Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

Rape... murder... masochism... cannibalism... mutilation... sexual debauchery... incest... body horror... regurgitated sausages. Welcome to the medieval world as presented by Ottessa Moshfegh! Those who aren't instantly put off by such sordid elements will probably find that an over-indulgence in such bombastic grotesquery comes to feel humorous and absurd. Maybe it enhances rare moments of tenderness such as when a servant girl longingly dreams of her lost love or when a grieving beaten boy who never knew his mother suckles the empty breast of a kindly old woman. Or perhaps this fictional reimagining of past horrors comes to feel like a distorted mirror of the present where the majority toil under increasingly strained conditions while society's elite live in excess. Or could it just be there for shock value?

Whatever your interpretation of Moshfegh's writing it certainly inspires plenty of discourse. Her debut “Eileen” earned her credentials with multiple book award nominations and her musings of a sleepy heroine in “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” became a big bestseller. “Lapvona” has already received a range of praise and damnation in literary circles. There is a mesmerising quality to this author's storytelling which drew me into the world of its naïve adolescent protagonist Marek. At first this son of a shepherd feels sympathetic with his unfortunate ugliness, twisted spine and mop of untended red hair. However, his pitiful desire for his father's punishment soon gives way to lowkey aggression and cruelty as he passively listens to the pleas of a dying boy. Over the course of a year he finds himself in a surprisingly close position to the town's lord and governor Villiam.

Marek is central to this story of a feudal land set in an unspecified place and in some archaic time period where peasants toil the land and live with the hope that their suffering will earn them points in the afterlife. But it's just as much a tale of this town's range of other inhabitants and the narrative frequently shifts to follow their points of view. We gradually discover hidden familial relations and a sinister scheme which drives the general population to starvation while Villiam indulges in his endless gluttony and demand for constant puerile and perverse entertainment. There's also the sometimes-blind elderly Ina who is called a witch, converses with birds and served as a wet nurse to most of the village. Later on she even helps “prepare” the men to repopulate the area. And a mysterious tongueless woman is rumoured to be carrying the new son of God and this disrupts the unequal order of this viciously brutal community. The way in which the reader is privy to information which certain characters are ignorant about creates an excellent feeling of suspense within this horrifyingly vivid story.

Randomly, I recently watched John Waters' film 'Desperate Living' for the first time. There are strange parallels to “Lapvona” in that both splinter away from reality to indulge in a carnival of debauchery centred around an imaginary feudal community. In the movie a mentally ill suburban housewife and her murderous nurse seek refuge in a shantytown ruled by an evil queen similar to Villiam in her insatiable appetite and pleasure in the suffering/humiliation of her subjects. Moshfegh and Waters make surprising but natural bedfellows in their invocations of immoral worlds filled with perversity and wild drama. Perhaps their rebellion against established orders show how continuous imbalances in society drive people to follow their most depraved instincts. Or that neither logic or faith hold up against the wilfulness of human experience which is always centred around the self. Towards the end of this novel, Moshfegh wryly comments “Right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by.” Whether you applaud her, cancel her or allow yourself to be entertained by her writing, this is a writer who is unafraid of sticking a pitchfork in conformity.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh has a particular talent for writing about vile characters in an engaging way. Her novel “Eileen” portrayed an excruciatingly self-conscious protagonist recalling a dark mystery from many year ago. But where the protagonist of that novel was repulsed and embarrassed by her own body, the unnamed narrator of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” takes easy pride in her beauty and size two figure. But she doesn’t see this as an advantage as she slyly observes “Being pretty only kept me trapped in a world that valued looks above all else.” She’s an art history graduate that comes from a privileged background who sets herself the goal of sleeping as much as possible for a year. Her reasons for this goal are elusive at first and appear to be nothing more than the whim of a jaded spoiled young woman, but gradually it takes on more poignancy as she describes her difficult relationship with her mother and the disappointingly shallow experience of working in an art gallery. This takes place in New York City over the years 2000-2001 and she seems to be asking during this ominous period in which George Bush Jr takes office whether it’s more sensible to sleep through life than live it. Reading this novel is perversely pleasurable with its weary view of the world and the narrator’s overwhelming devotion to her hero Whoopi Goldberg who embodies for her the idea that “Nothing was sacred.”

The narrator has an all-consuming scepticism about human emotions and can’t engage in meaningful exchanges. She reflects “I felt nothing. I could think of feelings, emotions, but I couldn’t bring them up in me.” Her only friend is an old college buddy named Reva who is perpetually insecure, suffers from an eating disorder and aspires to obtain the narrator’s privilege and waist line. But the narrator barely tolerates her and breezily ignores Reva when she confesses that her mother is suffering from cancer or that she has an unwanted pregnancy. Equally any emotion Reva displays towards the narrator is awkwardly accepted like when Reva hugs her at one point and the narrator observes how “I felt like a praying mantis in her arms.” The narrator regularly sees a quack psychiatrist named Dr Tuttle (when she doesn’t sleep through their scheduled appointment) but only in order to obtain worryingly strong doses of sleep medication to aide her in sinking into an unconscious oblivion. Hilariously her doctor can’t even recall that the narrator’s parents are both dead even after she’s told this multiple times and makes extensive notes.

“Wherever she went, everything around her became a parody of itself, gauche and ridiculous. That was a comfort to see. Thank God for Whoopi. Nothing was sacred. Whoopi was proof.”

It’s rational to assume at first that the narrator’s desire for sleep is connected to the loss of her parents, especially her emotionally absent mother who she only ever felt close to when they were unconscious in the same bed. But this easy interpretation of the narrator’s goal is refuted when she reflects about her mother’s death: “the particular sadness of a young woman who has lost her mother – complex and angry and soft, yet oddly hopeful. I recognized it. But I didn’t feel it inside of me. The sadness was just floating around in the air. It became denser in the graininess of shadows.” Instead of building relationships or looking for a sense of self-worth when she’s conscious she only seeks to lose herself in an endless stream of rewatched VHS tapes of movies from the 80s and 90s. It gives her a temporary sense of detachment from reality that can only be perfectly realised in “Good strong American sleep.”

While it can be enjoyable to indulge in the narrator’s frank and nihilistic view of the world, the novel took on more poignancy for me as I pondered why Moshfegh set it at this particular point in American history. It’s a period leading up to an event which is ominously foreshadowed throughout the novel when it’s casually mentioned the narrator’s ex-boyfriend works in the Twin Towers. It ultimately began to feel like the author wished she could wake up from the string of tragic events and toxic culture that has plagued the country in the 21st century thus far and dismiss it all as a nightmare. Looking at it this way, it begins to make sense that the narrator considers “I would risk death if it meant I could sleep all day and become a whole new person.” The great tragedy of this novel is that the narrator can’t ever escape herself or the history she’s trapped in.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

The narrator of "Eileen" is so painfully introverted and isolated in her thoughts I felt instantly on edge and utterly compelled by her story. As a now elderly woman, Eileen recounts a week in her life back in 1964 when she was a young woman who lived a very claustrophobic life with her alcoholic widower father. At that time she was friendless, worked in a correctional facility for young offenders and spent her free time on booze runs for her father or in the attic reading issues of National Geographic. Although she was secretly plotting to run away from her small New England town, the arrival of an attractive new staff member named Rebecca creates a dynamic tension that changes everything. Filled with squeamish descriptions of Eileen’s extremely self conscious physical and mental state, this sinister novel builds to a dramatic conclusion

The narrator of this novel reminded me slightly of “The Looking-Glass Sisters” because she’s so overwhelmingly uncomfortable in her own skin and lives in an isolated damaged household. Eileen is so acutely embarrassed by her own physical being that she even states “Having to breathe was an embarrassment in itself.” She has a heightened awareness of the smells and functions of her body. With so much disdain for her own being it’s no wonder she doesn’t have the self confidence to make any friends, let alone find a relationship. She has a romantic obsession for a man and frequently lingers outside his house. Eileen is equally critical and vile about other people as she is about herself. The comments she makes about her colleagues are frequently vicious and perverse. In an understated way she claims: “Looking back I’d say I was barely civilised. There was a reason I worked at the prison, after all. I wasn’t exactly a pleasant person.”

The only close relationship she has is with her father a man who drinks copious amounts of gin each day, protectively clings to his gun from his days in the police force and treats Eileen with abominable disdain. Eileen came back to live with him when her mother grew gravely ill, but since her mother’s death continued to stay with him far longer than she should have. Her beautiful and more confident sister Joanie left quite some time ago. Eileen skulks through life hiding her emotional state behind what she terms her “death mask” and flails about within her twisted fantasies. Throughout the novel I felt we were meant to question how truthful Eileen is being with the reader because it’s about a period in her life so far in the past. Also, she’s quite cagey with certain details. For instance, she never names this town of her youth referring to it cryptically as X-ville.

Frequently there are descriptions of the threat of icicles hanging from the roof of the house which Eileen imagines killing her or her father.

Eileen is so determinedly unlikeable that she’s actually quite fun to read about. I enjoyed her indulgent descriptions of repulsion for almost everything and everyone around her. It’s quite fun reading about someone living so firmly within her own rules that she shoplifts, creates teasing questionnaires for the mothers of the imprisoned delinquents and engages in other antisocial behaviour. Sometimes she’s flat out bitchy like in her judgement of one woman where she states “Her lipstick was a cheap insincere fuchsia.” In her disdain for the human condition she also explores a dark side of humanity from a highly unique angle. For instance, she feels that “Violence was just another function of the body, no less unusual than sweating or vomiting. It sat on the same shelf as sexual intercourse. The two got mixed up quite often, it seemed.” Anyone from the outside looking in on her situation would probably disagree and understand how a toxic situation has created a very damaged individual. But these strident opinions and alarming situations feel quite natural for Eileen because it’s all she’s known.

Hovering in the background is the knowledge that something very sinister has occurred, but the reader doesn’t fully understand the situation until towards the end of the novel. I enjoyed how Ottessa Moshfegh builds this tension with creepy descriptions and teasing passages which gradually build up an alarming amount of dread. Eileen is someone who only lives by her own moral code and it’s alarming to discover from her that “I didn’t believe in heaven, but I did believe in hell.” The consequences of her particular belief system create an atmosphere of tension which makes for compulsive reading. “Eileen” is a wickedly unsettling and mesmerising novel.