But the surface elements of her life seem to controvert her need for extreme rest and relaxation. Told in the first person, past tense, the narrator recounts her attempts, beginning in January 2000, to “escape the prison” of her mind and body.
“Oh, sleep, nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness,” says the narrator, extolling her hibernation drive. Unlike the stumbling, confused, misfit actors of the author’s earlier fiction, the central character of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” is focused on supine inaction, realizing that only deep sleep can be an exit from her immediate context and an entrance to self-renewal. From the granular misapprehensions and failed connections that fuel the stories collected in “Homesick for Another World” (a finalist for the 2018 Story Prize) to the grand, violent effort for misguided justice and muddled liberation that closes her novel “Eileen” (winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2016), these characters crave disengagement from their present contexts as they attempt to redirect themselves toward new starts, new futures. They must overcome their foibles or the follies of their counterparts to gain entry to elsewhere, to these alternate identities. The characters in Moshfegh’s fictions are searching for other sites of being: other worlds, other towns, other selves. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
“I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. With a hunger for detachment and direction, the complicated unnamed narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel begins a deep sleep regimen.
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