I've been reading good reviews all morning to try and figure out what I missed, but a lot of people who wrote positive reviews didn't actually like it either: it's an unpleasant reading experience, and a lot of the book's high ratings seem to be on the dubious merit of that unpleasantness. There's so little substance in the actual text that I'm not even sure how to go about this review. If you're here looking for recommendations, I'd give this one a pass and read the Kleeman instead.Īnother entry in the baffling 'women can be assholes too!' movement, My Year of Rest and Relaxation is all smoke and mirrors: Moshfegh is a good enough writer on a sentence level to make it seem like her book is about something, but I can assure you that it is absolutely not.
Instead I got 300 pages of vapid bullshit that seems unreasonably proud of itself. I was expecting something like You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine: a weird, disturbing book about a young woman dissociating from modern society.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation could have been good. 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. 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. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility what could be so terribly wrong? 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. 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. 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.
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