Then comes Mathilde’s Vassar education funded by a domineering older man who teaches her about art and wine and subjects her to a string of elegantly degrading sex acts. This interlude features a scene where the uncle laps up a panna cotta, leaving “cream in the folds of his mouth,” while, in case you missed the point, Mathilde watches a cat kill a field mouse. Then comes a gothic, Jane Eyre adolescence in a big, empty house filled with locked doors under the care of a sinister uncle (“some kind of manager in a bad organization”). There’s Mathilde’s peasant childhood as a fishwife’s daughter in Brittany before she is exiled to the care of a prostitute grandmother in a Parisian garret-pure Zola, even to the point of seeming weirdly unmoored from the 20 th century. Unlike “Fates,” “Furies” is preposterously, deliriously fictional, a pell-mell plunge through an array of genre homages.
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