Skip to main content

Review 8: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen
I sincerely believed that if there were less of me, I would have fewer problems.

This pretty much sums up Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen. The titular protagonist is a sort of anti-heroine, but without the swagger that word tends to conjure. Instead, she has been raised in a loveless home, and has never had friends. She hates her town, her family and most of all, herself. Her misanthropy springs from the world’s rejection of her, rather than the other way around.

Moshfegh says that she wrote Eileen as an experiment, following a paint-by-numbers guide to commercial fiction. But the Man Booker shortlisted novel comes out as anything but conventional. It’s more a masterclass in characterisation – light on plot, but heavy on unreliable narration, building Eileen’s miserable day-to-day existence up until the character slouches fully off the page.

It’s a really sad and well-observed depiction of how women can internalise hatred. Eileen is disgusted by her own body. She refuses to wash, but fears that people might smell her. She refutes the idea of sex, but daydreams about it constantly. She eats hardly anything for days, then takes a battery of laxatives to purge herself. She is the nexus of self-hatred and self-control.

Like building an Airfix model or remembering to floss, reading this novel is a slow burn, but you are rewarded for your effort. The introduction of Rebecca, with all the apparent charm and manipulation that her du Maurier namesake implies, doesn’t come until at least halfway through the novel, but it’s really where the plot begins. There’s no big climax in the book, just a steady grinding inevitability that takes you from beginning to end. This is no bad thing.

Moshfegh’s writing is stark and piano-wire tense, sentences whipping like snapped guitar strings. She gives Eileen the cold, distant voice of a hypnotist’s victim, and yet this arouses pity rather than any remove. This isn’t a comfortable or a happy read, but it’ll certainly stick with you.

--

This is my eighth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 23: Monstress, Vol. 1: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Fantasy is a funny beast (ironically). It’s easy to dismiss it as dragons ‘n’ arrows; the land of a thousand quests, where you can’t have a word without starting it with s. But when you find someone who gets it right, it’s like finding – oh, I don’t know – a mysterious golden ring or something far-fetched like that. It has a power that sucks you in. The Hugo award-winning Monstress is a fantasy graphic novel that does it right. The world-building is superb, leaving few cracks in its foundations, and you’re aware of the wider plot in the same way as, when you’re on a train, you’re aware of the rails. That said, this isn’t for everyone. The world that Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda have painstakingly constructed is grim and gritty. In the words of a film about milkshake: there will be blood. There’s really quite a lot of it, revealed in all sorts of interesting and violent ways. There’s also a fudge-ton of swearing. These don’t feel particularly gratuitous, for the most part –...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 42: The Vegetarian by Han Kang

It’s hard not to respect trees. I try my best, but they always get me in the end, the cunning green-and-brown scamps. They don’t do anyone any harm. They just stand there, absorbing nutrients from above and below, pumping out oxygen with the quiet confidence of a wizard puffing his pipe. It would be wrong to call that the central premise of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian , because it’s not. But the idea of comparing human morality against the gentle harmlessness of vegetation rings through its core. The central character, Yeong-hye, a housewife, decides to stop eating meat. While this seems like a fairly small choice and one hardly worth building a whole novel around, the novel explores the reactions of her family and her own gradual slip into extremism in a slow-but-steady deterioration. The most intriguing, and in many ways frustrating, aspect to the novel is the impenetrability of Yeong-hye herself. You’re never quite allowed inside her head, and so have to observe her change from...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 44: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

Claudia Hampton, the star of Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger , is about as big a shit as you can imagine without actually being a psychopath or criminal. This book, then, is all the more impressive for being able to take such a dislikeable character and reveal the reasons why she is the way she is, and make you empathise and sympathise with her. Actually, before we get into that, let’s address the stripy lunar elephant in the room: Moon Tiger is a brilliant title for a book. It’s the sort of title I imagine that, when she came up with it, Lively lit a big cigar and swanned around the house for days chuckling to herself. A tiger! From the moon ! Whimsical diversions aside, this book has nothing to do with tigers or the moon, so get that out of your head right now. It’s actually about a woman evaluating the history of the world as it relates to her, and the discovery of the events in her life that developed her personality. It’s also a book that’s very concerned with the fal...
Post a Comment
Read more