Moopy Book Club - January '20: 'My Year of Rest & Relaxation' by Ottessa Moshfegh

Cerro de Casa

Cerro de Casa

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From Good Reads:

This is 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.

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. 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. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. 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.
 
the courier messed up and shipped it to my MUM who lives 260 km in the OTHER DIRECTION. I'm visiting this weekend though and will start then. sorry for the delay y'all!
 
I started yesterday, it’s going down very smoothly, so you’ll have no trouble finishing it quickly.

Going into this right after Crime and Punishment, it’s a bit unfair to compare, but this feels like chick lit light and so far I’m a bit on the fence, but we’ll see how it turns out.
 
RaspberrySwirl said:
But to quote what you just said about Circe, doesn’t this narrator feel even more indifferent?
Click to expand...

Yeah, but I suppose it's the point given her depression so I'm more forgiving. We'll see though. Circe was a goddess of magic for crying out loud and still "MEH" about it all. :D
 
Circe was indeed hardwork, but I was rooting for her through out the story. This bitch I’m already wanting to OD and die... :D but yeah, I’m still only 50 pages in.
 
Yeah. Calling it now too that given
that the novel starts in September 2000 in NYC, a year later will be 9/11.
 
Finished this yesterday. I’m a bit disappointed, I don’t think it really lived up to the hype.

spoiler part:
There was so much that could be explored and delved into more, but instead we pretty much got a journal of what pills she was on with some flashbacks in between (especially in the first half of the story).
There was a lot I could identify with; two years ago when I finally dealt with my sleeping problems and got sleeping medication (the mildest sort of antihistamine) all I wanted to do is sleep. I can see why she was doing that, but as I said, I wanted more depth and more action.


3/5
 
3/5 - it was fine. It would have been fifty pages shorter if she didn't list every single pill she took, every time.

I found the most interesting bits were her interactions with other people and the least her own thoughts. When
Reva took her pills
I was happy to finally have some action.
 
I actually liked this book because of all those reasons. I liked the narrative style and the monotonous stream of consciousness aspect of it - which worked really well as an audiobook, by the way.

4/5
 
My mother was diagnosed with leukemia just last week and now I almost wish I could escape life and reality and sleep for a whole year. :bad::bruised:
 
I've still got 50 pages to go but criticizing the lack of action from a book which title is practically the ANTI THESIS to action is... well I'm not gonna say anything :D
 
DONE

what can I say, I'm an icy nihilist so to learn that her apathy was rooted in childhood trauma after all was a bit disappointing. and wouldn't it be fun if her comatose experiment turned out to have had NO EFFECT AT ALL. I liked it though! credit to that actually very beautiful last page as well
 
We were a bit ahead of time when we read this. This story suddenly feels much more relevant. They should sanction sleeping pills to the masses, let us sleep our problems and pandemic away.
 
Or, let’s put it this way: imagine sleeping for a year and then instead of waking up to 9/11, waking up to the Corona virus quarantine.
 
What a prophetic choice of book for us in January! Slightly eerie actually.

Maybe for Jan 2021 we should go for something more utopian!
 
There is this new Korean book that won the booker prize(?) that seems like a good contender.
 
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