In his fledgling literary career, ottessa moshfegh She has demonstrated an interest as healthy as it is variable due to the disparity of themes towards diversity of intentions as a narrator. What is usually known as free verse with its surprised readers already won and safe.
Unless the current publisher adopts its experimental spirit, we will surely find ourselves facing a new Margaret Atwood, always surprising. A writer with the most unusual concentration of the creative gift and the will to focus it on the argument that truly moves the author at every moment.
To start with, we find in Ottessa a taste or a fondness for more popular genres. Mysteries or thrillers from which to take the story to your ground, to the unfathomable imaginary that breaks with the canons of the genres themselves to which the plot is initially circumscribed. Something like Mariana Enriquez when he begins to narrate obscurities with his point between gothic and lyrical. Breaks, to call it in some way, very much appreciated in a necessary revision of the plot in the face of so much offer sprinkled with similar resources and twists almost always intuited.
Except when Ottessa throws himself into the open grave to address existential edges, arguments made chronic of our lifestyle and its risks ... One of those authors with whom each new book leads us to the most unexpected adventures of the very act of reading as a discovery ...
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Ottessa Moshfeg
Death in his hands
Writing is atonement and placebo. Even if it's just to testify about a murder or even disguise a confession. In fact, perhaps a handwritten note is the safe conduct so that the witness or even criminal on duty can continue with his life as if nothing had happened. He already left the note there, for God to know, for anyone to judge. The rest that can happen are all coincidences ...
While walking her dog through the woods, Vesta Gul comes across a handwritten note. 'Her name was Magda. No one will ever know who killed her. Was not me. This is his corpse. " But next to the note there is no corpse. Vesta Gul, who has just moved in after her husband died and knows no one in her new home, is not sure what to do with this information. He begins to become obsessed with the figure of Magda and to ponder the various ways in which they could assassinate her, if indeed such a thing happened.
Her isolation leads her to a series of ideas that begin to find a reflection in real life. In an exciting and terrifying way, the pieces seem to fit together: to fit with each other and with the darker areas of their own past. There are only two options to solve this mystery: a banal and innocent explanation or a deeply sinister cause.
My year of rest and relaxation
nil, the nothing that arises from within. One of those fascinating Latin terms. Because around him even philosophy awakens, the thought that nothing has value. An overcoming of stoicism down to the cellular level. Nothing is sought, nothing is wanted, nothing is missing ...
En My year of rest and relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh makes Manhattan the epicenter of a civilization, that of the year 2000, dominated by apathy. Like a dark sleeping beauty, the narrator of this novel decides to lock herself up for a year in her apartment in one of the most exclusive areas of New York, assisted by a huge inheritance and a large number of drugs, to dedicate herself to sleeping and watching movies. by Whoopi Goldberg and Harrison Ford.
The beginning of a supposedly fast-paced century finds our protagonist sleeping on the couch with the TV on. With a lot of cynicism, series, commercial films and narcotics, and at the cost of severing all human ties, anyone can cope with this life. Now what we want is cope with it?
My name was eileen
Eileen collects that kind of daily fatalities that can make one a shadow of what could have been, or even what was. Because Eileen was probably not even a child in the notion we all have of childhood. This is how someone ends up living with a soul made into a monster; and this is how the monster ensures that the sinister ends up arriving with the magnetic force of the inevitable disguised as an ominous chance.
Christmas offers little to Eileen Dunlop, a modest and disturbed girl caught between her role as a caregiver for an alcoholic father and her clerical job in Moorehead, a juvenile hall fraught with everyday horrors. Eileen tempers her sad days with wicked fantasies and dreams of fleeing to a big city. Meanwhile, he fills his nights with petty thefts at the local grocery store, spying on Randy, a naive and muscular reformatory guard, and cleaning up the mess his father leaves at home.
When the bright, beautiful, and cheerful Rebecca Saint John makes her appearance as Moorehead's new educational director, Eileen is unable to resist their miraculous budding friendship. But in a Hitchcock-worthy twist, Eileen's fondness for Rebecca makes her an accessory to a crime.
Other recommended books by Ottessa Moshfegh
lapvona
Lo castizo sells when it comes to presenting a story with marked features of the autochthonous for the terroir on duty. It may be through an intimacy capable of bringing us aromas and even touches from distant places, or to offer us a generous glimpse with which to escape from the most limiting ethnocentrism. But even a noir plot can be approached with that point of approach to idiosyncrasy that transforms any genre into something much more complete.
In the medieval village of Lapvona, little Marek lives in abject poverty with his widowed, devout and aggressive father Jude. Lame, with a deformed face and a distorted conception of reality, Marek only finds comfort in his fear of God and in his visits to Ina, an old woman with hidden knowledge who lives far from the world.
When a violent death places him at the epicenter of palace life, Marek becomes a true aristocrat within the court of the corrupt and self-absorbed feudal lord who rules Lapvona. However, his new status will be threatened by the arrival of a mysterious pregnant woman with features suspiciously similar to his.
McGlue
A debut work is always a declaration of intentions, the reason for each person to write. The rest of the works will deeply disguise this leitmotif that can originate from the most spiritual to the most capricious. The issue is the passion for writing. In the case of Ottessa we find characters who come from the shadows, from physical and spiritual underworlds. Without a doubt a search for abysses of the soul that will always accompany the author.
Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue, a rough sailor, a cheat and a scoundrel, speaks to us from the filthy hold of the ship in which he is held, in a state of intermittent drunkenness that makes reality ambiguous. He doesn't remember anything, he wanders between memories and weaves a fine line between the fog of alcohol and the traps of memory.
It is possible that he killed a man, and that man was his best friend. Now, she just wants a drink to quiet the terrifying shadows that accompany his unwanted sobriety.
Halfway between a pirate tale and a western, the first novel that Moshfegh wrote smells of vomit, blood, gunpowder, whiskey, salt, sweat and old wood, and shows that from the beginning she knew how to be nihilistic and superlative.
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