Reviews for My Year of Rest and Relaxation
My Twelvemonth of Rest and Relaxation
Imagine taking a sabbatical, not just from your job, only from your life. How about going even further and taking a yearlong break from yourself and the world, courtesy of an extended nap? That's the desperate programme of the unnamed 24-twelvemonth-old narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh'due south bizarrely fascinating second novel. This miserable immature woman hopes she can hide for a twelvemonth and literally lose herself — her haunting memories, obsessive thoughts, and acidic negativity — and emerge from her sleep-cure as "a whole new person." My Year of Rest and Relaxation is her hyper-articulate account of this disturbing, ultimately moving "self-preservational" project. Yous might call it a residual-oration drama.
Moshfegh'due south self-proclaimed somniac and somnophile evokes Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov's archetype 19th century Russian novel about profound lassitude and ennui — just only to a signal, and in a twisted sort of way. Like Oblomov, she's privileged with an excellent educational activity, aplenty inherited wealth, and people to manage her estate. Both lack worldly ambition and would gladly stay in bed circular-the-clock. In both cases, their disillusioned response to the hustle and bustle of daily life says something about their effete civilization. But Moshfegh'south narrator isn't lazy like Oblomov — in fact, she's single-mindedly goal-directed: She wants to slumber and sleep and sleep. And she's made a deal with herself: "If, when I woke upward in June, life still wasn't worth the trouble, I would terminate it," she states unequivocally.
Her projection begins in 2000, a date which gives pause: So depressed already, pre-9/11 and the 2016 presidential election, you lot can't help thinking. She requires pharmaceuticals — lots of them — to execute her plan, and finds an all-likewise-willing psychiatrist, 1 of the worst (and funniest) shrinks of all time. A running gag is Dr. Tuttle's inability to retrieve the cardinal trauma of her patient's life, namely her chilly parents' tragic deaths within six weeks of each other when she was in college.
Much of the novel's activity consists of popping pills — a cafe of more than ii dozen name brand meds. This quickly gets tiresome, and more soporific to the reader than the narrator, but Moshfegh raises the stakes when her narrator turns to a fictional, sinister, blackout-inducing drug chosen Infermiterol that leads to weird spa days, clubbing, and shopping sprees she doesn't call up upon awakening. Moshfegh's sharp prose provides a strong dissimilarity to her character's murky "brain mist:" "My vision pixelated, moiréed, then blurred and womped dorsum into focus," she writes after ane membranous awakening. Amidst all the far-fetched logistics of this young adult female'southward self-obliterating scheme, the fact that she doesn't die of an overdose is the most astonishing aspect of this novel.
Like the soused, wildly inappropriate xxx-year-old math instructor in "Bettering Myself," the leadoff story in Moshfegh'south Homesick for Another Globe, the narrator of R&R describes her daily routine in loving item. When not sleeping, she watches movies and eats animal crackers and Thai food betwixt slipper-clad excursions to the corner bodega for bad java and RiteAid for prescription refills.
The only one checking in on her is Reva, the bulimic best friend from higher whom she finds more than abrasive than likeable. That's office of her problem: She's a lifelong outsider, and her parents' deaths left her well off financially, just emotionally strapped. She's unable to move beyond a degrading on-and-off human relationship with a full creep, whom she keeps calling and texting pathetically. She's also beyond caring what others think well-nigh her — though she does tell united states of america repeatedly what a knockout she is, effortlessly slim and blond and looking "like an off-duty model" even on her worst days. "No fair!" Reva protests repeatedly.
My Twelvemonth of Rest and Relaxation is, among other things, well-nigh the narrator'due south guilt almost being such a bad friend to Reva, the rare optimist amid Moshfegh'southward characters (whose hopefulness is portrayed as misguided to the point of inanity). Like the eponymous narrator of her Booker prize-nominated, noir first novel, Eileen, R&R's characters aren't particularly sympathetic or likeable. Nonetheless they aren't entirely without hope or middle — and most incomparably not without interest.
Moshfegh knows how to spin perversity and provocation into fascination, and bleakness into surprising tenderness, simply her nighttime humor and ghoulish sensibility are not for everyone. She's drawn to the transgressive and the icky, finding plenty of both in the offensive fine art at a downtown gallery where her narrator briefly works. (She has a field day mocking the ridiculous reviews these shows receive.) Reading her, you gawk and balk but can't turn abroad.
I won't take chances spilling the beans, but Moshfegh then heavy-handedly foreshadows her denouement that it should come equally no surprise to anyone who's half-awake. It certainly puts her graphic symbol'south suffering in perspective. More chiefly, it marks a bold — if not entirely earned — spring to a less solipsistic worldview and a broader relevance for this provocative author. Every bit for her narrator, let's simply say it's a serious wakeup call.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/10/627447444/rest-and-relaxation-is-as-sharp-as-its-heroine-is-bleary
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