Lapvona

A Novel

No cover

Ottessa Moshfegh: Lapvona (2022, Diversified Publishing)

English language

Published June 18, 2022 by Diversified Publishing.

ISBN:
978-0-593-60770-1
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4 stars (17 reviews)

4 editions

Did I like this?

No rating

Moshfegh's books are page turners and funny, but they are also horrific and filled with dread. In a conversation with jilliansayre@bookwyrm.social, we were trying to figure out if you could say you "enjoyed" a novel by Moshfegh. It's a complicated question. This book is no different. You likely won't be able to put it down, but you might not be able to figure out why you keep turning pages (and you might ask yourself what that fact says about you).

Uno de los mejores libros que he leído

5 stars

Es difícil decir eso de "este es el mejor libro que he leído nunca", porque bueno, depende del día. Sobre héroes y tumbas de Sábato, o la inclasificable "la casa de las hojas", de Danielewski, las colecciones de cuentos de Borges, Nuestra parte de noche de Mariana Enríquez etc... son libros que me han dejado el cerebro fundido, y Lapvona lo ha vuelto a hacer. Es cierto que no está muy desarrollado, es una novela muy corta, que hubiera ganado con 200-300 páginas más. Realmente el final te sabe a poco.

Review of 'Lapvona' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

"I feel stupid when I pray" - "Anyone", Demi Lovato (Introductory quote of the book)

"...Marek was a little pleased that he was bleeding and that surely the broken bucket would be reason enough for Jude to give him a sound beating when he got home. Pain was good, Marek felt. It brought him closer to his father's love and pity ... Marek thought, I deserve this hardship. He lived for hardship. It gave him cause to prove himself superior to his mortal suffering."

What an interesting book to reflect on, I think this specific book poses a real challenge for reviewers regarding objectivity/subjectivity. Of course, all reviews are subjective, but different reviewers may allow "objective" elements (prose, structure, pacing) to weigh more heavily on their rating of book than subjective (overall enjoyment).

For this book, I don't think it's controversial to say that the more "objective" elements were very …

Lapvona

No rating

When Marek was born, his mother died, or so he was told. He lives with his father, a shepherd, in Lapvona, the fiefdom of a corrupt, feckless and incompetent lord. Marek is the line that runs through Lapvona. He was born with skeletal deformities that earn him the contempt of Lapvona villagers, including his father. However, he makes friends with the lord’s son, although the prince treats him more as a hunting dog than as a friend. The relation between Marek and the prince is the feeble engine driving whatever plot there is in Lapvona. Overall, Lapvona reads like a truly terrible year, from spring to spring, at a tyrannically-run Ren Faire: murderous bandit raids, drought and starvation, relentless poverty and grinding work. Add to that humanity’s propensity to lie, and the almost impossibility of meaningfully connecting with another person, and you get a Boschian horror-show from which …

Review of 'Lapvona' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Ottessa Moshfegh is one of the most interesting contemporary writers. She loves weird, outsiders and grotesque and this book contains all these characteristics. But I have mixed feelings about it, the story is in places quite dull and it lacks flavour.  

Review of 'Lapvona' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

This felt like an arthouse film in book form. Haha. I came very close to DNFing but I’m glad I stuck with it. There’s a good chance that if I were in a different mood I would have hated this book. The ending saves it. As the book progresses, The many people of Lapvona we come to know develop ideas and theories that allow them cope with the many setbacks they face. Superstitions, mythologies. In the end, they question all of it, and find nothing to replace it with. It’s a poignant allegory for what it means to live in a society, even on the smallest of scales.

Review of 'Lapvona' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

‘The man was afraid of strange people. Anyone deaf or crippled or ugly, he felt, was cursed. This was the attitude of most northerners. His wife, of course, being a native, understood that lameness or strangeness was a mark of grace. If one suffered purgatory on Earth rather than after death, heaven was easier to access.’

This book is perhaps best summarized with a ‘what the fuck’. Going into it, all I understood was that it had a medieval context and an arresting cover. Perhaps there would be commentary about being an ‘other’ in medieval society, or the role of religion in daily life, or something to that effect. To be sure, there is a bit of this, but in quite a different way than expected. I had read some of the reviews—or at least, enough to expect some grotesque and disgusting scenes. Listen to the reviews: this book is …

Review of 'Lapvona' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

I wanted to give this one a go because I really enjoyed Death in Her Hands - like I want to go back and give that one 5 stars instead of 4 stars based on how I keep thinking about it - but I DNFed both MYORAR and Eileen. I was hoping that since Death in Her Hands was the most recent, I’d get something more like that, but no such luck.

I didn’t get very far in this one, so I don’t have a lot to say. What I did read felt too simplistic, perhaps in an intentional fable-like way, and I wasn’t interested.

I’ll keep at least trying Moshfegh’s work because her style always has the potential to work really well for me.

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