I took me a long time to get through the first half of this book. I did it with the hope that there would be some redeeming quality within the pages that made it so that the book was worthy of the praise it had received (that got me to read it). While the author does have admirable talent, this book is engulfed and written with very obvious White privilege glasses and it is made worst by the fact that the author seems aware of this with her narrative and rather than address it in any meaningful way, indulges it, and tries to make the audience adore and applause it. 
 Perhaps going into this book, I misunderstood the description of a "story about a marriage of twenty years". And that is self reflective as I don't think of marriage as a terrible chore one must endure for "love". From the onset its clear that these two people, Lancelot and Mathilde, should not be together. The author bends over backwards to try to make us believe that they do belong together even as the characters themselves know they should not. The book itself covers Lancelot's side of the story in the first half and it's difficult to read. He is a a self indulgent, self obsessed, misogynist, whom everyone in the book seems to adore for some strange reason. The author keeps trying to get you to pity this poor man boy. He just can't help that he is privileged and doesn't understand when for the most logical reasons a character in the book doesn't like him. It's mostly sickening to read. 
 The second half is Mathilde's perspective of the marriage and its as if the author thought she had presented us with a beatific woman who it turns out is a sociopath. I don't know if the author was trying to be ironic by making it seems as if Mathilde's true personality was somehow not present in the first half. I will say that the second half of the book is easier to read because Mathilde is a terrible person, but she asks for no sympathy. Her macabre nature is almost entertaining in its horribleness. While the author has a way with words, at times she gets carried away and her sentences become flighty and unintelligible, but when they don't they do hit the right tone. 
 Did I enjoy the book? No. I am proud of myself of finishing it, but I do not recommend it.