Cleopatra and Frankenstein: ‘Move over Sally Rooney: this is the hottest new book’ - Sunday Times

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update: dropping this to 4.5 because there is one thing that bugs me too much to leave this at a perfect 5. but i still love you eleanor!!! I squint into the icy sunlight. The path sparkles with a thin layer of frost. Everything is hard and bright, like I’m looking from inside a diamond”.

New York City at the start of the 21st-century – pre-financial crisis, pre-Trump, pre-Covid – is captured with near-devotional lushness in this nostalgic debut. It’s an urban playground that struggling painter Cleo, 24 years old and stylishly British, is on the brink of being exiled from, her student visa due to expire in mere months, when she meets Frank, a fortysomething ad agency owner with a nice line in elevator chitchat. They wed on a whim to calamitous effect on both sides. In terms of depth, this novel is more Jay McInerney than Hanya Yanagihara, but Mellors proves herself a poetic chronicler of inky gloom as well as twinkly surfaces. Unattached: Essays on Singlehood You have to be okay with unlikeable characters to read this book. You have to be willing to go on a journey that doesn't necessarily leave our protagonists shining and shimmering in the end. And I would've appreciated a bit more time to have the characters really dig into their issues, to grapple with the fact that the world is much bigger than just the two of them; though in some ways I think that's part of the point Mellors is trying to make. If Manhattan were a drug, which one would it be? This is one of the profound questions raised by reading Coco Mellors’ tantalizing but blithe debut novel, “ Cleopatra and Frankenstein,” whose Manhattanites run on stimulants and drown in alcohol. Hers is a city of flash and fluttering movement, as if deliberately designed to distract its inhabitants (or those Mellors chooses to depict) from seeing that, beneath the surface, there’s no there there. Since I can’t take the book - or even my thoughts about it serious ….I’ll have a little playful fun, ….trying not to be too harsh in my poo-poo of it.

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The novel then jumps ahead a few months to Frank and Cleo getting married following a whirlwind romance. The novel continues jumping through several months as the couple’s enigmatic connection unravels, affecting the lives of those around them. Cleo — beautiful, blond and British — meets Frank — older, handsome and an award-winning advertising executive — in an elevator 90 minutes before the first day of 2007. They’ve both left a New Year’s Eve party. Their first conversation turns into an exchange of witty remarks that leads to dinner and flirtation. Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Librarians Group is the official group for requesting additions or updates to the catalog, including: I felt as a whole the mental health aspects, including addiction and depression were handled sensitively. If I was to be slightly critical, I felt Cleo’s depression was slightly glamourised. Beautiful, suicidal Cleo who no man could resist. 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, author of How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right

while this seems like the classic ‘young twenty-something woman starts dating the older richer man’ story (which we all know and love), mellors’ unique narrative style offers a fresh new take. cleo and frank’s relationship is the strand which runs through everyone else’s lives, their tumultuous up and downs bleeding into the lives of their circle of friends and family. in essence it is a love story, albeit told through the eyes of others. while the book jumps around between a cast of characters running full-speed around new york, they all feel fleshed out and their perspectives are equally as absorbing as the one before, with witty humour laced throughout. along with being a tender and painfully realistic character study, the book provides explorations of love, marriage, desire, friendship, art, addiction, and mental illness. but most of all, it seems that the book is about the journey to discovering who you really are and what you really want - a journey which seems to never really be complete. There were very many characters in this book that I didn't like, but also I wasn't supposed to, but also even when I'm not supposed to I usually do anyway, often more than when I AM supposed to. They meet cute, and begin spouting off impossibly clever lines: all those sharp, witty retorts that you and I only think of twenty minutes after the fact. Mellors’ debut is an emotional, provoking and deeply relatable statement about a romantic partnership. “Cleopatra and Frankenstein” spins you around the hole of love, trauma and betrayal its characters experience, imparting lessons about how letting go might be a greater gesture of love than latching on to coupled loneliness.

Reviews

I love her so much I don't know what to do with myself. Her life, her jokes, her work, her allusions. Her mom and dad, her brother, her friends. Her house and her train rides and - I am genuinely getting worked up and I have to stop. More than anything, Mellors shows how you can still love and care for someone, yet not be good for them. Frank and Cleo realize that their age gap, their experiences with broken families and their lifestyles ultimately make them less than compatible. Sometimes, loving another person means separating yourself from them to give them room to grow. It's the latest in a string of literary fiction pieces that I've read that feel aspirational to that title. It's giving aggressive general fiction. the book perfectly captures the messiness and complexities of relationships in the modern world, especially what happens when the honeymoon phase starts to wear off and reality sets in. mellors’ exploration of relationships also feels strikingly contemporary - in a fragmented world full of such choice and chaos, it’s becoming increasingly harder to figure out what you want, what you desire, to decide what it will take to bring ‘true happiness’, a notoriously obscure concept which everyone is still desperately trying to grasp anyway. For me, this is a book of characters. The writing is lovely, but in relation to the people it creates and summons. There isn't much of a plot to speak of, beyond the shifting dynamics and relationships built between them, namely Cleo and Frank, a semi-green-card marriage built mostly on passion and age difference, and those around them: Frank's younger half-sister, Zoë; Frank's friends, Anders, and another more boring and half-hearted inclusion whose name I don't remember; Cleo's best friend Quentin; Zoë's best friend Audrey; and finally, ELEANOR.

There was the subterranean Oyster Bar ….served with dialogue about childhood trauma, masturbation and a four-in-a-half year old who had her first orgasm. yep, too much wit, swooning, tidbits, themes, dialogue, life quandaries, perplexing showy sentences, and cheesiness,……

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This book caught me by surprise. I wouldn't consider myself a fan of contemporary relationship novels, but this one - I loved. the characters are cool, but I did hate eleanor. and I kiiiinda hated cleo but just because I know people like her are insufferable in real life. in books I love sad art bitches like cleo so whatever. everybody seems to love eleanor because she is down to earth and funny but to me she was so mediocre. MY OWN LIFE IS MEDIOCRE I DON’T NEED TO READ ABOUT MEDIOCRE PEOPLE. the fact that she gets it all (won’t say what) made me furious. like GO HOME TO YOUR MOM AND LEAVE MY CLEO ALONE. I stayed attached to my tracic awfully flawed heroine, I guess that’s my greek side in me, whatever¿ (GIVE ME MORE TRAGIC AWFUL HEROINES OKAY?) it���s just good people bore me, terrible people are more interesting in literature. and I love toxic love in books, movies whatever GIVE IT TO ME ALL.

The above excerpt is a ‘hint’….that what we’ll continue to read is….a PERFORMANCE of the greatest sentences, the greatest off-the-wall absurdities, the greatest exaggerated character descriptions…. The last thing I'll say is that lately I have been holding a pen in my hand while I read, but I'm rarely prompted to use it.

Everyone Frank knew was the greatest ‘something’ in the world. His half-sister Zoe was the greatest actor, his best friend Anders was the greatest art director and amateur soccer player, and Cleo, well, Cleo was the most talented painter, the deepest thinker, the most beautiful woman on earth. Why? Because Frank wouldn’t have married anyone else”. When I first started reading Cleopatra and Frankenstein I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. I really struggled to get into it at the beginning. I think this was mostly due to not warming to the main characters. It all just felt a bit superficial and pretentious but the more I read, I think that was actually the point.