death in her hands (ottessa moshfegh)

Death in her Hands is something of a shaggy dog story, almost literally, as the narrator’s dog plays a key role in the narrative. Out walking her dog Charlie, the narrator, Vesta Gul, discovers a note which states: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” The novel opens with the discovery of this note, which prompts the elderly Vesta to go on an increasingly unhinged journey to discover what really happened to Magda. Suffice it to say there is no body and what we, as readers, discover is entirely the product of Vesta’s curious imagination. Which is also, one deduces, the author’s curious imagination. In essence this is a short sharp novel about delirium. It is reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, in the way in which the reading of his novels compels the reader to enter into the consciousness of the narrator. Similarly, this is a journey through Vesta’s consciousness, made all the more curious because she is not so much an unreliable narrator as an unhinged one. We know that Vesta is constructing a mystery out of nothing - there is no body - but at the same time the shadow of her imagination seems to cast its spell and suggest that there is something there to be discovered, even though we know there probably isn’t. Maybe Robbe-Grillet would be another point of reference. The novel as a construction of insanity, the process of reading as one that is complicit with this process. All of which makes it sound more challenging than it is to read: Death in her Hands rattles along at a fair old lick, the greatest obstacle to completing it being the reader’s tendency to scratch his or her head in bemusement on a regular basis.