After finishing this book, there's a lot of back and forth in my mind about how to feel. I'll leave the spoiler-free review: I liked it, but I'm not sure that everyone will.
More detailed insights:
So the issue I had trying to update as I read in this case wasn't that I read too fast to keep notes but rather that it's difficult to annotate a chapter because a lot of this is an almost running consciousness that is occasionally divided by time periods and moderately big revelations. I also spent so much of my time flipflopping on my feelings around this book. This is my first Otessa Moshfegh book and I have heard that she is notorious for writing difficult Main Characters.
The protagonist(?) is pitiful. That's the best way I can put it. This is a very accurate and barefaced rendition of what it's like to be horribly, critically depressed and grieving. The MC's plan is to sleep through a year in order to recalibrate and refresh herself following a hollow existence punctuated by tragedy, trauma and heartbreak. She has one toxically adoring friend who also has mountains of issues. She is spiteful, manipulative, callous and...not all that unlikable. Honestly speaking I think that the depiction of the MC as this terrible person burdened by her own mental health is refreshing. She is a wasp who is completely aware of her privlages, beauty and money but is hollow in every sense of the word and aware of it. There is no romantic element to this book. There is no revelation of a man coming to heal her pain. There is no lightbulb moment where she treats Reva better. There is no self-care. Only sleep. It's the woeful apathy that comes with depression that finally gets a spotlight.
I suppose what I want to add in regards to negativity is that after Reva's mother's funeral there is a large section of book before she allows Ping Xi to treat her as an art exhibit that seems to drag on for a long time. I feel like this book could have been condensed and still have the same impact it did. I also want to put my two cents in that this book is nowhere near as deep as it might be trying to put forward it is. It's a very brutal depiction of someone not so much battling depression as...co-existing with it? but it's not trying to make any broader message that actually holds much weight. I saw that someone who rated this poorly claimed to not understand the intellectualism but... I don't think there's much to really be found that's worth worrying about. The MC is written as a self-absorbed nightmare and sometimes that itself is a struggle to settle down and read. The pacing replicates the drug-induced daze the MC is going through perfectly.
It's written in a very descriptive and easy to picture manner - New York is a perfect backdrop to this story (between this, Cleopatra & Frankenstein and American Psycho). The surrealism adds a whole other layer to this story, making it more than memorable, the oddly terrifying concept of her drug induced wandering over days doing things that the MC has no memory of. But what it comes down to is that this book will either be something you thoroughly enjoy or thoroughly dislike and I totally can see both sides of the camp. I'm putting my tent on the 'like' section but I can easy move over and visit the dislike side.
