My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh

For a book essentially about a woman sleeping her life away, this one is pretty apt considering the current lock-down circumstances. Like Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator, I spend my days in a fog, watching old movies and drinking coffee. Unlike the narrator, I do not consume a vast amount of pharmaceutical medication to achieve this state, nor is my incarceration strictly a ‘voluntary’ confinement.

Going from the blurb, I thought I would be reading a book about a spoilt, vapid woman. ‘Look at all she has’, it flouts. ‘Beauty, money, time - she doesn’t need to work for her expensive Calvin Klein jeans, her lipstick, her rent…’ But Moshfegh doesn’t allow us this shallow perception of the narrator’s character. In fact, she doesn’t allow us surfaces at all. From the cluttered countertops of her New York apartment to the envious friend, each aspect of the narrator’s life is put on display and dissected. It sits before us; a sad and crumpled mess of empty pillboxes, mentally abusive boyfriends, absent parents…

The plot is twisted, compelling and in places bitterly funny. Even though the narrator literally does little else other than ‘rest’, it is her psyche which motivates. I loved being able to slip inside her mind, take a seat on her sweat-stained couch and listen to her heart thumping through her medicated sleep.

There is so much depth to this book, but it never runs the risk of coming across as ‘try-hard’ or pretentious. For example, Doctor Tuttle is on the surface your stereotypical ‘mad doctor/ scientist’ type but read deeper and she could be representative of a society built around quick fixes, one which does not care for (or even remember) the individual. In this way it is significant that the narrator herself remains unnamed: she perhaps stands for a wider dislocation between the self and society.

I don’t want to spoil you the pleasure of reading the final chapter but let me say that it was beautiful.

Yes, I will be thinking about this one for a while.



In three words? Twisted, compelling, psychological