My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel Paperback – 1 Oct. 2024

I read it right after I finished Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang which also plays with real/unreal. This was so good. I don’t recognize the satire which is mentioned in the reviews. I read it as an account of someone desperately seeking reality and realness. Someone seeking true feelings. The way she goes about it is dissociating. For herself but also for me. Sometimes when I stopped reading I had to take a few moments to get realisme who I am and what I was doing. I was impressed by this. The story is so compelling and the writing really does it justice.

So I was quickly hooked on the story of the very complicated girl - did we ever know her name? I do love the author's honesty and how bleak life can seem, nothing much happened but it was still compelling. But it felt like a rushed ending, we're supposed to believe she's just fine now after a specific period of time? Maybe I missed the point of it or it wasn't meant to be examined too closely.

The main character was just about plausible enough for me to stick with this book until the end, although the repetitive, contrived, unpleasant and implausible nature of quite a lot of what was going on nearly had me giving up about a third of the way through. She was also basically quite hard to like or find sympathy for, and it was only because of her apparently mindless tolerance for such a horrible boyfriend, her attitude to her poor friend, her cold, addicted mother, and the fact she wanted to just check out of consciousness for a year meaning that she must be really miserable that squeezed a bit of affection for her out of me.I found a kind of voyeuristic interest in all the (prescription) drugs she took but whilst I don't really know enough to judge, I couldn't help thinking that if she'd actually taken all that it would have made her a lot more ill and quite possibly led to a rather different ending (and yes I know some of the medication was fictitious but I'm not sure that makes it any better). As she also seemed depressed and traumatised by her life as a backdrop to her decision to have a year of R&R, it would have been much more interesting and relevant to have heard a bit more about this and would certainly have given some colour and dimension to the character.I also thought her psychiatrist was thoroughly unlikely and the scenes between the two reminded me considerably of the much-better drawn patient/practitioner piece in Miranda July's The First Bad Man.Nice cover and intriguing title, but doesn't live up to either. Not funny either really - I get what we were supposed to be laughing at, but tbh it was not my idea of a laugh, even a dark one.

I love Ottessa Moshfegh – I hope one day to meet her at a NYC bar and spend hours drinking in her company. Do you hear me, Universe?So. "My Year of Rest and Relaxation". We are introduced to three ladies, who are presented to us solely for the sake of entertainment: the nameless main character, who God knows how is still alive if you take into account the rainbow of pharma she consumes 24/7, her beautiful friend Reva, a walking disaster and a thesaurus of quotes of the “help yourself” variety, silently suffering from bulimia, and Dr. Tuttle, a psychotherapist/shaman. All of them are multifaceted, beautiful and unique, not unlike the snowflakes. All possess a variety of problems, just dig a bit deeper. Each of them could be a marvelous heroine of a book in her own right. Love them!If you think that the book about a rich if troublesome girl ("tall and thin and blond and pretty and young") going to sleep by way of narcotic hibernation is not your cup of tea – I urge you to reconsider. This is a great book. But man this book is so much more than just a story about the nameless sleeping beauty! It's scary stuff!Moshfegh’s new book is another tough nut, which will not be liked by everyone (think about all the [metaphorically] broken teeth). But if you like black humor, sarcasm and satire – this is cool stuff. Passivity as a rebellion has never looked so enticing.Ottessa, let me buy you a drink!

Everyone in this book is dislikable, yet that doesn't make me dislike it. If anything, It makes me want to live the opposite like to the narrator, to experience it the world in full-force, to have passions, to cry. All of this was unnervingly relatable and I've chosen to take it as a warning of how not to love my life. I've highlighted so many passages in this book: Ottessa makes a wonderful use of stream of consciousness in this novel. This is my first non-romance novel in a while, so it was a real change in rhythm. Nevertheless, it was a fairly quick read. I recommend pairing this with the audiobook as well.

Such good prose and bone dry comedy, for this alone it’s more than worth the read. But this is a book that plumbs the depths by attending to the surface. In this sense it’s on a par with something like,say, ‘Lolita’. The unnamed narrator is rich, troubled and young. She decides one day to sleep her way through the mourning that can’t be done for her dead parents and loveless childhood. It’s a book about regression and addiction, written through the jaded gaze of someone squinting against the too-harsh light of reality. Assisting her down the wormhole is the gloriously insane Dr Tuttle. The finale is a curiosity and unexpectedly optimistic, but ultimately ambiguous. What is it to sleep through life- what is it to remain wide awake?