My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 4 / 5 stars
Switching up gears with a genre I do not often turn to and reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s infamous “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”. Cynical, very real and heavily character driver – Moshfegh succeeds greatly in her depiction of the dark realities of life – because not everything is rainbows and sunshines, sometimes life gets hard and all we want to do is go into a year-long “hibernation”.
The narrator is young, beautiful, rich – in the eyes of the general population she should be happy, shouldn’t she? Well… she may be taken care of pretty well but the reality is a lot different- she has absolutely no one in her life. Her only “friend” Reva is envious and spiteful. Her love life is a mess and she is constantly seeking comfort in her on and off relationship with Trevor who treats her like an object. And lastly her therapist Dr. Tuttle, who is the light at the end of the tunnel as she is the endless ‘drug’ supplier.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is an absolutely unhinged story exploring wealth privilege, the monotony of depression and apathy for life. Set in 2000 New York city, our narrator decides to go into full “hibernation” for a whole year with the help of sleeping pills prescribed by probably the most questionable therapist on the planet. So she takes a break from her shitty job which frankly speaking she doesn’t even need as she lives comfortably with her inheritance money. The portrayal of the narrator’s character and her daily struggles is beyond fantastic. We see how she slowly detaches herself from this world and its ‘norms’. Days become nights until she can no longer tell in which moment of life she exists. There is a constant feeling of lethargy, stillness.. and we all patiently wait to see when will the other shoe drop and what will happen next. She is constantly testing the limits of her life – seeing which pills will make her forget the most, what will happen if she blacks out for 2, 3, 5 days in a row.
In her desperate need to acquire more and more medications for her ‘hibernation’ plan, the narrator perfectly masters the art of manipulation. The depths into which she is willing to go in order to detach herself from reality have no boundaries and as the story progress we see her completely new outlook on life. And just when we think that there’s a happy ending to this tragic story, life reminds us that sometimes the worst is waiting patiently for us to happen.
Dark humour, toxic, cynical and absolutely bizarre at times, My Year of Rest and Relaxation will challenge your morals and walk you through someone’s existential crisis. What an absolute gem!
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