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A review by rzarate9696
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
5.0
Contender for my favorite book read this year.
I recently traveled to New York for the first time and I'm still feeling the romance of being there. You're so insignificantly small in a city that has so many things going on beyond you and your experience. Once that wave rolled over me I was left with the feeling of so much possibility and freedom.
Moshfegh takes that sense of freedom and shits it onto the gilded stage of a Manhattan art installation in the year 2001. You're placed in the care of the book's narrator as she casually drags you along her pill-induced reminiscence of memories greasy with neglect and apathy. Her present circumstances are no less dreary, as she plans to medicate herself into sleeping through most of the year to save herself the trouble of dealing with, well, anything.
She also spends most of her journey ripping her closest friend apart with backhanded comments and barbed descriptions. Reva folds to the pressures and expectations of early 2000s New York, while our narrator glides through life on the magic carpet of beauty, wealth, and snide self-awareness.
There's no initial sense of tragedy as the narrator gets exactly what she wants out of this experience: a year, or close enough, of rest and relaxation. She seems renewed by the experience, and also happy with the satisfaction of giving all of her expensive clothes to Reva, and seemingly ending their friendship with the gesture. The pain comes with Reva's death at the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's not necessarily the physical loss that impacts, but the spiritual one, in that whether you were caught up in the material trappings of the turn of the century or you chose to "rise above it all" through the art scene and self assured intellectual superiority, the facade of it all came crashing down with the towers.
The narrator finds some solace in watching a woman leap from one of the towers, whom she considers to be Reva. She finds herself compelled by the notion that the woman is diving headfirst into her fate, wide awake.
I recently traveled to New York for the first time and I'm still feeling the romance of being there. You're so insignificantly small in a city that has so many things going on beyond you and your experience. Once that wave rolled over me I was left with the feeling of so much possibility and freedom.
Moshfegh takes that sense of freedom and shits it onto the gilded stage of a Manhattan art installation in the year 2001. You're placed in the care of the book's narrator as she casually drags you along her pill-induced reminiscence of memories greasy with neglect and apathy. Her present circumstances are no less dreary, as she plans to medicate herself into sleeping through most of the year to save herself the trouble of dealing with, well, anything.
She also spends most of her journey ripping her closest friend apart with backhanded comments and barbed descriptions. Reva folds to the pressures and expectations of early 2000s New York, while our narrator glides through life on the magic carpet of beauty, wealth, and snide self-awareness.
There's no initial sense of tragedy as the narrator gets exactly what she wants out of this experience: a year, or close enough, of rest and relaxation. She seems renewed by the experience, and also happy with the satisfaction of giving all of her expensive clothes to Reva, and seemingly ending their friendship with the gesture. The pain comes with Reva's death at the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's not necessarily the physical loss that impacts, but the spiritual one, in that whether you were caught up in the material trappings of the turn of the century or you chose to "rise above it all" through the art scene and self assured intellectual superiority, the facade of it all came crashing down with the towers.
The narrator finds some solace in watching a woman leap from one of the towers, whom she considers to be Reva. She finds herself compelled by the notion that the woman is diving headfirst into her fate, wide awake.