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![]() ![]() Upon waking up, the narrator is terrified and unsettled by the pictures of genitals populating her screen and the designer items she has no memory of ordering. In their lack of self-awareness, these characters bolster the narrator’s sense of isolation, which encourages her to try and emotionally disconnect from anything resembling love or support.Īfter the narrator begins self-medicating, Moshfegh starts experimenting with tone, juxtaposing hope and horror as Ambien leads the narrator to seek connections in pervy chat rooms and order clothes, inviting the reader to recognize that deep down, the narrator does crave connection, though she can only try to while unconscious. Rather than dive into examining the unhappiness she’s feeling, Moshfegh introduces the reader to a series of people who have let her down, bringing in deceased, neglectful parents, a priggish ex-boyfriend, and Reva, an upbeat, bulimic socializer who wears happiness as a mask to hide her disappointment. Moshfegh’s narrator is a twenty-five-year-old Columbia graduate who sets off on a mission of great ambition: to hibernate for a full year via a battery of heavy-duty psychopharmaceuticals. A lavish ending caps off this wholly original novel.In Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, she uses the optimism of new-millennium New York to explore isolation, cultural emptiness, and the complexity of female friendships in a biting and detailed way. It’s a simple, ingenious plot that yields more narrative tension than you might think (I was reminded at times of The Girl on the Train’s blackout-induced mysteries), made all the juicier by Oshfegh’s razor-sharp insights, a send-up of the New York art scene, odes to Whoopi Goldberg, and world-weary narration by the amazing Julia Whelan. ![]() At the center of My Year of Rest and Relaxation is another disdain-able type: a beautiful, privileged twentysomething who tries to escape her angst-aided by enough pharmaceuticals to make Hunter S. Thank God for Ottessa Moshfegh, who has a knack for making miserable characters eerily seductive (I see you and I love you, Eileen). ![]() I admire them, which might be why I’m also a bit bored of them. ![]() "Strong, world-conquering heroines are everywhere these days. I woke right up for this dark comedy about sleeping Named a best book of the year by: The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Amazon, Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, and Audible. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary alienation can be. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility what could be so terribly wrong? But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate she works an easy job at a hip art gallery and lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. “One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.” ( Entertainment Weekly )įrom one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes Entertainment Weekly ’s number-one book of 2018. ![]()
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