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A review by potatq
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
4.0
Rating it 3 stars instead of 2 because of Reva and agreeing to an extent on how depression was depicted.
Edit after a few months: I often find myself thinking about this book. I didn’t particularly like it and I remember hating the main character with a burning passion, but the concept of it is still so intriguing to me because that was exactly the point. The character is supposed to be unlikeable. She was written that way to depict how depression is not how people romanticize it to be. You can become a horrible person and project your self-hatred to people who care the most about you. The lethargy, the exhaustion, the emptiness. It’s all so accurately woven into the story.
Depression is not crying your eyes out 24/7. It’s being so empty inside that you literally cannot give a fuck about anything anymore and sure, that can translate into you being a shitty person. Of course it’s not an excuse to treat people horribly, but sometimes that internal hatred mixed with insecurities is expressed externally; those closest to you are often the ones to receive the hits. It doesn’t make you any less shit of a person though - which our MC definitely is. But it’s also true that depression heavily affects our ability to form relationships with other people.
Whenever I am in depressive episodes, I think back to this book and how accurately it portrayed just wanting to sleep through life - not caring about anything anymore - so I’ll give credit to the book for that.
Having more time to reflect on this, I really appreciated how unique the perspective is. It’s rare to see a main character completely succumb to nihilism. This still remains a 3 stars for me, maybe a 3.5 at most, since I definitely do feel that the author had so much more to explore with such a unique concept. I wish she had dug deeper and provided us with a more satisfactory conclusion.
That being said, I would still recommend this. It definitely takes a bit of time to appreciate it since at initial finishing of the book, I hated it. But this book is the kind that stays for a while for you to think back on, to reflect further - at least for me.
Edit again before 2022 ends: This book has stuck with me. I keep thinking about this book without meaning to. It’s so rare for me to think so much of a book that isn’t a 5 star read to this degree. Maybe life has just got me down in the dumps, but the main plot in this book sure seems like a genius idea to me right now. I think it says a lot about a book to be able to have this much impact that it keeps creeping up its way in my thoughts . So for that, I change my rating to 4 stars.
Edit after a few months: I often find myself thinking about this book. I didn’t particularly like it and I remember hating the main character with a burning passion, but the concept of it is still so intriguing to me because that was exactly the point. The character is supposed to be unlikeable. She was written that way to depict how depression is not how people romanticize it to be. You can become a horrible person and project your self-hatred to people who care the most about you. The lethargy, the exhaustion, the emptiness. It’s all so accurately woven into the story.
Depression is not crying your eyes out 24/7. It’s being so empty inside that you literally cannot give a fuck about anything anymore and sure, that can translate into you being a shitty person. Of course it’s not an excuse to treat people horribly, but sometimes that internal hatred mixed with insecurities is expressed externally; those closest to you are often the ones to receive the hits. It doesn’t make you any less shit of a person though - which our MC definitely is. But it’s also true that depression heavily affects our ability to form relationships with other people.
Whenever I am in depressive episodes, I think back to this book and how accurately it portrayed just wanting to sleep through life - not caring about anything anymore - so I’ll give credit to the book for that.
Having more time to reflect on this, I really appreciated how unique the perspective is. It’s rare to see a main character completely succumb to nihilism. This still remains a 3 stars for me, maybe a 3.5 at most, since I definitely do feel that the author had so much more to explore with such a unique concept. I wish she had dug deeper and provided us with a more satisfactory conclusion.
That being said, I would still recommend this. It definitely takes a bit of time to appreciate it since at initial finishing of the book, I hated it. But this book is the kind that stays for a while for you to think back on, to reflect further - at least for me.
Edit again before 2022 ends: This book has stuck with me. I keep thinking about this book without meaning to. It’s so rare for me to think so much of a book that isn’t a 5 star read to this degree. Maybe life has just got me down in the dumps, but the main plot in this book sure seems like a genius idea to me right now. I think it says a lot about a book to be able to have this much impact that it keeps creeping up its way in my thoughts . So for that, I change my rating to 4 stars.