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While plot is not the primary driver of a novel like My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the story does spin its wheels a bit in the middle... About halfway through the novel, the scattered references to time make you realize the novel is building towards 9/11. Is the motivation important to get the story? This languidly lovely, monied heroine is unusual for her, though her humorously flat cruelty is familiar... As self-destructive and semi-suicidal as the narrator sounds, one expects that My Year of Rest and Relaxation will evolve into a cautionary tale of addiction and idle hands making the devil's work. Cumming's mother's (and grandmother's) story is one that is filled with secrets and silence. By now, I've forgotten what the book is.
I only hope more readers come to regard its complex and unpalatable protagonist with the compassion she deserves. So, she forms a plan to sleep enough to be "reborn, " make her bad past a distant memory, and goes so far as to transform her apartment into a "sleeping prison" so she can fully escape the waking world. She is neither resting nor relaxing, but is instead doping herself into an unfeeling oblivion, sleeping 18-20 hours a day with the help of dozens of medications she monthly lies her way into getting from her negligent therapist. Each chapter is a deftly light touch, an individual memory, but together they come together as a deep family portrait. Something was getting sorted out. A profoundly idiosyncratic heroine becomes a universal figure of alienation, an archetypal quester in search of 'a great transformation. S) during the year the narrator is checking out; how does the author portray the era? My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh's darkly comic and ultimately profound new novel, also concerns itself with a miserable woman in her mid-20s seeking 'great transformation'... Regardless, it is a portrayal which should be celebrated for its frank, bruising authenticity. But when I put myself in her position, she really has zero responsibility to anybody else. I could say a lot of titles for this one, but in the end, I think I'll go with Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Yet, at other points in the novel she talks about having been out of college for around 5 years and she also mentions her birth is is 1973. Moshfegh's protagonist is brutally dreary, and the brutality of her dreariness is often very funny, but the book is really quite serious...
It also speaks to the myriad ways we can all choose to numb out and disconnect from life. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. I'd forgotten that at the end, she goes to the Met and touches a painting to prove to herself that "things were just things. I was just so frustrated while reading it and I just wanted it to end, to be honest. Dr. Tuttle, a brilliant comic creation, dispenses unhinged bromides and a raft of prescriptions with shocking yet welcome alacrity... Like Thoreau at Walden Pond or Bartleby preferring 'not to, ' Moshfegh's narrator is in flight from a world that has been too much with her. Jane Seymour – A book that delivered what you wanted. Moshfegh gives us with amazing narrative blankness—page after page, month by month, chapter upon chapter—the frictionless feeling of the depressive's days unspooling, dissolving... It was in this light that I selected My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. The climate anxiety felt very real. And yet, there was a deeper, more searing element of this narrative which truly entranced me, and which I feel has been largely overlooked in discussions surrounding it: grief. Set in rural Trinidad, this family drama about a missing twin is taut with both drama and emotional turmoil. That's what kept me reading even as my cringing muscles grew sore: feeling in my screwed-up face, barked laughs, and watery eyes the translation of that private kind of pain into something I could share. But then it also upset a lot of people.
It's week three of Corona Book Club, and we're discussing the third chapter of 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' – including the narrator's noughties wardrobe. In the novel, Moshfegh's protagonist describes herself as young, beautiful and rich – she lives alone in the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, is a recent Ivy League graduate, and lives comfortably off her considerable inheritance alone. The novel is the story of an attractive, wealthy young woman whose feelings of disaffection, alienation and n…. All the emptiness and drugged-up ennui might be a little much if it weren't for Moshfegh's trenchant critique and chromatic prose.
At a time where it's easy to feel like things are just set to be bad, it was comforting. There are plenty of negative words to describe the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation—she's detached and depressed, she's cruel and unfeeling—but Moshfegh writes her with such care and specificity I felt like I could live in her head forever. Whatever you may think of her novel's subject—and I'm still on the fence—you have to give Moshfegh props for her skill as a writer... As engrossing as it is, there's also something undeniably airless and off-putting about this novel. While her actions and treatment of other people are in no way justifiable, this novel understands that and lets her careless lifestyle serve as an amusing examination of a selfish 2000-and-something New Yorker. It says nothing and everything about our narrator's future, which we realize with horror, is our own as well. Rebanks takes you through the history of his family's farm and how (and importantly why) its management has changed over his lifetime. And, conversely, what she lacks as an adult: having zero parents and zero intimate relationships. All this is delivered as comic—it is comic—but it's not exactly funny, though of course we laugh... This raised some really interesting questions about what our bodies can and can't do with and without assistance, and what assistance really means. Robin Wall Kimmerer. Members get a 15% discount for purchase of the book club book at POWERHOUSE ARENA. The remarkable thing is that they're the same person.
This one might be a little divisive. Ultimately, the sleeper does and should become a better person—it's just that the worse one was a lot more fun. I knew of the theories that Kahneman and Tversky had developed and I had definitely been affected by their impacts, but I didn't know anything about the pair behind them or their friendship. This book, to me, is a wonderful reminder of the resilience in all of us. Her cynicism and despair over life, love and loss were relatable and yes, I too have met obnoxious people at art galleries, like the one she works at for a brief stint. It's small, but it really bothers me, lol. Moshfegh has established the parallels between both periods so well, the connective tissue that sees one epoch emerge monstrously from the other. Wanting not to face anymore of her life if it continues to bring her suffering. The thought of sleeping through this particular moment in the world's history has appeal. ' Despite her vaunted talent, Moshfegh isn't up to the task. The money involved is terrifying but the story Wiener told was so familiar it was almost comforting. It's a lovely story of trying to get to know your family and how difficult that truly is.