A review by mediaevalmuse
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

dark funny

3.0

This book has artistic merit, but in all honesty, it just wasn't a book I was going to enjoy. I picked it up not knowing what I was getting myself into, and despite liking the writing, the whole thing was just unpleasant. Perhaps it's because I'm not a fan of bleak stories set in the vague past. But again, that's my preference. 

WRITING: Moshfegh's prose is well-crafted: it flows easily, advances at an appropriate pace, balances showing and telling, etc. It also does a good job of creating various moods, wavering between despair and absurdity. For the themes that Moshfegh wants to explore, I think her style works. It's descriptive and sometimes blunt, and I always felt the bleakness coming in at every sentence.

PLOT: The plot of this book follows a cast of characters in the medieval town of Lapvona over the course of about a year. During this year, there is a murder, a drought, a wedding, and a bunch of other events, each revealing (to often absurd degrees) the length of human greed, selfishness, and corruption.

A lot of this book is gross. There is scatalogical imagery, sexual assault, casual violence, and so on, so if you're at all sensitive to those things, I'd advise skipping this book altogether. Intellectually, i understand why all these things were included in the book, but I personally don't get much enjoyment or narrative/artistic satisfaction from them.

But credit where credit is due: I think Moshfegh made a story that moved at an appropriate pace, neither rushing nor plodding along, and things were just interesting enough where I felt like I could stick it out to the end rather than DNF. Perhaps it's because the characters are the type you love to hate and I wanted to see them get their comeuppance. Perhaps things were just so bananas that I continued out of curiosity. Whatever the reason, I think the overall shape of the narrative worked well and kept the ball rolling, even if that ball was a pile of shit and piss.

CHARACTERS: There are a lot of characters in this book, so I'm not going to go over them individually. Instead, I'll just generally say that I think Moshfegh did a good job making them somewhat eccentric and well-rounded, despite how unlikable most of them are. We spend a lot of time in the heads of various characters, so we get to know their attitudes towards a number of things: religion, pleasure, self-importance, and so on. Each character was horrible in their own way, which made them interesting, and I was at least interested in watching them evolve (or devolve) over the course of a year.

TL;DR: Lapvona has artistic merit, but this kind of bleak storytelling is just not for me. 
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