The humor is so dark that sometimes it’s hard to see at all. The material may be heavy, but Moshfegh’s treatment of these many themes is deft and ironic enough that they never feel didactic or obvious.
Subverting the conventional is her calling card. She’s practically never a fully realized character. If this character sounds somewhat familiar, that’s because she’s the type to turn up in stories as a detestable foil to illustrate, oh, name it-rampant materialism, shallow mean-girl posturing, the soulless art scene, frat-house eye candy. Moshfegh’s performance is all the more impressive because the protagonist she invented is so unlikely. Her new book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is an odyssey of consciousness. Ottessa Moshfegh hasn’t just walked the literary tightrope that is the existential novel: she’s cartwheeled across.
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My sleep had worked.’ Has it? Read Full Review >
In place of the antic sarcasm of the beginning of the novel, she now speaks in anodyne clichés: ‘Pain is not the only touchstone for growth, I said to myself. The narrator’s hibernation becomes a kind of artistic project, an unmaking and remaking of the self. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is written in multiple modes at once: comedy and tragedy and farce, blurring into one another, climbing on top of one another. But there’s a casually intimidating power to Moshfegh’s writing- the deadpan frankness and softly cutting sentences-that makes any comparison feel not quite right. My Year of Rest and Relaxation constantly eludes classification. One of the things Moshfegh is interested in is irony: she both exploits it and questions its value. Read Full Review >ĭoes sleep count as doing something? Can that trite phrase ‘rest and relaxation’ communicate something true? The tone of this.flickers between sincerity and insincerity. This is a novel of immense and yet very ordinary human sadness. This kind of simultaneously horrifying and devastating glimmer, a scoop direct from the places to which the human mind plummets in private, is what makes Moshfegh’s prose so arresting, so original. Moshfegh writes brilliantly, and very funnily, of a certain kind of spoiled, affluent New Yorker. Along the way, there’s a lot of detail to enjoy. The trudging banality of a character’s quest to sedate what is unbearable, and to come out the other side into some cleansed and emptied new reality: this, paradoxically, is the fun of this strange and obstinate narrative, and it is where it strikes its sharpest, clearest truth. there is a great deal more layered compassion than there is boring transgression. She has a singular instinct for the jangled interiority of loners and outsiders, most of them women, and for their uncomfortable and often unpretty inhabitance of their bodies. The guard grips her shoulders, but after she explains that she got dizzy, the guard lets her go, and she is free.
Then she places her whole palm on the surface of the canvas. Instead, she puts her hand out and touches the frame of the painting. 'Step away,' a guard reprimands her when she gets too close to a painting. Moshfegh’s extraordinary prose soars as it captures her character’s re-engagement. It’s her own desire to be an artist that has been reborn. By the end of her self-imprisonment, a transformation does occur. The narrator recalls her mother, a vain and distracted bedroom drunk. Surfaces are important in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In Persona the two at first seemingly opposite women begin to meld.similarly, as Moshfegh’s novel progresses, Reva and the narrator, at first strikingly different, increasingly resemble each other. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the relationship between Reva and the narrator is reminiscent of Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, in which a stage actress suffers a breakdown and becomes mute. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh’s darkly comic and ultimately profound new novel, also concerns itself with a miserable woman in her mid-20s seeking 'great transformation'.
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