"The fantasy of prolonged sleep—of giving up some days, a week, a season in pursuit of a state of peaceful rest that seems to constantly elude you otherwise—is something I have talked about with friends in the kind of erotic tones usually reserved for crushes or cake. When leisure time is increasingly commodified and even the most indulgent self-care practices reinforce belief in the Self as product, the desire to sleep it away to no end other than blissful obliteration may be the one true perversity left to us. Moshfegh plumbs this murky psychologia with her trademark gallows humor and real affection for her menagerie of fuckups. I devoured this novel in two days and emerged on the other side much like its protagonist: blinking in the bright light of day, wobbly-legged and tender, feeling completely pried apart and newly awake."
Publisher Penguin Books
Publication Date 2019-06-25
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Lauren A.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780525522133
From one of our boldest, most celebrated literary voices, a shocking and tender novel and a New York Times bestseller.
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. 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. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. 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. 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.
