Review:
Matrix, by Lauren Groff
| Publisher: |
Riverhead Books |
| Copyright: |
2021 |
| ISBN: |
0-698-40513-7 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
260 |
Marie is a royal bastardess, a product of rape no less, and entirely out
of place in the court in Westminster, where she landed after being kicked
off her mother's farm. She had run the farm since her mother's untimely
death, but there was no way that her relatives would let her inherit. In
court, Marie is too tall, too ugly, and too strange, raised by women who
were said to carry the blood of the fairy M lusine. Eleanor of
Aquitaine's solution to her unwanted house guest is a Papal commission.
Marie is to become the prioress of an abbey.
I am occasionally unpleasantly reminded of why I don't read very much
literary fiction. It's immensely frustrating to read a book in which the
author cares about entirely different things than the reader, and where
the story beats all land wrong.
This is literary historical fiction set in the 12th century. Marie is
Marie de France,
author of the lais about courtly love that are famous primarily due to
their position as early sources for the legends of King Arthur. The lais
are written on-screen very early in this book, but they disappear without
any meaningful impact on the story.
Matrix is, instead, about
Shaftesbury Abbey and what it becomes during Marie's time as prioress and
then abbess, following the theory that Marie de France was
Mary of
Shaftesbury.
What I thought I was getting in this book, from numerous reviews and
recommendations, was a story of unexpected competence: how a wild,
unwanted child of seventeen lands at a dilapidated and starving abbey,
entirely against her will, and then over the next sixty years transforms
it into one of the richest abbeys in England. This does happen in this
book, but Groff doesn't seem to care about the details of that
transformation
at all.
Instead,
Matrix takes the mimetic fiction approach of detailed and
precise description of a few characters, with all of their flaws and
complexities, and with all of the narrative's attention turned to how they
are feeling and what they are seeing. It is also deeply, fully committed
to a Great Man (or in this case a Great Woman) view of history.
Marie is singular. The narrative follows her alone, she makes all the
significant decisions, and the development of the abbey is determined by
her apparently mystical visions. (In typical mimetic fashion, these are
presented as real to her, and the novel takes no position on whether that
reality is objective.) She builds spy networks, maneuvers through local
and church politics, and runs the abbey like her personal kingdom. The
tiny amount of this that is necessarily done by other people is attributed
to Marie's ability to judge character. Other people's motives are simply
steamrolled over and have no effect.
Maddeningly, essentially all of this happens off-screen, and Groff is
completely uninterested in the details of how any of it is accomplished.
Marie decides to do something, the narrative skips forward a year, and it
has happened. She decides to build something, and then it's built. She
decides to collect the rents she's due, the novel gestures vaguely at how
she's intimidating, and then everyone is happily paying up. She builds
spy networks; who cares how? She maneuvers through crises of local and
church politics that are vaguely alluded to, through techniques that are
apparently too uninteresting to bother the reader with.
Instead, the narrative focuses on two things: her deeply dysfunctional,
parasocial relationship with Eleanor, and her tyrannical relationship with
the other nuns. I suspect that Groff would strongly disagree with my
characterization of both of those narratives, and that's the other half of
my problem with this book.
Marie is obsessed with and in love with Eleanor, a completely impossible
love to even talk about, and therefore turns to courtly love from afar as
a model into which she can fit her feelings. While this is the setup for
a tragedy, it's a good idea for a story. But what undermined it for me is
that Marie's obsession seems to be largely physical (she constantly dwells
on Eleanor's beauty), and Eleanor is absolutely horrible to her in every
way: condescending, contemptuous, dismissive, and completely uninterested.
This does change a bit over the course of the book, but not enough to
justify the crush that Marie maintains for this awful person through her
entire life.
And Eleanor is the only person in the book who Marie treats like an equal.
Everyone else is a subordinate, a daughter, a charge, a servant, or a
worker. The nuns of the abbey prosper under her rule, so Marie has ample
reason to justify this to herself, but no one else's opinions or beliefs
matter to her in any significant way. The closest anyone can come to
friendship is to be reliably obedient, perhaps after some initial
objections that Marie overrules. Despite some quite good characterization
of the other nuns, none of the other characters get to
do anything.
There is no delight in teamwork, sense of healthy community, or
collaborative problem-solving. It's just all Marie, all the time,
imposing her vision on the world both living and non-living through sheer
force of will.
This just isn't entertaining, at least for me. The writing might be
beautiful, the descriptions detailed and effective, and the research
clearly extensive, but I read books primarily for characters, I read
characters primarily for their relationships, and these relationships are
deeply, horribly unhealthy. They are not, to be clear, unrealistic
(although I do think there's way too much chosen one in Marie and way too
many problems that disappear off-camera); there are certainly people in
the world with dysfunctional obsessive relationships, and there are
charismatic people who overwhelm everyone around them. This is just not
what I want to read about.
You might think, with all I've said above, that I'm spoiling a lot of the
book, but weirdly I don't think I am. Every pattern I mention above is
well-established early in the novel. About the only thing that I'm
spoiling is the hope that any of it is somehow going to change, a hope
that I clung to for rather too long.
This is a great setup for a book, and I wish it were written by a fantasy
author instead of a literary author. Perhaps I'm being too harsh on
literary fiction here, but I feel like fantasy authors are more likely to
write for readers who want to see the growth sequence. If someone is
going to change the world, I want to see
how they changed the
world. The mode of fantasy writing tends to think that what people do
(and how they do it) is as interesting or more interesting than what they
feel or what they perceive.
If this idea, with the exact same level of (minor) mysticism and historic
realism, without added magic, were written by, say, Guy Gavriel Kay or
Nicola Griffith, it would be a far different and, in my opinion, a much
better book. In fact,
Hild is
part of this book written by Nicola Griffith, and it
is a much
better book.
I have seen enough people rave about this book to know that this is a
personal reaction that is not going to be shared by everyone, or possibly
even most people. My theory is that this is due to the different reading
protocols between literary fiction readers and fantasy readers. I put
myself in the latter camp; if you prefer literary fiction, you may like
this much better (and also I'm not sure you'll find my book reviews
useful). I may be wrong, though; maybe there are fantasy readers who
would like this. I will say that the sense of place is very strong and
the writing has all the expected literary strengths of descriptiveness and
rhythm.
But, sadly, this was not at all my thing, and I'm irritated that I wasted
time on it.
Rating: 4 out of 10
Due to recent events around Twitter, I finally decided to give Mastodon a
try. Naturally, I find the idea of an open and decentralized platform much more
appealing than the privately owned walled gardens that became so hugely popular
in the past two decades. I m curious whether Mastodon can keep up the momentum
of the last two weeks and eventually establish itself as an alternative to
Twitter. On that note, I think it will be interesting to see how well
moderation of hate speech etc. works- and scales on Mastodon. I believe that
Twitter, Facebook and the likes, spend a significant amount of resources on
content moderation, so this may become a huge headache for Mastodon instance
admins when it gets more popular.
Choosing an Instance
For no particular reason, I went with the mastodon.social instance, so my
handle is @venthur@mastodon.social. After my first steps, I realized that
choosing the instance does have an impact, particularly if you follow the
local timeline. mastodon.social is currently one of the biggest instances
and therefore the local timeline is very busy and the topics naturally very
random. Maybe I ll try out a more specialized instance such as fosstodon at
some point one of the awesome features of Mastodon is that it actually
supports the migration of accounts between instances!
I wonder if there are plans to have an official Debian instance?
First Impressions
So far I m quite happy with Mastodon. There s good quality content and I
already found a few people that I was following on Twitter here on Mastodon
too. Interestingly, some of them actually are more active on Mastodon than on
Twitter. But truth to be told: many of them do cross-post on both mediums, and
most of the people I follow on Twitter are not on Mastodon yet.
I do like the concepts of the local- and federated timelines, although they are
quite busy.
I like that you can set the language of your (individual) toots which allows
users to filter their timelines for languages. In practice, this does not work
so well yet, and I still see a lot of different languages in my local and
federated timelines. I assume the problem is that people just forget to set the
language of their toots so the default language is used. This problem should be
easily solvable in the frontend by guessing the language once a few words
have been typed.
I also like the idea that you can follow hashtags, although for me the results
were mixed. I tried to follow 
The Debian Videoteam has been
De 2 a 4 de novembro de 2022 aconteceu a 19 edi o do
V rias pessoas visitaram o estande e aquelas mais iniciantes (principalmente
estudantes) que n o conheciam o Debian, perguntavam do que se tratava o nosso
grupo e a gente explicava v rios conceitos como o que Software Livre,
distribui o GNU/Linux e o Debian propriamente dito. Tamb m recebemos pessoas
da comunidade de Software Livre brasileira e de outros pa ses da Am rica Latina
que j utilizavam uma distribui o GNU/Linux e claro, muitas pessoas que j
utilizavam Debian. Tivemos algumas visitas especiais como do Jon maddog Hall,
do Desenvolvedor Debian Emeritus Ot vio Salvador, do Desenvolvedor Debian
Foto da esquerda pra direita: Leonardo, Paulo, Eriberto e Ot vio.
Foto da esquerda pra direita: Paulo, Fabian (Argentina) e Leonardo.
Al m de conversarmos bastante, distribu mos adesivos do Debian que foram
produzidos alguns meses atr s com o patroc nio do Debian para serem distribu dos
na DebConf22(e que haviam sobrado), e vendemos v rias
Tamb m tivemos 3 palestras inseridas na programa o oficial do Latinoware.
Foto Paulo na palestra.
Agradecemos a organiza o do Latinoware por receber mais uma vez a comunidade
Debian e gentilmente ceder os espa os para a nossa participa o, e parabenizamos
a todas as pessoas envolvidas na organiza o pelo sucesso desse importante
evento para a nossa comunidade. Esperamos estar presentes novamente em 2023.
Agracemos tamb m ao Jonathan Carter por aprovar o suporte financeiro do Debian
para a nossa participa o no Latinoware.
And all of this is because I can read, write, articulate. Perhaps many of them may not even have a voice or a platform.
Even to get this temporary progressive disability certificate there is more than 4 months of running from one place to the other, 4 months of culmination of work. This I can share and tell from my experience, who knows how much else others might have suffered for the same. In my case a review will happen after 5 years, in most other cases they have given only 1 year. Of course, this does justify people s jobs and perhaps partly it may be due to that. Such are times where I really miss that I am unable to hear otherwise could have fleshed out lot more other people s sufferings.
And just so people know/understand this is happening in the heart of the city whose population easily exceeds 6 million plus and is supposed to be a progressive city. I do appreciate and understand the difficulties that the doctors are placed under.
For quite some time, many people asked for a riscv64 porterbox. Now we've got
one called
There is significant effort involved to get your 
That way more admins need to learn how to run high availability services for dubious business opportunities to "later" monetize services. Services that nobody cares to pay for and thus opportunities that never materialize. But every company wants to find that out again. Because if Apple could do it, why shouldn't Canonical be able to do it? $$$!1!!
So, can't update Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04 right now.
At least there is 
Bonus points for the bad client side implementation:
I just did again the usual web search, and I have verified that Mastodon still does not support 
A few days ago, my home network got a refresh that resulted in the enablement of some next-generation
technologies for me and my family. Well, next-generation or current-generation, depending on your point of view.
Per the ISP standards in Spain (my country), what I ll describe next is literally the most and latest you can get.
The post title spoiled it already. I have now 10G internet uplink and native IPv6 since I changed my ISP to 
If you are curious, this was the IPv6 prefix whois information: