My Year of Rest and Relaxation
If you are skeptical about the usefulness of praise pages at the beginning of novels, test the ones at the beginning of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I can't guarantee that my review is objective because of them (I'll put some of them at the end of this article). When ecstasy is justified with such verve, it's hard not to embrace it. And now I look like a sheep. It happens.
Summary
A girl in her early twenties who describes herself as a young Lauren Bacall who just woke up or a Joan Fontaine with tousled hair has decided to take a year off. Life is wearing her down, and she just wants to get some sleep. She's found a psychiatrist who's out of touch and prescribes her sleeping pills at will. Just go to her appointments every month and pretend that her insomnia hasn't lessened and has actually gotten worse. This is not suicidal, she claims: on the contrary, she does it to get better, to be reborn in a way, more rested and more willing.
She listens to movies all day in a state of half-sleep, goes out occasionally for take-out coffees on the corner of her street, gets high nonstop and sleeps as much as possible. She doesn't talk to anyone or see anyone except her "friend" Reva, a bulimic and highly insecure girl who persists in going to see her despite her total lack of good will. She plans to continue like this for a year.
Impressions
This book is unhealthy. Its title is misleading, its wise and classic cover is misleading. Taking drugs until you fall into a coma is not my definition of "rest". But between you and me, who hasn't fantasized about falling off the map and escaping reality in peace? There's a delicious tension between fantasy and horror and I loved it.
I also laughed a lot, with a very black humor. The narrator is impressively cynical. It's unpleasant and mean, but at the same time, one can't help but agree with her a little. It's true that the friend Reva seems pretty despicable, like the rest of the humans in general in the story. It's true that, from a certain angle, life is boring and ridiculous. And it's clear that if you keep this point of view long enough, you just want to sleep all day.
It makes you think. Especially the ending, which I'm still not sure I liked. But mostly, it's highly entertaining, and I devoured it in two days. I'll be hearing from you.
... because I promised you
This book isn’t just buzzy and maniacally entertaining – it’s a mean-spirited, tenderhearted masterpiece.
New York Post
I was cringing during every moment of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and yet I could not put the book down… It is mostly, almost by juxtaposition, about the realness of a more subtle and very private expression of pain, no matter the cause, no matter how seemingly trivial. That’s what kept me reading even as my cringing muscles grew sore: feeling in my screwed-up face, barked laughs, and watery eyes the translation of that private kind of pain into something I could share.
Claire Benoit, The Paris Review
The bravado in Moshfegh’s comprehensive darkness makes her novels both very funny and weirdly exhilirating… As in Eileen, Moshfegh excels here at setting up an immediately intriguing character and situation, then amplifying the freakishness to the point that some rupture feels inevitable. Her confidence never flags; hers are the novels of a writer invigoratingly immune to uncertainty and self-doubt.
Slate
