The Quick by Lauren Owen
526 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 6 to October 11
Rating: 4 out of 5
Short stories have broken my heart within an efficiency of pages—James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" (reviewed here) comes to mind. The Quick, however, might be the very first novel to have me bawling my eyes out within the first ten pages.
I've been wanting to read this book essentially since it came out; I found it on the new books shelf at my former local library and was immediately taken with its cover. This month, I've been feeling an urge to read horror, something I say every October, but this time I'm finally acting on it to some extent. The Quick seemed like the perfect place to begin.
In a Late Victorian London populated with enough vampires to round out several competing factions, bloodshed and grisly deaths can be found in spades, yet The Quick seems less interested in being chilling than in finding the tragedy woven throughout. It never again quite broke my heart with the same intensity it did in the beginning (though the last chapter came close), but sadness pervaded the novel like fog. It is a total bummer of a novel—but a beautiful bummer that earns every heartbreak.
Friday, October 11, 2019
Sunday, October 6, 2019
2019 read #16: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
289 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 29 to October 6
Rating: 3 out of 5
Can I recognize the quality of this book's prose, its emotional lucidity, and its narrative structure, while admitting that nothing about its characters or scenario appealed to me in any way?
When my partner MacKenzie recommended this book to me, I wondered how a book-length narrative could be sustained by the conceit of "someone with unacknowledged clinical depression tries to sleep for an entire year." Moshfegh's text is masterfully structured, establishing and expanding upon the concept by exploring how the "year of rest and relaxation" affected each aspect of the narrator's life, how she kept herself fed, how she sourced her sedatives, how she arrived at the desire for a year-long sleeping reset of her life in the first place. The pragmatic and emotional foundations of the narrator's "project" having been laid over the first third of the story as a sort of prologue, the middle depicts a single week or so around New Year's, the midpoint of the titular year of rest, as a new (fictional) drug causes her to have disconcerting blackouts and venture out from her sleeping bubble and quickly begin to spiral out of control.
The dry, detached quality of Moshfegh's prose provides an emotional scalpel that cuts uncomfortably deep, a descriptive inventory of a mental state in slow-motion collapse. There are also illuminating asides about the money- and fashion-driven fads of the high art world—insights that are likely routine in this sort of cynical, darkly humorous social satire, but felt fresh to me.
No doubt it seemed new to me because, frankly, I don't often read this sort of thing. I have an aversion to this sort of novel, the kind centered on a privileged and emotionally disconnected child of wealth who craters hard into drug abuse and self-absorption. Had, say, Bret Easton Ellis (or any number of interchangeable lit darling dudes) written this, I wouldn't even have cracked the cover. "I have too much money and my mom never loved me!" falls flat for me, never having had money or a mother. The narrator's dry inventory of her life includes numerous unadorned descriptions of her own appalling thoughts and prejudices, further alienating my sympathies.
Yeah, I know unappealing narrators are supposed to be artsy and au courant, but that's also another faddish affectation; there's absolutely nothing more refined or significant about enjoying stories about shitty people, and there's nothing wrong with preferring narrators who aren't awful.
I did find myself tearing up toward the end, as—spoiler warning!—a regimen of keeping herself drugged out for the final five months finally leads to the desired outcome, and the narrator finds herself softened and receptive and aware of the world around her at last. But then the last page has to go and become absolutely, preposterously silly, shoehorning on some tacky attempt to find grace and meaning in the fall of the Twin Towers. That last page ends a worthwhile and (to me, personally) challenging read on such a hack note. My year (and My Year) would have been improved had that been left on the editing room floor.
289 pages
Published 2018
Read from September 29 to October 6
Rating: 3 out of 5
Can I recognize the quality of this book's prose, its emotional lucidity, and its narrative structure, while admitting that nothing about its characters or scenario appealed to me in any way?
When my partner MacKenzie recommended this book to me, I wondered how a book-length narrative could be sustained by the conceit of "someone with unacknowledged clinical depression tries to sleep for an entire year." Moshfegh's text is masterfully structured, establishing and expanding upon the concept by exploring how the "year of rest and relaxation" affected each aspect of the narrator's life, how she kept herself fed, how she sourced her sedatives, how she arrived at the desire for a year-long sleeping reset of her life in the first place. The pragmatic and emotional foundations of the narrator's "project" having been laid over the first third of the story as a sort of prologue, the middle depicts a single week or so around New Year's, the midpoint of the titular year of rest, as a new (fictional) drug causes her to have disconcerting blackouts and venture out from her sleeping bubble and quickly begin to spiral out of control.
The dry, detached quality of Moshfegh's prose provides an emotional scalpel that cuts uncomfortably deep, a descriptive inventory of a mental state in slow-motion collapse. There are also illuminating asides about the money- and fashion-driven fads of the high art world—insights that are likely routine in this sort of cynical, darkly humorous social satire, but felt fresh to me.
No doubt it seemed new to me because, frankly, I don't often read this sort of thing. I have an aversion to this sort of novel, the kind centered on a privileged and emotionally disconnected child of wealth who craters hard into drug abuse and self-absorption. Had, say, Bret Easton Ellis (or any number of interchangeable lit darling dudes) written this, I wouldn't even have cracked the cover. "I have too much money and my mom never loved me!" falls flat for me, never having had money or a mother. The narrator's dry inventory of her life includes numerous unadorned descriptions of her own appalling thoughts and prejudices, further alienating my sympathies.
Yeah, I know unappealing narrators are supposed to be artsy and au courant, but that's also another faddish affectation; there's absolutely nothing more refined or significant about enjoying stories about shitty people, and there's nothing wrong with preferring narrators who aren't awful.
I did find myself tearing up toward the end, as—spoiler warning!—a regimen of keeping herself drugged out for the final five months finally leads to the desired outcome, and the narrator finds herself softened and receptive and aware of the world around her at last. But then the last page has to go and become absolutely, preposterously silly, shoehorning on some tacky attempt to find grace and meaning in the fall of the Twin Towers. That last page ends a worthwhile and (to me, personally) challenging read on such a hack note. My year (and My Year) would have been improved had that been left on the editing room floor.
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