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. 

my year of rest and relaxation [ottessa moshfegh]

New York, fin de siècle. An, unnamed, feckless young woman stares the 21st century in the face and decides the only way to deal with it is to try and blot it out. So she embarks on a project dedicated to sleeping as much as she possibly can. 

There’s something of a Roman Candle effect to Moshfegh’s novel. in the opening chapters it blazes brilliantly. The protagonist’s sardonic voice and the beauty of the idea, (the rational beauty), are engrossing. Why wouldn’t you?, one can’t help thinking. How much better it would have been to have slept through the last two decades. The privileged narrator, who lives on the smart side of New York, previously working in a brilliantly described modern art gallery, exists at the supposed apex of civilisation, mixing with the brightest crowd in the most ostensibly sophisticated city on Earth. Yet she retains an outsider status, deliberately thwarting her own capacity to fit it, or to be ensnared, by this seemingly brilliant world, whose shallowness she’s only too aware of. Hence, she decides to embark on her project. 

The problem, perhaps, is that this is a fiercely anti-dramatic project. The sleeping beauty without a prince is a narrative dead end. So the author introduces various tricks and ticks to keep the idea bubbling. Under the influence of a certain drug, the narrator has black-outs, where she wakes up aware that her drugged sleep has masked somnambulant adventures, of which only traces, like her credit card bills and random purchases, remain. The focus switches to her relationship with her doomed friend, Reva, the anti-cool to the narrator’s über-cool. 

The narrative starts to fray at the edges as it tries to sustain the brilliance of the opening chapters. Nevertheless, Moshfegh’s novel lucidly captures the uneasy, proto-digital age that dawned with the 21st century, the onset of a time that has lead to the increasing interiorization of communal space, steering us towards a world where no-one needs to leave their bedroom ever again.