i too want to sleep forever and never do anything
this was really unique and comfy but also kinda suffocating

-some parts were a tad too crude for the rest of the book?
-she kinda sucked as a person but it was still super entertaining and i would read this again ( )

wow 200 pages about someone sleeping. loved it ( )

Our narrator, a young, beautiful, and wealthy New Yorker, hates everything and everybody, so she decides to take a sort of gap year and just sleep. With the help of many, many different medications prescribed by an absolutely batty psychiatrist, she does just that.

It's absolutely true that you can enjoy a book with zero likable or relatable characters, especially if it's well-written and full of witty social commentary. It's just not for me right now. ( )

Moshfegh has written misanthropic fiction in which her wretched characters suffer deeply set during the 1850s (McGlue), the 1950s (Eileen), the current day (Homesick for Another World), and now that nightmarish period of American meaninglessness between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, when all we really had anymore was peace and prosperity. The unnamed narrator of this novel is the least wretched so far in material terms - she's a wealthy heiress and beautiful as a supemodel - but that means little. She'll hold her own in existential ennui.

Her career in the arts world is a joke because the art world is a joke, completely colonized by capitalism (“Stacey Bloom had started a magazine called Kun(s)t about ‘women in the arts,’ mostly profiles of rich art-party girls who were starting their own fashion lines or opening galleries or nightclubs or starring in indie movies. Her father was the president of Citibank.”). Her parents were always cold to her and now they're both dead. She dislikes her only friend. She decides to use prescription medication to sleep most of a year away, hoping to emerge a changed person on the inside (but not the outside - "I was born into privilege," I told Ping Xi. "I am not going to squander that. I'm not a moron.").

Does it work? Moshfegh suggested that she might be prepared to believe in the possibility of transformation from miserableness to happiness in Eileen, as that character narrated her story decades afterwards the story's events from evidently a much better place. Here she seems ambivalent. The story ends on 9/11, with the image of a jumper falling to her death from the Towers: "I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake."

9/11 as an awakening moment has been used a lot, of course, but usually it's meant in an active, improving way. Here it's referenced using the image of someone just becoming aware moments before plummeting to their death, so... pluses and minuses, I suppose. Pluses and minuses. ( )

Not my cup of tea. ( )