Review: My year of rest and relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

 

Format: 289 pages, Paperback

Published: June 25, 2019 by Penguin Books

Fiction

Library

Ok so this book was really weird, and I finished it a way cos I was home. 

The narrator of the book has taken a year of rest and relaxation. Her parents are dead, she was in a bad relationship, and now she has found a really bad shrink that gives her every pill imaginable. She mixes them together, she has blackouts for days and she sleeps. She sleeps days away. She watches movies.

A really weird book, because not much happen. She does have one friend that comes by now and then and tries to get her out. She thinks about her ex and calls him. 

It was an exploration into misery, and I could not stop reading

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.

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. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.