Ottessa MoshfeghReviews

#RichKids of Beverly Hills if one of them tried to seclude themselves from society in an effort to metamorphosize.

Chapter two and onwards are fun; I enjoyed the later third of the book the most as it amped up in a way I did not expect. The book focuses briefly on art as something to be consumed, and the short storyline around it was enjoyable. Pretty crude.

The book is meant to be absurd, so don't think too hard about the logical workings of various things. It's both enjoyable and draining, like potato chips. I would not recommend to those that want to avoid difficult casts, drug abuse, and stories centered around wealth (the story is more propagated from wealth, but the idea still stands).

2

Weird depressed girl lives with her alcoholic mentally impaired former cop father and works at a boys juvenile jail. (The prison metaphor is strong / she works in one and lives in one.)
But she’s edgy guys - she keeps a dead mouse in her glovebox, wears her dead mums clothes and obsesses over her co-workers and the 14 year old boy inmates who look 19.
She has dirty hands, abuses laxatives and barely eats - so eccentric people. her character felt contrived.
It was incredibly slow and dull right up until the end where she does a Personality 180 and everything happens.

If I had known this was a thriller that features child rape I wouldn’t have read it. Not for me.

The narrator, a young woman from a wealthy family, living in New York's Upper East Side, becomes dissatisfied with her post-college life after the death of her father from cancer, then her mother from suicide (triggered by an interaction with medications and alcohol), and embarks on a 'project' to sleep as much as possible over the next year. She contacts probably the worst psychiatrist in history, who actually starts writing prescriptions for sleep aids as soon as the narrator walks in the door. The narrator uses this psychiatrist to get a veritable pharmacy of drugs to help her sleep, and she doesn't even confess to her that she's already sleeping 14 or 15 hours a night, plus an hour at lunch. The book is her story, as the project continues, and how it reaches an end where she becomes involved in a strange art project around her sleeping. By turns very funny and also disturbing, it's a picture of New York city in the year before 9/11, but at the same time feels a bit prophetic about these COVID days.

3,5.

I picked up 'McGlue' in the library as I enjoyed Moshfegh's [b:My Year of Rest and Relaxation|44279110|My Year of Rest and Relaxation|Ottessa Moshfegh|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597676656l/44279110._SY75_.jpg|55508660]. This novella is a very different reading experience. The first person narrative is totally disorientating, as the titular protagonist is an alcoholic sailor with head injuries that have damaged his memory. He is imprisoned for killing his best friend Johnson, an act he has no memory of. McGlue is an absolutely unreliable narrator. Much of the novella consists of flashbacks or hallucinations, and it is often unclear which is which. McGlue's past is bleak, as he grew up in poverty and became addicted to drinking at a young age. Johnson met him nearly frozen to death at the side of the road and became his companion and enabler. This makes the tale sound grim and spare, while in fact McGlue brings a certain aggressive panache to his confusion and denial. The only other character who is similarly voluble is McGlue's lawyer, who amused me:

"That looks bad. That looks very bad." He nods some more. "Good. If we can pin this all on the dead brains and get that doctor to attest to what madness you've been brewing up there, that's nice, very nice. A jury is well-swayed by a sick man, pity's good. And a doctor's word is barely gotten the gist of, so we make claims to something very complicated. If all fails, and I hope we won't have to bring this up, and I hope you can be plain with me, sailor, I've been alive long enough to know it takes all kinds, we'll touch on what was between you and Johnson, just what it really was, without recalling whatever details - and you don't need to be that precise with me, of course - so as not to solicit additional charges, since that would not be good. And know this about me. I don't judge. We are all children of God, aren't we, etcetera." He waits for my eyes to meet his.
"What?" I say.
"Yes, yes, all right. Shake hands." He stands before me and sticks out his hand. I uncross my arms. My hand shakes on its own. He grabs it.
"I'm Foster. Cy."
"Sigh."
"That's it."

While I liked such snippets of dialogue, I struggled somewhat with McGlue's narration. It was often delirious and oblique beyond the point of incomprehensibility. The sequence of events seemed impossible to establish. The ending nonetheless had an inevitability about it, as well as being both vivid and visceral. The combination of blood, murder, and forbidden love was positively Shakespearean. While Moshfegh's writing is striking and distinctive, her style here is rather too experimental for my taste.

In keeping with its theme, I read the first half of ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’, took a hour's nap on the sofa, then read the other half. It is a novel steeped in the horrors of privileged femininity. The narrator is a tall, thin, blonde, wealthy, and beautiful New Yorker. However she is so depressed, lonely, and unhappy with her life that she decides to hibernate for a year using an alarming variety of pharmaceuticals. These are prescribed by her psychiatrist Dr. Tuttle, a hilarious yet terrifying parody of medical incompetence. To give you an idea of the novel’s tone, one of the funniest running jokes is that she keeps forgetting the narrator’s parents are dead:

"You’re exhausted. Plain and simple.” She scribbled on her prescription pad. “According to that book you’re holding, the death gene is passed from mother to child in the birth canal. Something about microdermabrasions and infectious vaginal rash. Does your mother exhibit any signs of hormonal abnormalities?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You might want to ask her. If you are a carrier, I can suggest something for you. A herbal lotion. If you want it. I’d have to order it special from Peru.”
“I was born caesarian, in case that’s a factor.”
“The noble method,” she said. “Ask her anyway. Her answer might shed some light on your mental and biorhythmic incapacities.”
“Well, she’s dead,” I reminded her.
Dr. Tuttle put her pen down and folded her hands into prayer. I thought she was going to sing a song, or do some incantation. I didn’t expect her to offer me any pity or sympathy. But instead, she squinched up her face, sneezed violently, turned to wipe her face with a huge bath towel lying on the floor by her desk chair, and scribbled on her pad some more.
“And how did she die?” she asked. “Not pineal failure, I suppose.”
“She mixed alcohol with sedatives,” I said. I was too lethargic to lie. And if Dr. Tuttle had forgotten that I’d told her my mother had slit her wrists, telling her the truth wouldn’t matter in the long run.
“People like your mother,” Dr. Tuttle replied, shaking her head, “give psychotropic medication a bad reputation.”

I think that exchange sums up the book quite well, really. Our narrator barely leaves her apartment and is visited by very few people, most often her best friend Reva. Their relationship is the most developed and emotionally significant, as well as painful and depressing, in the book. Neither woman is happy, their dynamic is clearly unhealthy, and both seem aware of this. Yet each provides continuity and support of some kind in the other’s life, which they cannot get from anyone else. Both have appalling on-off boyfriends and distant or dead parents. The most memorable sequence involves a funeral, the only occasion when the narrator leaves New York. The creepiest moments occur when the narrator tries to reconstruct what she did during the gaps in her memory caused by a particular drug.

‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ certainly conveys the intense vacuity of America in the year 2000. Its apparent focus is on how soul-crushing it can be to perform femininity. I can certainly relate to the desire for hibernation, as sleep is so great and waking up invariably disagreeable. However I definitely don’t share the narrator’s cavalier attitude to mixing medications. The consequences of her doing so are more existential than physical, which surprised me a little. Surely by the end of the book she’d have had serious digestive problems and vitamin deficiencies, at the very least. That isn’t really the point, though, as the emotional toll of being awake is under examination. I found much of it darkly funny, with a tightly controlled plot and claustrophobically limited settings. Considering the deep dive into rich people problems, Moshfegh made the narrator’s existential angst impressively compelling. As I’ve come to expect with postmodern novels (or whatever you’d call them - literary fiction written since 2000), there is no real resolution or catharsis at the end. In fact, the ending was more hopeful than anticipated, as the narrator didn’t overdose and die, as I half expected. Instead, she seems much happier, Reva’s death in 9/11 notwithstanding. Thus the apparent message that hibernation works? I’m not sure what to make of that.

I initially really loved this and had given it a 5 star review. Then I read a comment about how this books screams privilege, decided to give it a 4 star. Then realized that’s the point. There’s an obvious “privilege” here and as a black girl who sees privilege and injustice in everything without wanting to, it was so obvious but didn’t effect the way I read this. Regardless, this is good work.

I will never quite agree with people who say this isn’t interesting though. When the plot wasn’t, the language and thought process of the main character was. There was never a seemingly “dull” moment.

It is late into the year, and I am finishing my first book of 2024. I have taken an extended vacation from reading. Well, less a vacation, and more a tailspin into sustained but variable crisis, wherein I reserve reading for my visits to the depressive hospitalizations. The manic ones tend to not leave much room for literature. Against the Day and Earthlings were exceptional experiences, I savored both, perfect novels, but upon discharge, I did not re-engage my longstanding love for reading, because life proved consistently to overwhelm. But here I am, sitting in a crisis center, having just finished this book, and about to read Smoke and Mirrors by Gaiman, with my return to University to finish an English Literature degree three years abandoned impending, and I think I have finally struck it, the passion, the fervor, for literature. I am tumbling headlong after a long dormancy, a long but fitful sleep, into embracing words as my future, the future for which I have pined but which I have avoided for two decades. Thank you, Ottessa, for helping me wake up.½

Of course Moshfegh writes incredibly complicated characters in an unsensored world, pulling the reader in so that they can't look away. She does this so well, this time following Mr. Wu through his journey discovering his attraction to disgust. There's a tension to Moshfegh's words that keep you turning the page, unexpected actions from her characters that make you wonder at what they're not telling you. The writing here is uncomfortable, dirty, and concise.

This book is very well written. Really gritty and dark. Eileen explores hidden parts of her abused psychology in an encompassing way. She's drawn to strange expressions of herself and is trapped within the 1950's standards for women as well as her own impoverished life.

This novel, set in a quasi-Medieval village with an evil overlord, follows several inhabitants of the village and the palace, as they commit every imaginable disgusting, horrific, and stupid act, largely in an attempt to find love and the meaning of life. It reads sometimes like an allegory, sometimes like a comedy of errors, and sometimes like degrading violent porn. That said, if you can tolerate the style, there is much analysis-worthy literary value here. Moshfegh is definitely satirizing religion, and in a way where there are no winners and no sympathetic characters. She may even be satirizing all of humanity. This book is certainly not for everyone but you don't have got read very far into it to know if it's for you or not.½

1.5

Old lady finds a note in the woods saying someone died and then proceeds to just daydream and create made up characters and scenarios about it because she has nothing else to do with her life.
This story goes nowhere, and then includes an animal death. Did not enjoy it. Literally the only things that were decent was the interactions with the character Shirley and the mentions of the scenery. Why was this book written?

4.5??? O 4 estrellas, no sé.


Me reí en muchas partes y, a diferencia de varios comentarios, me gustó la protagonista pero porque me gustan los personajes malos, rotos, que se sienten insuficientes.

Si tuviera la plata que tiene ella, creo que haría lo mismo sacando las pastillas.

A miserable, self loathing, trapped character describes her unhappy young life and alludes to her current happiness, and finally gets around to telling us the shocking way she left home. She was well described but it went on a bit too long for me. I agree with Karen's review on Goodreads which observed that "the payoff itself is not a complete success in the ratio of expectation to delivery". But it was a worthwhile read.

Totally beefed the ending, but I liked most of the middle bits!

I hated this book. At first I thought the concept was interesting and enjoyed some of the witticisms Moshfegh builds in the beginning. But as I kept reading, I realized how shallow this book actually is. The commentary on New York and its archetypes felt unoriginal – seriously, am I supposed to be impressed by the "modern art is stupid and weird" take? – and the main character/narrator was so insufferable that it was impossible to take any of her observations seriously.

I'm not really sure how I feel in general about the "unlikable women" trend in contemporary fiction, but other books in this genre manage to maintain perspective and realism. This book was has a totally unrealistic premise, which is fine, but then so many people interpret the unlike-ability of the lead character as some sort of social commentary – which I think gives this book too much credit, and also doesn't seem to jive with how separated from reality the premise feels. For example, if this book was supposed to provide commentary on therapy/drugs or something in that vein, any analysis Moshfegh injects is negated by the fact that Dr. Tuttle, the main character's therapist is so wholly unrealistic, and feels so far removed from reality that it's not obvious she represents anything or is supposed to be satirizing/hyperbolizing something in real life.

Further, Moshfegh has said in interviews that she doesn't think art needs to have lessons and I don't disagree. But if this book has no philosophical/moral implications, and the characters aren't relatable, and the observations are trite, and I don't feel like I learned anything, then why read it? I didn't even find it entertaining in the way that a trashy reality tv show is entertaining.

Reva was the only good character and it hurt so much to see her mistreated time and time again by the narrator and author – and once I was done with the book, I realized how pointless it was.

I also thought the 9/11 ending was unnecessary and cheap. What were we supposed to take away? That some good came out of 9/11 because it snapped an insufferable, privileged girl out of her self-imposed depressive modern art experiment?

And maybe I'm reading too much into it – but if we're supposed to herald Moshfegh as a literary genius, then I think it's fair game to read into everything – but I thought the decision to make the only Asian character be a Chinese man who abuses dogs, a little bit questionable. The protagonist also has this weird Whoopie Goldberg obsession which felt gratuitous, and was maybe only there to make her seem quirky? Not sure.

I am undecided about this one. Reviews are either 5-star ("brilliant") of 1-star ("pointless"). Honestly, I vacillated between those two points of view many times while reading.

ininterrotto flusso di coscienza di una mente alterata e petulante.
L'accoltellamento del cane veramente disturbante

This is currently at the top of one of my favorite lists of books, the slacker girls list, or flailing females list: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/153374.She_s_Not_Feeling_Good_at_All_Catastr... So of course I felt I HAD to read the current top book, even if a book club was the reason that finally shoved me into reading it. I kind of expected to like it more? Even if I feel like Ottessa Moshfegh is one of those writers that wants to shove you AWAY from a book. Since 2018, I think there have been a bunch more books like this, that take it even further, that I love even more. (See: the above list.) So maybe this book is kind of a pillar for those types of books, but I also expected Moshfegh to be more Out There. A lot of the writing features some vapid stuff, which I know is entirely the point for this main character, but not necessarily what I feel like reading. If this is satire, I don't really get it. I do like that the plot is set in late 90s, early 2000s, rather than being current. But then I also disliked the reason for it being set in that time. Ah well, I have the rest of that amazing list. Weird girls for the win!

3.75 stars? This was really a mind-trip to read but the last chapter was kind of disappointing. I have too many questions. Really excellent sense of suspense throughout though.

Wow so having a hard time collecting my thoughts about this one. This was such a departure from the only other Moshfegh book I've read - Death in Her Hands. This book was like a horrible car crash that you can't look away from.

Set in a fictional, medieval European fiefdom, this follows several characters at odds with God, their lord, paganism, and their various inner moral struggles. This book doesn't hold back from being as disgusting as possible - CW for gore, rape, feces, vomit, cannibalism, pedophilia, murder, etc etc. At the same time, I was completely absorbed and couldn't put it down.

I'll have to think about this one more and write up a full review.

[a:Otessa Moshfegh|14555635|Otessa Moshfegh|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] is described as one of the brightest new voices in fiction, an NEA fellow, Stanford Stegner grad, and she is but this book is a hard sale. Her story is suspenseful -- I kept reading avidly late into the night -- but it is a bleak tale (and I love bleak) of a young girl who is trapped living with her overbearing ex-cop alcoholic father, working at a prison for boys, suffering an eating disorder and troubled by her lack of intimate connections until Rebecca comes to work at the prison and provides a "ticket to a new life...She was so clever and beautiful, I thought, the embodiment of all my fantasies for myself." What keeps you reading other than the edge-of-seat shenanigans at the end, are strategic references to the beautiful, loving life she lives now, fifty years later, and the superb writing: "She whirled off her coat as though in slow motion -- this is how I remember it -- and shook it like a bullfighter as she strode up the corridor toward me, hair rippling behind her, eyes like daggers shooting down straight through my heart to my guts." She notes the motto written on a pack of Pall Malls "a shield between two lions -- Per aspera ad astra. Through the thorns to the stars. That described my plight to a tee." The story winds up hopefully "not a direct line to paradise, but I believe I got on the right road, with all the appropriate trips and kinks." I am glad I read [b:Eileen|23453099|Eileen|Ottessa Moshfegh|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1423783612s/23453099.jpg|43014905] and will read her next book but it's a relief not to be the bookseller for this one.

Brilliant, fascinating language that kept me reading against my better judgement. I was trapped in nightmare feelings and horrified about weirdness, delapidation, lackingness, ugliness, idiosyncracy, gaps, non-sequiturs, revulsion, self-hate, intrusive physicality and crime, layered over with a white icing of cold, cold, cold. The end was confusing and confused. OK, she got out of it - the ambiguity was ambiguous in itself. Did that help or not?

this book pissed me off so bad!!!! i was genuinely excited because it seemed like it was right up my alley, but now i guess i can safely say this is WAY overhyped, as both a new york novel and a sad girl novel.

may be spoilers ahead.

1) god i HATED how she treated reva. HATED it. i hated how consistently cruel she was, and it really went too far, for me. reva was a far more compelling character to me and i understood why the protagonist would feel the way she did, but like, we get it. you've made your point. enough. i was interested in their friendship but i often felt violently unwell when she was talking about reva. i can read any sort of shock horror with a straight face but i guess i draw the line at people harbouring genuinely repugnant private thoughts about their friends. (come to think of it, my reaction reminds me of how i felt about cersei's chapters in asoiaf/affc, so i guess i just have a particular ick around reading that sort of thing.)

2) i think the language of this book is a little too contemporary to make it a convincing y2k novel. some of how moshfegh writes about technology just felt a little blasé, like she was talking about stuff that had been around forever, except in 2000 it was actually brand new/not all that common. this really detracted from my comprehension of this as being something rooted in its era. maybe it's part of the conceit, but it did not work for me.

3) i did think there were some interesting ideas at play in this book. (that said, i don't think i would've touched it if i knew how much of it was about cancer, my least favourite Theme to explore in fiction.) but, here's the kicker: you want me to sympathise with a pretty, skinny, rich WASP? i know this is HEAVILY signposted, but like, the way she's like "i'm not stupid, i don't want to give up my privilege" was an unsatisfying way of dealing with her, honestly, fetishisation of poverty. like the ending felt raaaaather common_people.mp3, you know? i LOVE an unlikable rich protagonist!! i love reading about horrible rich people like you would not believe. i love reading satires on rich people in the art world. but NONE of that worked for me here; i felt that with the protagonist, moshfegh was trying too hard to thread the needle between "she's too privileged" and "she is genuinely lost and miserable." an interesting balance to strike, but not the way it was done here. and everything about the art world was SO extreme, so cartoonish, that it was hard to buy into the satire. like girl your lifestyle is another side of the same coin...

anyway at least it was a quick read½

I'm still trying to figure out what to do with these stories—in a good way. It's extremely visceral writing, at times a little too much so, that's also painstaking in its detail. And each narrator is so different from the last. How does she do that so well? Overall just a great reading experience that makes me want to read more.