![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Perhaps there is something shocking about the premise of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, in which a 24-year-old woman decides to take such a daily – indeed, hourly – cocktail of psychopharmaceuticals that she essentially sleeps, and sometimes sleepwalks, through an entire year. Nothing terrible or infantile about either of these things, and in the painstaking attention she pays to her misfit characters, from the namesake of her debut novel, Eileen, to the protagonists of her novella McGlue and her many superb short stories, there is a great deal more layered compassion than there is boring transgression. She has a singular instinct for the jangled interiority of loners and outsiders, most of them women, and for their uncomfortable and often unpretty inhabitance of their bodies. Moshfegh, who has published a novella and a short story collection in addition to her novels, is that kind of writer: tempting to pigeonhole and likely, then, to write an epic, uncategorisable opus from the point of view of the pigeon. ![]() Ottessa Moshfegh’s publishers position her as an enfant terrible – the phrase is front and centre on the press materials for this, her second novel – which is, ironically, the kind of cringey move at which the narrator of a Moshfegh novel would direct a perfect, withering put-down. ![]()
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