What do you think?
Rate this book
Scaffolding
The story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart.
In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London. Hence, she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood…Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, unaware that they once inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London. Hence, she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood…Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, unaware that they once inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
388 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 13, 2024
449 people are currently reading
17k people want to read
About the author
Lauren Elkin
23books420followersLauren Elkin is a widely acclaimed Franco-American writer, critic, and translator. Her books include Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, which was a Radio 4 Book of the Week, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the art of the essay. Her essays on art, literature, and culture have appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's, Le Monde, Les Inrockuptibles, and Frieze, among others. She is also an award-winning translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir's previously unpublished novel The Inseparables, and forthcoming fiction and non-fiction by Constance Debré, Lola Lafon, and Colombe Schneck. After twenty years in Paris, she now lives in London.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 398 reviews
July 13, 2024
Translator and cultural critic Lauren Elkin’s debut novel’s partly inspired by her interest in the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and took over 16 years from conception to completion. It features two timelines, the primary - set in the years just before the Covid pandemic - centres on Anna a psychoanalytic therapist. Anna’s in her late 30s and struggling to get past a recent miscarriage. Her husband David’s working in London while Anna holes up in their apartment in rapidly-gentrifying Belleville, in Paris. Anna’s on medical leave. her only outside contact’s with her own therapist Esther. But when a younger woman Clémentine moves into Anna’s apartment complex they gradually form a bond.
Anna spends much of her time alone, obsessing over her identity and desires, using her knowledge of Lacan � particularly his lectures on female sexuality � as a kind of framework through which to analyse her thoughts and feelings. These partly relate to her ambivalence about her marriage, potential motherhood, but also her inability to move past a grad school relationship with a Jewish man Jonathan, who left her supposedly because she was too potent a reminder of the French people who betrayed his family during WW2. Her link to Jonathan is intensified by his parentage. His father’s the renowned psychoanalytic theorist Max Weisz. His work on Lacan proved formative for Anna, particularly his take on Lacan’s notions of the relationship between desire and lack, the impossibility of fully merging with the ‘other� and the loved one as an object of desire only when lost. This notion of loss, of the inevitable thwarting of desire even as it surfaces, haunts Anna.
Clémentine lives with an older man but identifies as queer, less self-conscious about her needs and wants, she’s also a feminist activist. She’s a member of Les Colleuses (the gluers) � Elkin’s group replicates the actions of the real-life group Les Colleuses who operate throughout France and beyond. Clémentine performs guerilla actions, flyposting enigmatic messages around Paris intended to critique and expose France’s appalling record when it comes to violence against women and femicide � France’s femicide levels are unusually high compared to other western European countries. Clémentine’s lack of knowledge of Lacan opens up a space for Elkin to introduce Lacan and highlight his anti-essentialist, reformulation of Freudian theory. If the emphasis on Lacan sounds daunting, it needn’t be: key theories are explained and don’t go much beyond the kind of basic Lacan frequently encountered on lit degrees, including the famous ‘mirror� stage often brought up in relation to Althusser and ideology.
The secondary timeline moves between Henry and Florence, a Jewish couple living in Anna’s apartment in the early 1970s. A resentful Henry charts his dissatisfaction with his marriage while Florence charts her involvement in a consciousness-raising, feminist group and is embroiled in an affair with her tutor Max Weisz � father of Anna’s Jonathan. Together with Max, Florence attends Jacques Lacan’s in-person lectures. She too is interested in France’s emerging feminist movement particularly the work of now-famous lawyer Gisele Halimi and the collective Choisir. Apart from cementing Elkin’s fascination with feminist historiography, these characters� interactions and approach to life seem to form a kind of Lacanian case study � I found their storylines frustratingly open-ended and overly contrived. But their experiences also parallel aspects of Anna’s, conjuring other elements of psychoanalytic theory particularly ideas around repetition and trauma. Embedded in the overall narrative are a range of references including the films of Rohmer and Sally Rooney’s fiction; and notably the feminist novella The Yellow Wallpaper and ways in which women might escape everyday patriarchal structures. This is further symbolised by Florence’s and later Anna’s apartment renovations, removing the old, kitchen wallpaper and replacing it with designs that suit the tastes of their respective eras.
It’s difficult to talk about developments in Elkin’s narrative without revealing crucial plot developments � although Elkin’s more interested in ‘situation� than storytelling, following in the footsteps of writers like Sheila Heti and Teju Cole. Elkin’s invested in exploring issues around women’s bodily autonomy and desire � although the attempt to derail an emphasis on heterosexuality through Clémentine’s queerness doesn’t fully succeed or convince. The mix too of feminist history, psychoanalytic theory and musings on Jewishness felt awkward, unbalanced and mannered at times, and the pacing too leisurely. Although not unusual for a first novel to be overpacked in this way. The resolution to Anna’s dilemmas surprised me in its conventionality, and the restoration of the patriarchal, nuclear family that appeared to be the very structure Anna was trying to evade. I felt that queerness introduced via Clémentine could too easily be read as a temporary disruption to the status quo - rather than an underlining of Lacan’s refusal of essentialist gender roles.
So, for me, a fascinating, ambitious novel but not an entirely successful one � I should also admit that I’m not a fan of psychoanalytic theory in general or the concept of interpreting the self through one set of theoretical frameworks. But I did find this absorbing. I particularly enjoyed Elkin’s detailed portraits of the city, especially the Belleville area with its rich history, and her nods to recent developments in relation to migrants particularly the influx of Chinese sex workers and their policing. I also liked the ways in which Elkin built on her earlier work on the woman flaneuse in an extended section detailing Anna’s journey through the city.
Thanks to Netgalley and to publisher Vintage/Chatto & Windus for an ARC
Rating: 3 to 3.5
Anna spends much of her time alone, obsessing over her identity and desires, using her knowledge of Lacan � particularly his lectures on female sexuality � as a kind of framework through which to analyse her thoughts and feelings. These partly relate to her ambivalence about her marriage, potential motherhood, but also her inability to move past a grad school relationship with a Jewish man Jonathan, who left her supposedly because she was too potent a reminder of the French people who betrayed his family during WW2. Her link to Jonathan is intensified by his parentage. His father’s the renowned psychoanalytic theorist Max Weisz. His work on Lacan proved formative for Anna, particularly his take on Lacan’s notions of the relationship between desire and lack, the impossibility of fully merging with the ‘other� and the loved one as an object of desire only when lost. This notion of loss, of the inevitable thwarting of desire even as it surfaces, haunts Anna.
Clémentine lives with an older man but identifies as queer, less self-conscious about her needs and wants, she’s also a feminist activist. She’s a member of Les Colleuses (the gluers) � Elkin’s group replicates the actions of the real-life group Les Colleuses who operate throughout France and beyond. Clémentine performs guerilla actions, flyposting enigmatic messages around Paris intended to critique and expose France’s appalling record when it comes to violence against women and femicide � France’s femicide levels are unusually high compared to other western European countries. Clémentine’s lack of knowledge of Lacan opens up a space for Elkin to introduce Lacan and highlight his anti-essentialist, reformulation of Freudian theory. If the emphasis on Lacan sounds daunting, it needn’t be: key theories are explained and don’t go much beyond the kind of basic Lacan frequently encountered on lit degrees, including the famous ‘mirror� stage often brought up in relation to Althusser and ideology.
The secondary timeline moves between Henry and Florence, a Jewish couple living in Anna’s apartment in the early 1970s. A resentful Henry charts his dissatisfaction with his marriage while Florence charts her involvement in a consciousness-raising, feminist group and is embroiled in an affair with her tutor Max Weisz � father of Anna’s Jonathan. Together with Max, Florence attends Jacques Lacan’s in-person lectures. She too is interested in France’s emerging feminist movement particularly the work of now-famous lawyer Gisele Halimi and the collective Choisir. Apart from cementing Elkin’s fascination with feminist historiography, these characters� interactions and approach to life seem to form a kind of Lacanian case study � I found their storylines frustratingly open-ended and overly contrived. But their experiences also parallel aspects of Anna’s, conjuring other elements of psychoanalytic theory particularly ideas around repetition and trauma. Embedded in the overall narrative are a range of references including the films of Rohmer and Sally Rooney’s fiction; and notably the feminist novella The Yellow Wallpaper and ways in which women might escape everyday patriarchal structures. This is further symbolised by Florence’s and later Anna’s apartment renovations, removing the old, kitchen wallpaper and replacing it with designs that suit the tastes of their respective eras.
It’s difficult to talk about developments in Elkin’s narrative without revealing crucial plot developments � although Elkin’s more interested in ‘situation� than storytelling, following in the footsteps of writers like Sheila Heti and Teju Cole. Elkin’s invested in exploring issues around women’s bodily autonomy and desire � although the attempt to derail an emphasis on heterosexuality through Clémentine’s queerness doesn’t fully succeed or convince. The mix too of feminist history, psychoanalytic theory and musings on Jewishness felt awkward, unbalanced and mannered at times, and the pacing too leisurely. Although not unusual for a first novel to be overpacked in this way. The resolution to Anna’s dilemmas surprised me in its conventionality, and the restoration of the patriarchal, nuclear family that appeared to be the very structure Anna was trying to evade. I felt that queerness introduced via Clémentine could too easily be read as a temporary disruption to the status quo - rather than an underlining of Lacan’s refusal of essentialist gender roles.
So, for me, a fascinating, ambitious novel but not an entirely successful one � I should also admit that I’m not a fan of psychoanalytic theory in general or the concept of interpreting the self through one set of theoretical frameworks. But I did find this absorbing. I particularly enjoyed Elkin’s detailed portraits of the city, especially the Belleville area with its rich history, and her nods to recent developments in relation to migrants particularly the influx of Chinese sex workers and their policing. I also liked the ways in which Elkin built on her earlier work on the woman flaneuse in an extended section detailing Anna’s journey through the city.
Thanks to Netgalley and to publisher Vintage/Chatto & Windus for an ARC
Rating: 3 to 3.5
September 18, 2024
the writing was just so 🤌🏻🤌🏻🤌🏻
July 12, 2024
Outside the building as well, the work is about to begin. Every ten years or so, Parisian buildings must be refaced, and it is our bad luck to have caught the ravalement so soon after moving in. It is going to be expensive and immensely disruptive. We voted against it at the owners� meeting but you can’t outrun it forever; into every Parisian life a little refacing must fall, expensive and inconvenient.
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin is the second of the author's works I've read after No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute.
Like that work, this novel is set in Paris, and is on which the author has been working on since 2007, indeed starting when, as she tells is in an interview at , "nearly twenty years ago, I was assigned Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973) in a postgraduate seminar."
Elkin's own succinct description of the novel puts it perfectly - "a kind of Lacanian-Rohmerian mash-up set in Paris" (from ) and (from ):
The novel is divided into three parts of roughly equal length. Part I is set in 2019, in the Belleville district of Paris, where Anna, in her late 30s, has recently moved into a flat with her husband David. Anna suffered a second-trimester miscarriage recently, and David is living temporarily in London (a lawyer, working on Brexit-related issues), which is causing her to reflect on what each of them wants from their relationship. She befriends a 24 yo art history graduate, who lives in the same area of flats, Clémentine. When Clémentine first visits Anna's flat:
She lights another cigarette, gets up, goes to my bookshelves. She scans them as if looking for something familiar. A finger across the spines of the collected works of Freud. You have a lot of stuff about psychoanalysis, she says. I’m a psychoanalyst, I say. Another one! she says. It seems like half the people in Paris are shrinks. The other half are in therapy, she jokes. I thought about studying psychology, was it very difficult? It seemed very difficult. Too much science. I guess your father helped you. She takes down a volume of Lacan, opens it, makes as if to close it, then looks at it more closely. Seminar Sixteen, D’un Autre à l’autre. From an Other to the other. Homophobe, she says, and puts it back on the shelf.
And Anna, who has been temporarily suspended from her psychoanalytical duties as she processes her own trauma, explains her Lacanian approach:
The kind of psychoanalysis I subscribe to is more Lacanian, it’s less about your coming up with a narrative that explains and cures your symptoms and more about what might be suggested during the therapeutic process, how the way we talk about our lives encodes the way we think about them, the things we want, our desires, how we might learn to live with them instead of being led by them. You’ll never be cured, so to speak. There’s no cure for being human.
In addition to the scaffolding that is being erected on the exterior of the building, for the 10-yearly ravalement (the muncipality-mandated refurbishment of the facade), Anna is also planning interior works:
There’s so much to be done in here, it’s a minefield of other people’s choices, I feel like I’m fighting with the past. It has to be entirely stripped and rebuilt–starting with the wallpaper in rotting shades of orange and brown. Here and there it peels away from the wall. Then the brown tiles over the stove with the owls on them. Owls, for god’s sake! Hit them with a hammer, crack them into pieces, scrape off the mortar. Replace with metro tiles, bevelled white, pristine for now, yet to meet the splashes of oil and sauce. Install butcher’s-block countertop, never to run with the blood of animals; we are vegetarians and our children will be too.
Clémentine herself is part of a clandestine group of women, the colleuses (literal translation: gluers), who overnight put up posters protesting against violence against women and femicide in particular:
Saturday morning and something has been pushed under my door. I take a closer look: it is a newspaper article, taken from .
Aux femmes assassinées, la patrie indifférente: les «colleuses» d’affiches veulent rendre visibles les victimes de féminicides.
A picture of a blonde woman, who could be Clémentine, but isn’t, is it? painting block letters on to A4 sheets of paper.
Above her, pasted on a wall: CÉLINE DÉFENESTRÉE PAR SON MARI 19e FÉMINICIDE
Across the bottom of the article, in red ink, Clémentine has written: COME OUT WITH US
(this is a real-life group from the time, and Elkin has used the actual words from signs they posted)
Clémentine encourages Anna to take part, as well as to explore her sexuality (and Anna finds herself oddly drawn to an older man who she first meets when she forgets her purse and he pays for her goods at the bakery). A crucial scene in the evolution in Anna's thinking takes place with her and Clementine dancing to a cover of by the Raincoats, from their first record of which in the sleevenotes when it was reissued:
And towards the end of Part I when Anna visits Clémentine's house and meets her husband, she discovers a coincidental but strong connection
Part II takes us back to 1972 but the same flat, which is then occupied by Henry (a paralegal) and his wife Florence. Florence is also a psychoanalyst, or rather training to be one, attending Lacan's seminars at the Faculté de Droit. She shares with Anna a love of Eric Rohmer movies, indeed each woman's life could be from a Rohmer movie, although clearly not a taste in interior design, as she proves to be responsible for the brown wallpaper and the owl decor.
Florence is keen to start a family, Henry rather less so, so she takes matters into her own hands, stopping taking the pill and embarking on an affair with her lecturer at the university.
Politically, the backdrop, is a rising feminist movement (feeling the 1968 protest rather excluded them - He doesn’t see that his revolution is incomplete as long as he and men like him are the ones writing it), and in particular the , which was to lead to a change in reproductive rights in France.
And Henry feels pushed towards having an affair of his own, as well as questioning if he wishes to be responsible for a child he is not confident is even his.
Part III takes us back to 2019 (and early 2020, as rumours emerge of a virus in China), with Anna embarking on a sexual affair with both Clémentine and Jonathan, a more 21st century echo of Florence's more traditional approach in 1972. Echoes of the exclusion of women from the 1968 movement also come in, with Clémentine criticising the TERFs and their fucked-up idea of what feminism is ... Feminism has always been about extending freedom to the greatest number of people, but there are some women who seem to have forgotten that.
While on a walking tour of Paris (echoes of Elkin's ):
I recognise the Tour Saint-Jacques a little ahead. When I was in grad school, in my early years alone in Paris, I was preoccupied by it, by the fact that it had been in a state of restoration for many years, I was in a hurry for them to finish up, I wanted to see it, I studied it obsessively, and for so many years, as it stood there under the scaffolding, I idealised it, waiting for the day this medieval tower would be revealed to us, if only they would hurry up, and I imagined what it would look like, and scrutinised the photograph Brassaï took that Breton uses in Nadja, à Paris la tour Saint-Jacques chancelante, the unsteady Tour St Jacques, half under scaffold. As it was peeled back the tower began to reveal itself, a little bit at a time, and what turned out to have been underneath was something of a let-down, so clean and flat and nothing like what the medieval builders had in mind, newer than new even, and I realised I loved it better with the scaffolding, when we didn’t know what was taking shape beneath.
Various works of art and literature infuse the text. Notably Clémentine models for an artist whose works are essentially those of the real-life artist Shannon Lucy Cartier - the novel’s distinctive cover is the artist’s Girl with Swans.
The novel ends, perhaps more conventionally than might have been expected, with a short coda that tells us what happened to Anna and David and Clémentine and Jonathan, and also with a hint that the man in the bakery might provide another connection to 1972 :
That morning, the morning of the scaffolding finally being gone, I ran into my friend at the threshold of the bakery. He opened the door for me. The scaffolding is down he said, but it wil go up again.
A thought-provoking novel with more depth than its ostensibly plus ça change story of Parisian having affairs might imply, indeed one perhaps needing more appreciation for Lacanian psychoanalysis than I have.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin is the second of the author's works I've read after No. 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute.
Like that work, this novel is set in Paris, and is on which the author has been working on since 2007, indeed starting when, as she tells is in an interview at , "nearly twenty years ago, I was assigned Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973) in a postgraduate seminar."
Elkin's own succinct description of the novel puts it perfectly - "a kind of Lacanian-Rohmerian mash-up set in Paris" (from ) and (from ):
It’s set in the same apartment in Paris in 1972 and 2019, about the two different couples who live in the apartment at this 50-year distance from one another, and there are all kinds of interrelations between them. They’re both dealing with the idea of pregnancy, with wanting to have a baby, with difficulty getting pregnant, with fidelity, and trying to reckon with how to live with someone else in a long-term way and how to respect their alterity without trying to erase it or possess them. One is a psychoanalyst, and the other is training to be a psychoanalyst, the two main characters. So there’s a lot about Lacanian psychoanalysis and desire and lack and the compulsion to repeat.
The novel is divided into three parts of roughly equal length. Part I is set in 2019, in the Belleville district of Paris, where Anna, in her late 30s, has recently moved into a flat with her husband David. Anna suffered a second-trimester miscarriage recently, and David is living temporarily in London (a lawyer, working on Brexit-related issues), which is causing her to reflect on what each of them wants from their relationship. She befriends a 24 yo art history graduate, who lives in the same area of flats, Clémentine. When Clémentine first visits Anna's flat:
She lights another cigarette, gets up, goes to my bookshelves. She scans them as if looking for something familiar. A finger across the spines of the collected works of Freud. You have a lot of stuff about psychoanalysis, she says. I’m a psychoanalyst, I say. Another one! she says. It seems like half the people in Paris are shrinks. The other half are in therapy, she jokes. I thought about studying psychology, was it very difficult? It seemed very difficult. Too much science. I guess your father helped you. She takes down a volume of Lacan, opens it, makes as if to close it, then looks at it more closely. Seminar Sixteen, D’un Autre à l’autre. From an Other to the other. Homophobe, she says, and puts it back on the shelf.
And Anna, who has been temporarily suspended from her psychoanalytical duties as she processes her own trauma, explains her Lacanian approach:
The kind of psychoanalysis I subscribe to is more Lacanian, it’s less about your coming up with a narrative that explains and cures your symptoms and more about what might be suggested during the therapeutic process, how the way we talk about our lives encodes the way we think about them, the things we want, our desires, how we might learn to live with them instead of being led by them. You’ll never be cured, so to speak. There’s no cure for being human.
In addition to the scaffolding that is being erected on the exterior of the building, for the 10-yearly ravalement (the muncipality-mandated refurbishment of the facade), Anna is also planning interior works:
There’s so much to be done in here, it’s a minefield of other people’s choices, I feel like I’m fighting with the past. It has to be entirely stripped and rebuilt–starting with the wallpaper in rotting shades of orange and brown. Here and there it peels away from the wall. Then the brown tiles over the stove with the owls on them. Owls, for god’s sake! Hit them with a hammer, crack them into pieces, scrape off the mortar. Replace with metro tiles, bevelled white, pristine for now, yet to meet the splashes of oil and sauce. Install butcher’s-block countertop, never to run with the blood of animals; we are vegetarians and our children will be too.
Clémentine herself is part of a clandestine group of women, the colleuses (literal translation: gluers), who overnight put up posters protesting against violence against women and femicide in particular:
Saturday morning and something has been pushed under my door. I take a closer look: it is a newspaper article, taken from .
Aux femmes assassinées, la patrie indifférente: les «colleuses» d’affiches veulent rendre visibles les victimes de féminicides.
A picture of a blonde woman, who could be Clémentine, but isn’t, is it? painting block letters on to A4 sheets of paper.
Above her, pasted on a wall: CÉLINE DÉFENESTRÉE PAR SON MARI 19e FÉMINICIDE
Across the bottom of the article, in red ink, Clémentine has written: COME OUT WITH US
(this is a real-life group from the time, and Elkin has used the actual words from signs they posted)
Clémentine encourages Anna to take part, as well as to explore her sexuality (and Anna finds herself oddly drawn to an older man who she first meets when she forgets her purse and he pays for her goods at the bakery). A crucial scene in the evolution in Anna's thinking takes place with her and Clementine dancing to a cover of by the Raincoats, from their first record of which in the sleevenotes when it was reissued:
I don’t really know anything about the Raincoats, except that they recorded some music that has affected me so much that whenever I hear it, I’m reminded of a particular time in my life when I was (shall we say) extremely unhappy, lonely, and bored. If it weren’t for the luxury of putting on that scratchy copy of the Raincoats� first record, I would have had very few moments of peace. I suppose I could have researched a bit of history about the band, but I feel it’s more important to delineate the way I feel and how they sound. When I listen to the Raincoats, I feel as if I’m a stowaway in an attic, violating and in the dark. Rather than listening to them I feel like I’m listening in on them. We’re together in the same old house, and I have to be completely still or they will hear me spying from above and, if I get caught � everything will be ruined because it’s their thing.
And towards the end of Part I when Anna visits Clémentine's house and meets her husband, she discovers a coincidental but strong connection
Part II takes us back to 1972 but the same flat, which is then occupied by Henry (a paralegal) and his wife Florence. Florence is also a psychoanalyst, or rather training to be one, attending Lacan's seminars at the Faculté de Droit. She shares with Anna a love of Eric Rohmer movies, indeed each woman's life could be from a Rohmer movie, although clearly not a taste in interior design, as she proves to be responsible for the brown wallpaper and the owl decor.
Florence is keen to start a family, Henry rather less so, so she takes matters into her own hands, stopping taking the pill and embarking on an affair with her lecturer at the university.
Politically, the backdrop, is a rising feminist movement (feeling the 1968 protest rather excluded them - He doesn’t see that his revolution is incomplete as long as he and men like him are the ones writing it), and in particular the , which was to lead to a change in reproductive rights in France.
And Henry feels pushed towards having an affair of his own, as well as questioning if he wishes to be responsible for a child he is not confident is even his.
Part III takes us back to 2019 (and early 2020, as rumours emerge of a virus in China), with Anna embarking on a sexual affair with both Clémentine and Jonathan, a more 21st century echo of Florence's more traditional approach in 1972. Echoes of the exclusion of women from the 1968 movement also come in, with Clémentine criticising the TERFs and their fucked-up idea of what feminism is ... Feminism has always been about extending freedom to the greatest number of people, but there are some women who seem to have forgotten that.
While on a walking tour of Paris (echoes of Elkin's ):
I recognise the Tour Saint-Jacques a little ahead. When I was in grad school, in my early years alone in Paris, I was preoccupied by it, by the fact that it had been in a state of restoration for many years, I was in a hurry for them to finish up, I wanted to see it, I studied it obsessively, and for so many years, as it stood there under the scaffolding, I idealised it, waiting for the day this medieval tower would be revealed to us, if only they would hurry up, and I imagined what it would look like, and scrutinised the photograph Brassaï took that Breton uses in Nadja, à Paris la tour Saint-Jacques chancelante, the unsteady Tour St Jacques, half under scaffold. As it was peeled back the tower began to reveal itself, a little bit at a time, and what turned out to have been underneath was something of a let-down, so clean and flat and nothing like what the medieval builders had in mind, newer than new even, and I realised I loved it better with the scaffolding, when we didn’t know what was taking shape beneath.
Various works of art and literature infuse the text. Notably Clémentine models for an artist whose works are essentially those of the real-life artist Shannon Lucy Cartier - the novel’s distinctive cover is the artist’s Girl with Swans.
The novel ends, perhaps more conventionally than might have been expected, with a short coda that tells us what happened to Anna and David and Clémentine and Jonathan, and also with a hint that the man in the bakery might provide another connection to 1972 :
That morning, the morning of the scaffolding finally being gone, I ran into my friend at the threshold of the bakery. He opened the door for me. The scaffolding is down he said, but it wil go up again.
A thought-provoking novel with more depth than its ostensibly plus ça change story of Parisian having affairs might imply, indeed one perhaps needing more appreciation for Lacanian psychoanalysis than I have.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
Want to read
January 26, 2025this book just automatically won best cover of 2024 because i said so
July 28, 2024
As someone who judges books by their cover, when I spotted "Scaffolding" on display at the wonderful Daunt Books in London, I started salivating the way a child does in a candy store.
*A necessary digression on candy stores*
My view of what a candy store should be was formed when I read when I was five or six years old. My single indelible memory of the book was of how beautiful the candy was. And I don't mean the candy, but rather, the boxes the candy came in. The candy boxes were bright, multi-colored, as aesthetically pleasing as any Van Gogh or Caravaggio. The material that formed those glorious rectangles would no doubt feel perfect under my fingers, their edges smooth, the weight and sound the candy made as it was tossed from side to side as I turned the box this way and that a mouthwatering philharmonic.
I could understand what drove Brother and Sister so mad. It wasn't the candy —the candy didn't matter —it was the irresistibly sensual sight of those brilliant boxes and the unmistakable promise of what they might contain. For as long as I didn't open them those boxes could contain anything, which is why I would never open them.
It is then a sad realization to step inside a candy store and find, instead of a gallery of vibrant boxes on display, a bland, monochromatic collection of soulless goods on offer. All of the calories but none of the taste, none of the beauty.
Today I find that I eat an inordinate number of sardines. This isn't because I particularly like sardines, but because the packaging most closely resembles this dream aesthetic I fell in love with as a child.
*End of digression*
This is a beautiful book cover. It's the sort of cover that, were I to discover that such a cover existed after having bought another edition with a different cover, I'd probably have something close to an existential crisis ... and an insatiable yearning to abandon my edition so as to have a reason to go out and buy the other one.
If I'd been more sensible, I'd have put this book on the shelf, cover out, and never opened it. For as long as it wasn't read, "Scaffolding" could have been about anything ... about everything. It could have taken its place as the perfect novel, alas one I would never read for fear of seeing cracks across its veneer.
Because I lack the willpower to fill a teacup, never mind an ocean, I couldn't resist the urge to open it and read.
So what does it say?
"Scaffolding" is an ostensibly "French" book that feels unfortunately too much like an American one. It's about art, desire, language, psychoanalysis, sex, love, memory, the Holocaust, France's complicity in the Holocaust, Jewishness, queerness, infidelity, the past, the future, feminism, activism, sexism, Catholicism, gentrification, architecture, Paris, walking in Paris, and about a dozen other things. In short, too much.
Because of the sheer scale of its ambition, "Scaffolding" has trouble getting off the ground. Yes, it is intriguing, absorbing, and there are moments that felt like it was close to catching fire, to saying something really poignant, true, and previously unspoken, but ultimately it feels like an assemblage of fascinating things that never really get fleshed out in any genuinely satisfying way, just so much of what we've seen before.
It's ironic that, given its title, what all these delicately structured sentences amount to is a shell of something we want to believe contains meaning and the mysteries of existence. It's all very pretty, but it feels unfinished, just a facade.
*A necessary digression on candy stores*
My view of what a candy store should be was formed when I read when I was five or six years old. My single indelible memory of the book was of how beautiful the candy was. And I don't mean the candy, but rather, the boxes the candy came in. The candy boxes were bright, multi-colored, as aesthetically pleasing as any Van Gogh or Caravaggio. The material that formed those glorious rectangles would no doubt feel perfect under my fingers, their edges smooth, the weight and sound the candy made as it was tossed from side to side as I turned the box this way and that a mouthwatering philharmonic.
I could understand what drove Brother and Sister so mad. It wasn't the candy —the candy didn't matter —it was the irresistibly sensual sight of those brilliant boxes and the unmistakable promise of what they might contain. For as long as I didn't open them those boxes could contain anything, which is why I would never open them.
It is then a sad realization to step inside a candy store and find, instead of a gallery of vibrant boxes on display, a bland, monochromatic collection of soulless goods on offer. All of the calories but none of the taste, none of the beauty.
Today I find that I eat an inordinate number of sardines. This isn't because I particularly like sardines, but because the packaging most closely resembles this dream aesthetic I fell in love with as a child.
*End of digression*
This is a beautiful book cover. It's the sort of cover that, were I to discover that such a cover existed after having bought another edition with a different cover, I'd probably have something close to an existential crisis ... and an insatiable yearning to abandon my edition so as to have a reason to go out and buy the other one.
If I'd been more sensible, I'd have put this book on the shelf, cover out, and never opened it. For as long as it wasn't read, "Scaffolding" could have been about anything ... about everything. It could have taken its place as the perfect novel, alas one I would never read for fear of seeing cracks across its veneer.
Because I lack the willpower to fill a teacup, never mind an ocean, I couldn't resist the urge to open it and read.
So what does it say?
"Scaffolding" is an ostensibly "French" book that feels unfortunately too much like an American one. It's about art, desire, language, psychoanalysis, sex, love, memory, the Holocaust, France's complicity in the Holocaust, Jewishness, queerness, infidelity, the past, the future, feminism, activism, sexism, Catholicism, gentrification, architecture, Paris, walking in Paris, and about a dozen other things. In short, too much.
Because of the sheer scale of its ambition, "Scaffolding" has trouble getting off the ground. Yes, it is intriguing, absorbing, and there are moments that felt like it was close to catching fire, to saying something really poignant, true, and previously unspoken, but ultimately it feels like an assemblage of fascinating things that never really get fleshed out in any genuinely satisfying way, just so much of what we've seen before.
It's ironic that, given its title, what all these delicately structured sentences amount to is a shell of something we want to believe contains meaning and the mysteries of existence. It's all very pretty, but it feels unfinished, just a facade.
August 31, 2024
Hmm this is a really tough one to review. I kept veering between loving and loathing this book.
The first section on Anna and David started out great, the descriptions of Paris and their apartment really drew me in. I could literally see the setting in my head. Anna's experience is told with honesty and candour and her self-analysis as a psychotherapist is interesting. Her friendship with Clementine is also a fascinating aspect of her journey. I absolutely loved this section.
The second section regarding Florence and Henry had me quickly swinging to the loathing! The two voice perspective just didn't flow very well. Both characters were arseholes and I found myself disliking them. The constant psychology and psychoanalysis referencing became tedious very swiftly! This book should have been called Scaffolding, sponsored by Lacan!! The feminist storyline felt contrived. And it felt like an apologist's tale of infidelity but you know, everything's fine cos Lacan said that's how it is so you know!
Had I just read the first section and left it there with the Jonathan cliffhanger, I would have given this book a 5 star rating. Following the second section with Florence and Henry, then the return to the "conclusion" of Anna and David's relationship, I have to drop it to a 2.5 star rating as there is too much superfluous psychological discussion, and the story feels contrived and in the end boringly predictable. A shame really as this had so much promise at the start.
The first section on Anna and David started out great, the descriptions of Paris and their apartment really drew me in. I could literally see the setting in my head. Anna's experience is told with honesty and candour and her self-analysis as a psychotherapist is interesting. Her friendship with Clementine is also a fascinating aspect of her journey. I absolutely loved this section.
The second section regarding Florence and Henry had me quickly swinging to the loathing! The two voice perspective just didn't flow very well. Both characters were arseholes and I found myself disliking them. The constant psychology and psychoanalysis referencing became tedious very swiftly! This book should have been called Scaffolding, sponsored by Lacan!! The feminist storyline felt contrived. And it felt like an apologist's tale of infidelity but you know, everything's fine cos Lacan said that's how it is so you know!
Had I just read the first section and left it there with the Jonathan cliffhanger, I would have given this book a 5 star rating. Following the second section with Florence and Henry, then the return to the "conclusion" of Anna and David's relationship, I have to drop it to a 2.5 star rating as there is too much superfluous psychological discussion, and the story feels contrived and in the end boringly predictable. A shame really as this had so much promise at the start.
June 13, 2024
Scaffolding
By Lauren Elkin
There's an alert going off on my phone, the final demand to post my review about this book which publishes today, but I still haven't processed it enough to do it justice. I honesty don't think I ever will, so I'll just throw out a few thoughts.
This story grabbed me from the first page with it's uniquely French style and it's strong sense of place. Light on plot, this is a character driven story centred in an apartment in Belleville, over two timelines with a tangential relationship.
The driving force is the central character's quest to parse the attributes and meaning of Desire.
Themes include miscarriage, infidelity, bisexuality, open partnership, opposing opinions on the desire for parenthood. Through the various characters we explore insights about psychoanalysis, music, art and culture, morality and ethics, and the work of female activists who protest against Femicide by plastering the city with signs.
There are things about the structure of the book that haven't sunk in for me yet. I expected stronger resolution between the two timelines, but by the time it ended, I almost didn't mind.
The novel is emmense in scope but almost everything is trapped inside a space that is being ripped apart from the inside, pelted and flayed from the outside, and tightly wrapped and shrouded to prevent escape and camouflage the trauma. How female.
This is not going to be the right book for every reader, but in the right person's hands, this will resonate strongly.
Publication date: 13th June 2024
Thanks to #NetGalley and #randomhouseuk for the ARC
By Lauren Elkin
There's an alert going off on my phone, the final demand to post my review about this book which publishes today, but I still haven't processed it enough to do it justice. I honesty don't think I ever will, so I'll just throw out a few thoughts.
This story grabbed me from the first page with it's uniquely French style and it's strong sense of place. Light on plot, this is a character driven story centred in an apartment in Belleville, over two timelines with a tangential relationship.
The driving force is the central character's quest to parse the attributes and meaning of Desire.
Themes include miscarriage, infidelity, bisexuality, open partnership, opposing opinions on the desire for parenthood. Through the various characters we explore insights about psychoanalysis, music, art and culture, morality and ethics, and the work of female activists who protest against Femicide by plastering the city with signs.
There are things about the structure of the book that haven't sunk in for me yet. I expected stronger resolution between the two timelines, but by the time it ended, I almost didn't mind.
The novel is emmense in scope but almost everything is trapped inside a space that is being ripped apart from the inside, pelted and flayed from the outside, and tightly wrapped and shrouded to prevent escape and camouflage the trauma. How female.
This is not going to be the right book for every reader, but in the right person's hands, this will resonate strongly.
Publication date: 13th June 2024
Thanks to #NetGalley and #randomhouseuk for the ARC
December 31, 2024
four stars for now but the more this one settles, the more i love it. ending 2024 on a high note
September 30, 2024
Yanno the books that upon finishing, your heart feels 14lbs heavier? Like, it literally hurts; and this is without the negative connotations typically surrounding a heavy heart?
Scaffolding did that for me.
...rest of my review to come! 😋
In regards to the audiobook specifically, the narrator did a wonderful job of conveying emotion without it feeling performative or taking away from the novel itself. Unique to this audiobook - when one character is thinking during dialogue, you still hear talking in the background while the listeners thoughts are narrated.
{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Lauren Elkin and publisher for the ALC in exchange for my honest review!}
Scaffolding did that for me.
...rest of my review to come! 😋
In regards to the audiobook specifically, the narrator did a wonderful job of conveying emotion without it feeling performative or taking away from the novel itself. Unique to this audiobook - when one character is thinking during dialogue, you still hear talking in the background while the listeners thoughts are narrated.
{Thank you bunches to NetGalley, Lauren Elkin and publisher for the ALC in exchange for my honest review!}
August 29, 2024
scaffolding tackles a little bit of everything: desire, marriage, motherhood, feminist politics, psychoanalysis, home remodeling, queerness, religion, past/present/future� we see how all of those topics interact with the lives and relationships of two different women, anna and florence, who live in the parisian same apartment 40 years apart.
there are some loose plot points that mirror each other in both women’s lives, including affairs, pregnancy, and careers in psychoanalysis, but it is not a super plot heavy novel - it’s a quiet look at the ideas and inner turmoil of the characters. ultimately, i really loved the experience of reading this book. the way that elkin paints the picture of both characters and their home somehow felt comforting to read. her language remains accessible even as it presents interesting ideas about who and what we are allowed to desire through the lens of lacanian psychoanalysis. some of the context went over my head but was still thought provoking to read about.
i’m really glad to have enjoyed lauren elkin’s fiction as much as i enjoyed her nonfiction exploration of feminist art, art monsters. there is very strong connective tissue between both books, without it feeling like she’s repeating herself. i’m excited to see how those themes are expanded upon in her other work! i’m not sure how much of scaffolding will fully stick with me but it was an enjoyable novel to get swept up in.
“I always thought of scaffolding as something supportive that goes around or next to something else, but there is always at least one point of damage, they can't just pile it up free-standing.�
thank you to fsg and netgalley for the digital copy!
there are some loose plot points that mirror each other in both women’s lives, including affairs, pregnancy, and careers in psychoanalysis, but it is not a super plot heavy novel - it’s a quiet look at the ideas and inner turmoil of the characters. ultimately, i really loved the experience of reading this book. the way that elkin paints the picture of both characters and their home somehow felt comforting to read. her language remains accessible even as it presents interesting ideas about who and what we are allowed to desire through the lens of lacanian psychoanalysis. some of the context went over my head but was still thought provoking to read about.
i’m really glad to have enjoyed lauren elkin’s fiction as much as i enjoyed her nonfiction exploration of feminist art, art monsters. there is very strong connective tissue between both books, without it feeling like she’s repeating herself. i’m excited to see how those themes are expanded upon in her other work! i’m not sure how much of scaffolding will fully stick with me but it was an enjoyable novel to get swept up in.
“I always thought of scaffolding as something supportive that goes around or next to something else, but there is always at least one point of damage, they can't just pile it up free-standing.�
thank you to fsg and netgalley for the digital copy!
August 12, 2024
Hate to leave a miffed review, but I was reaaaally excited for this book and proportionally disappointed. Everything that would have made it feel embodied, visceral, alive � the secret language of relationships, Lacanian dynamics not only intellectualized but experienced, even the appearance of the characters and details like what they smoke or what their hair smells like (there’s a scene where Lacan is lecturing but no description AT ALL of his stage presence, etc) � was left off the page, or thinned out by cliche language and flat reportage that, unlike Sally Rooney’s writing for example, lacked forward momentum. A main catalyst is the narrator’s grief over her miscarriage, and by the end the book seems to have forgotten it. Felt like it was trying to pull an Acts of Service, but without its seductive specificity of observation. Will have to try this author’s nonfiction instead.
**also possible Elkin did not intend to write a realist novel, that the characters were supposed to be conceptual stand-ins rather than 3D people, but I would have needed the novel to make a bolder stylistic claim & teach me how to read it that way
**also possible Elkin did not intend to write a realist novel, that the characters were supposed to be conceptual stand-ins rather than 3D people, but I would have needed the novel to make a bolder stylistic claim & teach me how to read it that way
November 15, 2024
This grew on me. I was sceptical at first, fearing it would become a self-absorbed account of a young person struggling with relationships, sexuality and the demands of modern life.
But it became much more interesting when questions were explored about how well we can know others, how does the previous life of a partner or friend impact them, how desires work, etc. I thought this was done cleverly by integrating (psychoanalytic) theory in the story that revolves around two couples who lived in a Parisian apartment decades apart.
Recommended!
But it became much more interesting when questions were explored about how well we can know others, how does the previous life of a partner or friend impact them, how desires work, etc. I thought this was done cleverly by integrating (psychoanalytic) theory in the story that revolves around two couples who lived in a Parisian apartment decades apart.
Recommended!
October 15, 2024
Intellectual pedantry, supported by the pseudo-scientific theories of Lacan and Freud, to account for a supposed patriarchal emancipation. However, the writing is beautiful...
June 8, 2024
I have no idea what I think about this. It is very very French. Whilst it beautifully examines the nature of individual relationships and how much one individual can truly know another, it occasionally felt like it wandered into the pseudo intellectual, or perhaps a parody thereof. I couldn’t not read it but I’m not sure I could say I enjoyed it.
January 15, 2025
First two books out the gate being five-stars?? What the hell is in this 2025 air?
In college I took a course on the geopolitical implications of urban spaces. The eroticism of city-living. The choreography of sharing public space. The endless potential in each stranger you pass, share a bus seat with, hold a door open for, give a dollar to, or buy your groceries from. So much of the nuances behind this book’s characters and their interactions felt very reminiscent of the discussions had in that class. There’s a very specific space between comfort and loneliness, between past and present, that Elkin depicts masterfully. It’s filled with those beautiful moments while reading where an illegible aspect of the human experience is remarkably articulated. More than once I found myself thinking that I was devouring a new all-time favorite book.
—ĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔ�
“Even when we touch someone we desire, our desire is filtered through everything we’ve ever thought and heard and encountered; everything the culture’s ever taught us about desire. Language isn’t innocent. The body isn’t innocent.�
“Fidelity is a container for sex, to keep it from being too threatening�
“I think we have to accept the paradox� We have to somehow accept having our stories broken before we can make sense of them. To stay alive in our subjectivity instead of deadening ourselves into something we’ve overheard or intuited. We have to absorb what we’re learning without passing it through language.�
“But who is our original true love, I think? And how do we return to them? And would returning to them really cure us of our desire for other loves? And what about that singularity that the person we love seems to possess? That themness, that no one elseness. Surely we can’t transfer it from person to person. When you have what you want, there’s nothing left to want, but how do you have what you have?�
“There’s something strange about a moment. We can’t ever live inside of it, we live just after it. We live the moment better in trying to relive it than in living it the first time around. Inhabiting the same space as the moment, we hear its echo sounding louder.�
“There’s no such thing as love at first sight. What there is is a reaction. Someone puts their hand on you from behind when you don’t expect it and you jump, startled out of porportion to the touch. When I first met Johnathan, it was like feathers brushed the wrong way, a disruption in the order of things. And that’s what it felt like again, seeing him again.�
“Everything in the culture tries to convince us that if we are truly in love with the right person, we will be as one with them. It isn’t true; we are always each other’s others.�
“Love and desire sometimes fall differently. Sometimes we love the people with whom we share a house, and sometimes with whom we share a soul. Maybe all the trouble starts when we try to make them coincide.�
“Most people when they talk are just children asking for what they want, using their children’s wiles to try to get it, appealing to their interlocuter’s love or sense of pity. It takes love to try to see that child again. It takes a certain wilfulness to consider their needs as seriously as you would those of a child. I’ve been living out a mad love, ceasing the other, and incorporating him into myself. But the only livable love has to maintain a certain distance. It seems more radical to accept your lover’s alterity and with that there essential freedom and autonomy.�
In college I took a course on the geopolitical implications of urban spaces. The eroticism of city-living. The choreography of sharing public space. The endless potential in each stranger you pass, share a bus seat with, hold a door open for, give a dollar to, or buy your groceries from. So much of the nuances behind this book’s characters and their interactions felt very reminiscent of the discussions had in that class. There’s a very specific space between comfort and loneliness, between past and present, that Elkin depicts masterfully. It’s filled with those beautiful moments while reading where an illegible aspect of the human experience is remarkably articulated. More than once I found myself thinking that I was devouring a new all-time favorite book.
—ĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔĔ�
“Even when we touch someone we desire, our desire is filtered through everything we’ve ever thought and heard and encountered; everything the culture’s ever taught us about desire. Language isn’t innocent. The body isn’t innocent.�
“Fidelity is a container for sex, to keep it from being too threatening�
“I think we have to accept the paradox� We have to somehow accept having our stories broken before we can make sense of them. To stay alive in our subjectivity instead of deadening ourselves into something we’ve overheard or intuited. We have to absorb what we’re learning without passing it through language.�
“But who is our original true love, I think? And how do we return to them? And would returning to them really cure us of our desire for other loves? And what about that singularity that the person we love seems to possess? That themness, that no one elseness. Surely we can’t transfer it from person to person. When you have what you want, there’s nothing left to want, but how do you have what you have?�
“There’s something strange about a moment. We can’t ever live inside of it, we live just after it. We live the moment better in trying to relive it than in living it the first time around. Inhabiting the same space as the moment, we hear its echo sounding louder.�
“There’s no such thing as love at first sight. What there is is a reaction. Someone puts their hand on you from behind when you don’t expect it and you jump, startled out of porportion to the touch. When I first met Johnathan, it was like feathers brushed the wrong way, a disruption in the order of things. And that’s what it felt like again, seeing him again.�
“Everything in the culture tries to convince us that if we are truly in love with the right person, we will be as one with them. It isn’t true; we are always each other’s others.�
“Love and desire sometimes fall differently. Sometimes we love the people with whom we share a house, and sometimes with whom we share a soul. Maybe all the trouble starts when we try to make them coincide.�
“Most people when they talk are just children asking for what they want, using their children’s wiles to try to get it, appealing to their interlocuter’s love or sense of pity. It takes love to try to see that child again. It takes a certain wilfulness to consider their needs as seriously as you would those of a child. I’ve been living out a mad love, ceasing the other, and incorporating him into myself. But the only livable love has to maintain a certain distance. It seems more radical to accept your lover’s alterity and with that there essential freedom and autonomy.�
June 24, 2024
Honestly, this is generally the kind of book I avoid. A “literary masterpiece� some might call it. But for me, just not my vibe.
The Blurb implied a creative time slip style, ghost story, merging of lives. But it was two stories, one sandwiched inside the other. Both discussing the same theme.
It’s an examination of relationships, focusing mostly on infidelity. With a melancholic thread running right through, and characters with so little personality revealed, I find it hard to be invested in them.
Also, no speech marks, so it reading this feels like reading someone’s subconscious, trail of thoughts. Which was probably the intention, but for me, it made me feel even more distant from the characters in the book.
This is my opinion. I don’t doubt people will rave about this. And I certainly don’t think the author did a bad job. It’s all subjective right? But if you read to escape and to experience, then this may not be the book for you.
The Blurb implied a creative time slip style, ghost story, merging of lives. But it was two stories, one sandwiched inside the other. Both discussing the same theme.
It’s an examination of relationships, focusing mostly on infidelity. With a melancholic thread running right through, and characters with so little personality revealed, I find it hard to be invested in them.
Also, no speech marks, so it reading this feels like reading someone’s subconscious, trail of thoughts. Which was probably the intention, but for me, it made me feel even more distant from the characters in the book.
This is my opinion. I don’t doubt people will rave about this. And I certainly don’t think the author did a bad job. It’s all subjective right? But if you read to escape and to experience, then this may not be the book for you.
Read
February 2, 2025baš mi je odgovarala. baš. 🧡
July 13, 2024
enjoyed this book about 2 couples living in the same apartment nearly 50 years apart and looks at relationships lost and feelings, felt like you got close to some of the characters and can understand why alot have praised this novel.
Shelved as 'did-not-finish'
November 23, 2024DNF at 50% - I enjoy the writing in this, but the story is taking a departure from what I expected. I thought this would be more focused on the shared apartment between the two timelines and didn’t expect the heavy emphasis on psychoanalysis theory. It feels nearly academic at times.
The novel is fine, I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading it, but I have zero background context to Jacques Lacan or some of the real aspects of Parisian history it covers. It’s missing too much context and I don’t care enough about the characters to research on my own time. Normally I like books where I can broaden my horizons and learn but I’m just not feeling invested enough in this case.
The novel is fine, I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading it, but I have zero background context to Jacques Lacan or some of the real aspects of Parisian history it covers. It’s missing too much context and I don’t care enough about the characters to research on my own time. Normally I like books where I can broaden my horizons and learn but I’m just not feeling invested enough in this case.
October 1, 2024
Colour me unimpressed
June 11, 2024
So I enjoyed part 1. I didn’t like the change of scene/relationship in part 2, and by the time we went back to part 3, I realised this book was way way over my head. I just didn’t ’get it� and the writing made me feel stupid. And I’m really not.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this advance copy in exchange for this honest review
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this advance copy in exchange for this honest review
October 26, 2024
A psychoanalyst is working through a miscarriage and playing at non-monogamy in her marriage. All about the societal structures we live by. Felt like the middle part where we jump back in time was unnecessary.
December 31, 2024
It's like 4 stars for the technical writing ability and for quality, and 2 stars for my enjoyment. I just can't with the French and their cheating and intellectualism.
March 31, 2025
Vrlo fino pogođen omjer lijepog pisanja i pokušaja da se određena poimanja svijeta i ljudskih odnosa shvate iz različitih perspektiva. Posebno bih izdvojila osjećaj za detalj, smisao za prostor i hrabrost da se bude i surov prema likovima, ali da se ima i razumijevanja za njihova stanovišta i postupke.
P. S. Ja stvarno ovako zamišljam sve koji se bave psihologijom - sa potrebom da svemu u svojim životima i životima ljudi oko njih nađu svrhu i pojašnjenje, ma koliko opsesivnog bavljenja i najsitnijim detaljima to podrazumijevalo. Ne znam samo da li me to fascinira ili plaši.
P. S. Ja stvarno ovako zamišljam sve koji se bave psihologijom - sa potrebom da svemu u svojim životima i životima ljudi oko njih nađu svrhu i pojašnjenje, ma koliko opsesivnog bavljenja i najsitnijim detaljima to podrazumijevalo. Ne znam samo da li me to fascinira ili plaši.
Read
November 30, 20242.5 months ain’t bad given my track record
thanks fsg and netgalley! i’ll try to be nice even though i feel negatively!
scaffolding follows main character anna and she reels from a recent miscarriage. her husband david is working in london while she remains in france, giving her time to befriend the younger and more politically radical clementine. the narrative later flashes back to the 1970s where couple florence and henry and living in the same apartment, dealing with the same issues of marriage and parenthood (or lack thereof).
i really enjoyed the first part of this novel. i liked anna's exploration of grief over her miscarriage, especially as she was forced to navigate it alone with david being away. i thought lauren elkin excellently explored her inner turmoil and posed many interesting questions.
however, the time jump made no sense to me. it totally reset the momentum of the story, and i simply did not care to keep reading (hence the 2.5 months of it all). i was annoyed by both henry and florence, and i was struggling to find meaning in their woes. i just kept asking...why can't we communicate??
moving back to anna's timeline, i was disappointed to learn that the interest i had at the start of the novel was completely gone. i found it a slog to get through the rest of the book, mostly because the characters lost appeal. i wish i could resonate with them more or find something to hold on to, but their self-destructive behavior ultimately became more irritating than anything else.
unfortunately, this book is really just about cheating, which, given the psychoanalysis i was promised, i found unfortunately underwhelming. i actually don't care why people cheat on their partners, sue me!
i was going through my highlights to try to find what i was connecting with while i read, and unfortunately i didn't have much to show for it. but i did find this one line that made me lol: "all I do with my days, it seems, is drink water, piss, and refill the fucking brita" so true girlie
for some people this may work, but i am simply not one of those people! gorg cover though
thanks fsg and netgalley! i’ll try to be nice even though i feel negatively!
scaffolding follows main character anna and she reels from a recent miscarriage. her husband david is working in london while she remains in france, giving her time to befriend the younger and more politically radical clementine. the narrative later flashes back to the 1970s where couple florence and henry and living in the same apartment, dealing with the same issues of marriage and parenthood (or lack thereof).
i really enjoyed the first part of this novel. i liked anna's exploration of grief over her miscarriage, especially as she was forced to navigate it alone with david being away. i thought lauren elkin excellently explored her inner turmoil and posed many interesting questions.
however, the time jump made no sense to me. it totally reset the momentum of the story, and i simply did not care to keep reading (hence the 2.5 months of it all). i was annoyed by both henry and florence, and i was struggling to find meaning in their woes. i just kept asking...why can't we communicate??
moving back to anna's timeline, i was disappointed to learn that the interest i had at the start of the novel was completely gone. i found it a slog to get through the rest of the book, mostly because the characters lost appeal. i wish i could resonate with them more or find something to hold on to, but their self-destructive behavior ultimately became more irritating than anything else.
unfortunately, this book is really just about cheating, which, given the psychoanalysis i was promised, i found unfortunately underwhelming. i actually don't care why people cheat on their partners, sue me!
i was going through my highlights to try to find what i was connecting with while i read, and unfortunately i didn't have much to show for it. but i did find this one line that made me lol: "all I do with my days, it seems, is drink water, piss, and refill the fucking brita" so true girlie
for some people this may work, but i am simply not one of those people! gorg cover though
August 31, 2024
Gave this one a good go. Got up to page 204 before I gave up. Interminable philosophising/psychoanalysing from someone who should just stick to research instead of trying to utilise these themes in a novel. The coincidences/revelations are so obvious and pointless. The book is exactly what you’d expect from an American who lived in France for a while, thinks that makes them unquestionably cool and profound, and that writing a story about bourgeois female neighbours, sitting around smoking in their Parisian apartments, talking about their first orgasms in practically the first conversation they have, isn’t 100% clichéd nonsense.
July 11, 2024
i will forever crave reading books like these.
‘a familiar feeling of something precious having been abandoned, trapped in the weave of the past�.
i just wish we got to go back to Florence and Henry, for a moment, at the end. it would’ve brought some symmetry. anna’s story is perfect and i love the ending and we don’t need florence and henry, but the author decided to include florence and henry for a moment and so now it feels bare without them.
‘a familiar feeling of something precious having been abandoned, trapped in the weave of the past�.
i just wish we got to go back to Florence and Henry, for a moment, at the end. it would’ve brought some symmetry. anna’s story is perfect and i love the ending and we don’t need florence and henry, but the author decided to include florence and henry for a moment and so now it feels bare without them.
December 11, 2024
one of the most fascinating novels i've ever read!
April 1, 2025
2.5 ⭐️�
The start of this book was pretty good and there were moments where the writing was so beautiful, but overall there was way too much psychoanalysis and theory and academic chat for me personally that I came so close to not finishing a few times as I just felt so dumb and had no idea what was being spoken about�
I also don’t really understand the purpose of the dual timeline�
I can see this would be a beautiful book if you’re into psychoanalysis, it just wasn’t for me!
The start of this book was pretty good and there were moments where the writing was so beautiful, but overall there was way too much psychoanalysis and theory and academic chat for me personally that I came so close to not finishing a few times as I just felt so dumb and had no idea what was being spoken about�
I also don’t really understand the purpose of the dual timeline�
I can see this would be a beautiful book if you’re into psychoanalysis, it just wasn’t for me!
July 3, 2024
This is a story of two women living in an apartment block in Paris, but decades apart. Their lives are linked by psychoanalysis, desire, fluid sexuality and differing feelings towards their partners and motherhood. I enjoyed the first third of the book but the sudden departure into the 1970s felt disjointed despite the similarities between the stories. I also felt pretty bogged down by the psychoanalysis detail - at times it read like a textbook and I did skim over a fair chunk of all the Lacan and Freud... For me it detracted, not added to the story and reduced my enjoyment of the book.
Thank you#Netgalley for the ARC
Thank you#Netgalley for the ARC
Displaying 1 - 30 of 398 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.