Cleopatra and Frankenstein
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Gesprochen von:
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Kit Griffiths
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Von:
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Coco Mellors
Über diesen Titel
‘A tender, devastating and funny exploration of love and friendship and the yearning for self-evisceration. Coco Mellors is an elegant and exciting new voice’ PANDORA SYKES
New York is slipping from Cleo’s grasp. Sure, she’s at a different party every other night, but she barely knows anyone. Her student visa is running out, and she doesn’t even have money for cigarettes. But then she meets Frank. Twenty years older, Frank's life is full of all the success and excess that Cleo's lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a green card. She offers him a life imbued with beauty and art—and, hopefully, a reason to cut back on his drinking. He is everything she needs right now.
Cleo and Frank run head-first into a romance that neither of them can quite keep up with. It reshapes their lives and the lives of those around them, whether that’s Cleo's best friend struggling to embrace his gender identity in the wake of her marriage, or Frank's financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates after being cut off. Ultimately, this chance meeting between two strangers outside of a New Year’s Eve party changes everything, for better or worse.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein is an astounding and painfully relatable debut novel about the spontaneous decisions that shape our entire lives and those imperfect relationships born of unexpectedly perfect evenings.
©2022 Coco Mellors (P)2022 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
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Kritikerstimmen
‘Positively inhalable. I was intensely consumed by the world of Cleopatra and Frankenstein for a few happy days’ The Evening Standard
‘Friends who couldn’t get enough of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends will fall head over heels for Coco Mellor’s debut novel’ ES Magazine
‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein, the luminous debut novel from Coco Mellors, is a book about many things: It's a great, swooning love story; a shattering depiction of how addiction and mental illness warp our lives; and a perceptive, witty portrait of globalized New York. But most of all, Mellors has written a devastatingly human book, at turns sharp and tender, that marks her as the rare writer whose sentences are as beautiful as they are wise. An unforgettable read’ Sam Lansky, author of The Gilded Razor and Broken People
‘A character driven epic thoroughly engrossing and entirely magnificent. It is thrilling to read a book that articles with nuance and compassion the way gender impacts every part of our lives. Sometimes you can just tell that a debut novel has been percolating and perfecting inside an author's mind until it is ready to leap into-and ultimately change-the world’ Adam Eli, author of The Queer Conscience
“Mellors’ remarkably assured and sensitive debut … strongly evoke[s] Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life… At its core, it’s a novel about how love and lovers are easily misinterpreted and how romantic troubles affect friends and family. A canny and engrossing rewiring of the big-city romance.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
‘Insistent, stylish and utterly captivating, the prose just sings.’ Heidi James, author of, The Sound Mirror
These are the wedding vows of Frank, a wealthy forty-something workaholic who owns an advertising agency, to Cleo, a twenty-something, stunning but emotionally unstable and penniless artist from England. But it doesn’t take long for those vows to unravel.
Set in New York in the 2000s, the novel follows their love story. They rush into marriage, partly out of love, partly to solve Cleo’s expiring visa problem, with Frank opening the door to his life of money, glittering New York events, and international travel. Before long, the two discover that marriage isn’t so easy when you barely know each other and, surprise, both of them are carrying a fair share of emotional baggage. Who could have guessed??
Cleo and Frank both come from difficult family backgrounds, carrying unresolved pain into their relationship. Their attempt at a happy ending is soon undone by betrayal and loneliness. Neither is willing to fully confront their past, and instead of healing together, they drift further apart. At its heart, this is a story about how loneliness and addiction keep people apart. Cleo and Frank fail to find the connection they are both looking for. Rather than finding solace in each other, they painfully learn that happiness requires first learning to accept themselves.
But this is where the book falls short. Instead of focusing in detail on the main characters’ growth, the story spends a lot of time on side characters. We get to know a full cast of cliché friends and family, each dealing with their own mess of addictions, toxic relationships, and heartbreak. Unfortunately, these side characters, while abundant, don’t add much to the central story and feel distracting. There’s Cleo’s drug-addicted, wealthy, toxic best friend Quentin; her best friend Audrey, Anders, a forty-something serial womanizer who treats his partners terribly; Zoe, Frank’s spoiled, financially dependent sister; and Eleanor, a copywriter at Frank’s agency, who is funny and less superficial than the other characters but also eyeing her boss Frank. Santiago, a restaurant owner and close friend of Frank, was for me one of the few genuinely likeable characters.
Coco Mellors leans on well-worn character clichés, so the cast comes across as predictable rather than fresh. Overall, most of the protagonists lack sympathy, are self-centered and immature, yet they aren’t compelling or complex enough to draw you in the way a Sally Rooney character might. Coco Mellors seems to aim for the wit and insight of Sally Rooney or Ottessa Moshfegh, but the novel doesn’t quite reach that level.
Despite its flaws, Mellors’ writing can be beautiful at times. Yet the novel as a whole left me unconvinced: a story full of broken people, told with ambition, but weighed down by clichés and not enough depth to make it resonate.
A Love Story Drowning in Loneliness and Clichés
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Beautiful and deeply moving
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Gut gesprochen, das war aber auch schon alles
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Nuanced and real
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Banal
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