My Year of Rest and Relaxation

For a minute there, at about two thirds of the novel, I worried Moshfegh was going to pull a Remember Me (the 2010 film, with that garbage ending that came out of nowhere) and have Reva be blown up in the 9/11 terrorist attack, but nearing the end I guess this book was supposed to be some sort of prescription drug induced sleepy Siddhartha (the Hesse novel) situation instead – and then she went for it anyway, right on the very last page.

Moreover, how am I supposed to feel something, anything, for this lethargic and wildly disdainful protagonist after all the bullshit she pulls throughout the story? She's a depressed asshole and remains one, even though she miraculously survived all the heavy sedation and finally (re)starts living. After turning the last page I kind of wished Reva was the one who got the transformative arc, not our narrator.

Regardless, this book read like a bullet train. Moshfegh's prose is refreshingly simple, smooth and vivid. I loved the quirky dark humor and cynical views on (the voidness of modern) art and society, written with a cosmopolitan flair. Also, some of the imagery is touching and original. Still, the ending felt cheap to me.

"I spent a lot of time staring at [Whoopi Goldberg] on screen and picturing her vagina. Solid, honest, magenta."

I don't know why but that line doubled me over. It's the sort of humor I've always been drawn to. Enough tension between earnestness and irony that it is neither one nor the other; it is both. That is the sense I had overall when reading Moshfegh's novel. I've read comparison's to the old HBO show Girls and I think that's apt, though for whatever reason I appreciated this novel a lot more than I ever appreciated Girls, which I found lacking in enough substance to justify it's privileged and vacant characters.

There are themes in this novel that are peculiar and I haven't thought enough about them to decide whether they are illusory or profound, but I did appreciate the lack of tidy epiphanies and Moshfegh's instinct to counter reader expectations just enough to keep things interesting.

I recommend this as a solid summer read. Easy to digest, entertaining in more than a few parts, and written by an author intellectual enough to make interesting provocations.

4.5 stars

There is a weirdness, a paranoia, that I particularly like in Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories. They operate in extreme conditions, somewhere between disgust and immense sadness. Her stories are strange and devastating, beautifully devastating. In a certain sense, throughout her books, the present is a place that the narrators tend not to want to be, they rather be in another place, in another timeline.

The narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a blonde, thin, pretty and financially independent young woman. She lives in Yorkville, Upper East Side NY and she is trapped in bleak, punishing circumstances. She has lost both her parents in a short space of time and she is trapped in a manipulating, ferocious and punishing relationship with an older man.

The book is painful, you can sense the depth of her grief and suffering, but more of that of being someone who does not know how to exist in that space and time, who wants out of her sadness and depression. The young woman seems vulnerable but her vulnerability is also her power and sleep, enforced and distressed as it is, is her way out. Sleep becomes a cathartic experience, when she finally awakes she has escaped not only death but also her past, she is a new person living in another time and place.

I am very excited by the work of Ottessa Moshfegh, it’s weird, almost surreal. Reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation, especially at the end, I couldn't move, I was completely absorbed. You know that in the few pages something awful is going to happen but you can’t stop reading. It is a powerful experience.

Read the whole review at Maquina Lectora

 I heard and read great things about this novel and the word that got me most was that it was "profound." I bought it, started reading it, and waited for the profundity. And waited. And waited. I never found it. Instead I found it to be workmanlike writing that any decent writer willing to put in the work could have written. I didn't come across a single new idea or observation in this book. I found it humorless and unconvincing—it's in the first person and the author describes herself as physically beautiful but not in a way that someone like that would ever do. At times, Moshfegh chokes her prose with lists of physical items to portray a subject's character. Good writers don't resort to this or let their narrators do so. They get tedious after awhile.
 If you read it, you'll find that it goes quickly. That's more because of the book's generous leading than due to writing style.
 You know what helps a writer get published? Having an exotic name. I wonder if this book would have been published and as widely reviewed if the author's name was something like Janet Miller.