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

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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…. 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”. yep, too much wit, swooning, tidbits, themes, dialogue, life quandaries, perplexing showy sentences, and cheesiness,…… Many of the people in Cleo's life are also somehow both unrealistic and uninteresting, like her drug addicted and toxic gay best friend (cliché, cliché) best friend Quentin and her brief love interest Anders (an older man who sleeps with younger women and doesn't view them as people, how original).

Marital bliss proves to be a fleeting thingy for these two. Sure, dining in chic restaurants, and taking in the NYC art scene is fine for a while, but before long, things to begin to unravel. Cleo suffers from depression, and feels neglected. Frank drinks way too much, and may actually be falling for one of his employees. (Funny and refreshing, Eleanor, a down-to-earth gal far removed from Frank's more upscale world. I fell for her, too. Hard.) This is the only part of this book I genuinely and actively disliked. Fortunately or unfortunately, it was nowhere close to enough to get me to shut up about it. I guess, considering that it's been a month since I read this and I haven't been able to stop reading or talking or thinking about it, five stars. 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 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.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”. Cleopatra and Frankenstein” is a compelling read for reasons beyond the core dynamic. The narration alternates between side characters’ perspectives, giving a chance for readers to construct their own account of the central romance. Some such narrators include Zoe, Frank’s sister; Santiago, a mutual friend whose party led to Frank and Cleo’s meet-cute; Anders, a former Scandinavian model and Frank’s best friend; Quentin, Cleo’s best friend; and Eleanor, one of Frank’s employees at the advertising firm. A more fundamental concern is how easy it would be to imagine this pre-recession Gotham universe as a Netflix series. The city’s surfaces are attended to in cinematic detail; emotional connective tissue often consists of characters telling their friends about their awful childhoods and narrating character traits direct to camera. (A recent Times of London profile, after breathlessly proclaiming, “Move over Sally Rooney,” noted that Mellors is “already in discussion with several streamers.”)

I read this because everyone was comparing it to Sally Rooney, which I guess is appealing to me. But it brings all the stuff that irks me about Rooney— hipster millennials having endless navel-gazing pseudo-intellectual conversations about themselves and the universe —and misses out the key component that, for me, makes Rooney as engaging an author as she is irritating. While I didn’t fully warm to Cleo and Frank, there were characters in the book that I did really like. I really enjoyed Eleanor’s sections written in first person narrative. Her interactions with her mother were both amusing and poignant at times. I also adored big-hearted Santiago. This book caught me by surprise. I wouldn't consider myself a fan of contemporary relationship novels, but this one - I loved.

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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.

And also, in addition to this, there was a character I loved so much that I cried through her chapters (of which there are only two), an insanely earnest and vulnerable moment the likes of which has never occurred to me ever. Despite there being potentially triggering moments, I didn’t feel depressed when reading Cleopatra and Frankenstein. It was more melancholic than outright depressing. It doesn’t descend into misery porn in the way books like A Little Life did. 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. 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.

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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. 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 I found Cleopatra and Frankenstein to be a great debut by Coco Mellors and I’m excited to read what she writes next. You may also be interested in:

There’s nothing wrong with writing books that are ripe for adaptation. Literary fiction is full of critically adored authors who hustled other jobs to pay the bills, and novels turned into series have given us some of our greatest television. But the type of enlightenment presented in certain novels, in which easy access to money makes chasing one’s art a matter only of finding oneself, ignores a world on fire with chaos and inequality. And it tends not to make for great TV either. 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. Cleopatra and Frankenstein is definitely a character driven book rather than one with a fast paced plot. Neither Cleo nor Frank are particularly likeable characters and I found them to be quite shallow and pretentious, especially at the beginning. 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.the whole younger woman/old man is a very tired hetero dynamic. maybe if the characters concerned are nuanced, interesting, or believable, maybe then i will bring myself to read yet another age-gap & vaguely toxic hetero romance but cleo and frank are not it. their first meeting is ridiculous, ludicrous even. of course she's beautiful and has a british accent. her hair is described as 'golden', her face, a 'performance', her clothes and makeup give her a vintage yet distinctive aura (i made the mistake of looking up coco mellors and could no longer divorce the author from the character...and i happen to find self-inserts cringe at the best of times). cleo has long fingers, smokes, she's artistic. i could keep on going...these ppl are boring and the author's attempts to make them into rooney-esque figures, well, tis' cringe. my life is too short and precious to me to waste my time on this earth reading bland stories. I sometimes loved, and sometimes hated all the characters in this one: the title pair who marry mere months after meeting, and their eccentric circle of pals. While the novel centers on a relationship between two lovers, it is ultimately more about loneliness than love. “Cleopatra and Frankenstein” is about two people dealing with familial issues and their own demons, who as a consequence latch on to one another to gain a sense of belonging. 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. 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.