Cleopatra and Frankenstein: brief thoughts [spoilers]

i want to love this book, but it’s also a broken book. it’s beautiful, but i find it too unnecessarily dramatic and tender. and i think that the textures of the characters are all stunningly, shimmeringly different perhaps for the sake of art, making the shades of personalities that melt together into ‘love’ different. it’s heart-breaking and sensitive and complex, when it does not have to be so.

cleopatra and frankenstein is about cleo and frank in new york, who marry impulsively, so convincingly in love that my heartstrings were tugging and i became firmly established in their love. cleo is 24 years old, and frank is much older, in his mid-forties, successful in his niche career.

they repeatedly try and fail to love each other.

frank is in love with someone else
like fully in love but not touching
notes in the office; while cleo is fucking someone else
which is so flawed, so fragile
their passion.
i think they still love each other
but it’s sad

“when the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.” the vulnerability is messy when they do not always speak the same emotional language. the different characters in the book move through love and damage, reflections of their childhood, which also felt a little bit forced. i think perhaps a charismatic book — reading it became parts of my day i looked forward to (and i think i would have butterflies for this book) but charisma is not a necessary nor sufficient part of genuinely liking someone.

i particularly enjoyed a lot of eleanor’s chapters where she provides lists and slices of life; and she is a really wonderful person which is rare. and these types of things don’t culminate in praises and often are completely invisible. as in her gesture to quietly love cleo without conditions because she loves frank, because cleo is a broken part of frank.

and yes, after having lost, there are things that “frank would do for eleanor what he would never do for [cleo]. eleanor got this version of frank, the sober, thoughtful man who took her suggestions, while cleo had endured the drunken predecessor like a fool.” it is sad. but there’s not much more to it than shrugging it off on new york city, as just another facet of life. i feel that cleo + frank misses the mark in capturing the depth, the genuine stretch, ache, and yearning of love but it offers a tangled knot of emotions that feel almost excessively complex for someone who has yet to experience love. but who am i to say? because every love is unique. in the moment, more enchanting than it is. looking back, pale and wistful.