Posts Tagged ‘Ottessa Moshfegh’

30 Aug

‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ by Ottessa Moshfegh – Sleeping for a Year

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: .

 

‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018) – 289 pages

Ottessa Moshfegh. I can’t imagine any writer voluntarily choosing this name as their pseudonym, but I also can’t imagine this being someone’s real name either. I keep trying to unscramble the letters ‘O t t e s s a   M o s h f e g h’ to come up with the real author’s name.

But Ottessa sure can write. Formerly I called her the Queen of Dirty Realism. Perhaps a more fitting name is the Queen of Ugly Realism. Not that her characters are ugly, far from it. It is just their behavior that is ugly. After our nameless young woman narrator loses her job at a realistic but ridiculous modern art gallery, all she wants to do is sleep. Anyone who can have their main character sleep for a year and still keep the story moving and interesting has got to be a good writer. Of course our nameless heroine does lots of subliminal activities while she is asleep.

“Sleep walking, sleep talking, sleep-online-chatting, sleepeating, that was to be expected, especially on Ambien. I’d already done a fair amount of sleep-shopping on the computer and at the bodega. I’d sleep-ordered Chinese delivery. I’d sleepsmoked. I’d sleeptexted and sleeptelephoned. This was nothing new.”

Her psychiatrist the lady Dr. Tuttle prescribes nearly every kind of downer drug and rest medication there is to help our girl sleep, and the ones she doesn’t prescribe she hands out as free samples. Our girl winds up taking one drug called Infermiterol which knocks her out for two days straight but causes her to do a lot of crazy things in her sleep.

Our girl’s best friend Reva comes over once in a while and tries real hard mostly unsuccessfully to cheer our girl up and get her to go out and about. Our girl nearly always snubs Reva and has only contempt for her best friend’s efforts to be friends and to interfere with her sleep.

This novel captures our girl’s darkly comic mood and is filled with caustic black humor. It could have been a tragic story of a young woman withdrawing from the world, but here it is played for mostly laughs. Despite our heroine’s depressive attitude, the humor here keeps us reading.

 

Grade :    B

 

2 Sep

‘Eileen’ by Ottessa Moshfegh – Dirty Realism at its Best

Posted by Anokatony in Book Reviews. Tagged: , .

‘Eileen’ by Ottessa Moshfegh   (2015)  – 260 pages

9781594206627

I want to explain to you what Dirty Realism is, because ‘Eileen’ is the best novel of Dirty Realism I have read in a long, long time.  ‘Eileen’ is a must-read.  I came across the following definition of ‘Dirty Realism’ in an article about Tobias Wolff by Claire Allfree in Metro magazine:

“Depictions of ordinary people, using transparent prose that gets uncomfortably close to the fabric of the characters’ lives.”

Usually the term ‘Dirty Realism’ was applied to short stories, but ‘Eileen’ is a novel, a sustained performance.  It is so honest it is uncomfortable.

The 24-year-old woman Eileen in ‘Eileen’ doesn’t get out much.  She stays at her New England home taking care of her drunk abusive father who is an ex-cop and thus well-respected in the community.  Eileen’s cruel mother died a painful death a couple of years ago.  Occasionally Eileen goes to a movie by herself telling her father she is going out with friends, but her father won’t believe her.  She has no friends.  Eileen works at a boys’ detention center where teenage boys are imprisoned for committing some horrific crime like burning down the family home or murdering a parent or sibling.

“There was a reason I worked at the prison; after all, I wasn’t exactly a pleasant person.”    

Eileen’s thoughts reverberate with negativity toward herself. What makes ‘Eileen’ special is the provocative and disturbing voice of Eileen.  There is nothing girlish or perky about Eileen.  We’ve had enough of those.  Eileen’s voice is real.

“I was unattractive in temperament most of all, but many men don’t seem to care about things like that.”  

 Here is Eileen describing her body:

“So just for laughs, here I am again, my little virginal body at age twenty-four.  My shoulders were small and sloped and knobbly.  My chest was rigid, a taut drum of bones I thudded with my fist like an ape.  My breasts were lemon-size and hard and my nipples were sharp like thorns.  But I was really just all ribs, and so thin that my hips jutted out awkwardly and were often bruised from bumping in to things.  My guts were still cramped from the ice cream and eggs from the day before.  The sluggishness of my bowels was a constant preoccupation.”

The novel takes place in 1964 with Eileen many years later telling her story from back then.  Things change for Eileen when Rebecca Saint-John starts working as the first ever prison director of education.  Rebecca immediately befriends Eileen.

“I prefer being sort of flat-chested, don’t you?  Women with big bosoms are always so bashful.  That, or else they think that their figures are all that matters.  Pathetic.”  

Moshfegh-200x200As I said before, the novel ‘Eileen’ is Dirty Realism with a vengeance.   The writer Raymond Carver, a writer also well worth reading, is considered the King of Dirty Realism.  According to Stuart Evers in the Guardian, Carver wrote “pared-down tales of urban dismay, of losers and liars, of drunks who never know when to stop.”  Despite this being her first novel and despite there being other fine female dirty realists like Jayne Ann Phillips and Joy Williams, I am compelled to call Ottessa Moshfegh the new Queen of Dirty Realism.

 

 

Grade:   A