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell .” – USA Today “An electric reimagining . . . feminist, sensual . . . unforgettable.” – O, The Oprah Magazine “Thrilling and heartbreaking.” –Time Magazine “[A] page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her.” –New York Times One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies. Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough? Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

graceanne clancy &
Matrix by Lauren Groff

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