![]() ![]() 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, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. The minimisation of feelings and memories (“lame memories”) is what makes this such a heartbreaking novel, so many paragraphs and phrases resonated with feelings I’ve felt myself from time to time, and the chemical annihilation is raw.From 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. You could say in a way, Moshfegh has written an adult fable - one filled with gender injustice, prejudice, alcohol and drug abuse, abandonment and varying definitions of love, and in a way the ending was a great exposé on sociological taxonomy and its ability to painfully bring up feelings of regret, existential angst, depression and self-deprecation. A reflection of one’s self is called into question and what was once a comically brutal narrative becomes anything but. ![]() Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything.”Īs the narrator nears her goal of 24/7 slumber with the aid of a performance painter (infamous for splatter canvases made with his own semen - *eyeroll* - the art world ay), the novel becomes less about the catalogue of pills and labels and slows right down to displaced grief and trauma. “ I can’t point to any one event that resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. While we laugh and turn away at awkward moments in the novel, we subsequently feel a sense of ‘disgust’ - most possibly in the language but subconsciously an evaluation of our own lives and the emotional dissociations we share with others. Moshfegh almost shines a light on our own standards and values - as we feel abandoned by one another in relationships, sadly, simple acts such as sex become portrayed as vile and evidence of our incompetence in associating our emotions with such simple acts of intimacy. The constant emotional abandonment weighs heavily on one hand whilst the vindictive nature of friendship teeters on the other. Moshfegh has successfully captured the raw and vigoured nature of a life overly consumed by prescription psycho-pharmaceuticals: the inability of the mind and ‘privilege’ in this context stems from the relief from the responsibility to acknowledge the existence of others. This self-induced ‘coma’ seems to be an ode to the art world - a performance piece crying for inner peace and an awakening of the soul and the spirit. ![]() Taking place in New York over a period of 15 months, the novel follows a twenty-something art history graduate who quits her job after the death of her parents only to be submerged in a world of sedatives, therapy and the Home Shopping Network in a bid to achieve round-the-clock sleep unperturbed. Consequently after googling the difference between a nap and a sleep (and by the way, I will still stand by the fact that my 2 hour head-down-on-pillow time is indeed a nap in my eyes), this novel just seemed perfect for the long weekend. ![]() Yes, I have to admit I was definitely late to the book party/ YouTube/bookstagram world on this one but goddamn this was delightful in its own self-induced and ‘privileged’ way. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |