Moshi mosh motherfeghers! Otessa? More like Grotessa! All bad jokes aside, this is a grotesque book. As with Homesick for Another World the author specialises in feelings of disgust. This takes many forms. Eileen, the protagonist and narrator, has many features that seem designed to make the reader feel discomfort. Physical things like her extreme malnutrition, her dirtiness, her habit of wearing her dead mother’s ill fitting clothes, her oceanic bowel movements and her propensity to vomit. Psychological disgust and repulsion are also front and centre. Eileen’s homelife is as depressing and squalid as the house itself. Her delusional, alcoholic father treats her like a slave and only speaks to abuse and denigrate her. Her work at a correctional facility for boys is mundane and repetitive. Her internal life is also sordid and degenerate. She fantasises about killing her father and plans to run away. In essence, everything is miserable and seems stage managed to make your stomach turn. It’s laid on very thickly and this can be a little much. However, it does serve to emphasise how mundane and unhappy Eileen’s life is both internally and externally.
There are two big turning points in the book. One - the arrival of Rebecca, a new educational consultant, at Eileen’s work and two - the subsequent happenings of their early friendship. The pace of the book is slow and drudging to begin with, which I enjoyed. Things suddenly explode into action later on. Rebecca appears in the book like a character from another world. She is beautiful, self-confident, educated and appears upper class and cosmopolitan. Eileen falls in love with her instantly and is disbelieving that Rebecca will even give her the time of day. It brings some meaning and enjoyment into her life beside her plans of running away, which she seems to lack the bravery to execute before Rebecca arrives. The shining ray of brilliant, almost implausible, sunshine that is Rebecca doesn’t last long before it is considerably dimmed and contorted by the novel’s monstrous filter. This was probably the best bit of the book for me. I loved the chaotic incongruity of what Eileen thinks is Rebecca’s house when she goes to visit. Eileen is expecting stylish decor, luxurious homeware and exotic alcohol served in refined glassware. When she arrives to discover a scene of poverty and disarray that Rebecca couldn’t possibly have curated in the few weeks since she moved to X-ville; it is obvious that something is up. Has Eileen imagined Rebecca’s sophistication at work? It is certainly possible given how deranged Eileen seems. Has Eileen invented Rebecca entirely? Will Rebecca turn out to be a murderous psychopath? I felt like it might be a caricatured plot twist like this but in the end it was so much better. Rebecca has had a chat with a, previously silent, inmate at the correctional facility. He tells her that the reason he killed his father is because his father used to rape him every night with the complicity of his mother who used to give him an enema after supper. If this seems quite heavy, it is a good example of the general tone of the novel; it is disgusting and repulsive in the extreme. In any case, it turns out that Rebecca has driven to the boy’s mother’s house and locked her up in the basement in order to extract a confession, to precisely what ends remains uncertain, and has called Eileen to assist her. This is a good plot twist and an excellent way of explaining the insane dissonance of Eileen’s view of Rebecca at work and what she encounters when she arrives.
Rather less good are the following scenes. The boy’s mother is threatened by Eileen with a gun and confesses. Apparently she permitted the rape of her son through a sense of spousal responsibility and obedience. She also says her husband’s raping of her son coincided with rejuvenation of her husband’s sexual desire for her, which she enjoyed enough to ignore the darker goings on surrounding it. Because the husband used to fuck her after sodomising his son, she gets vaginal infections and starts administering the enemas in an attempt to stop this. This all seems rather muddled, implausible and hastily flung together after the more considered pace of the earlier parts of the novel. Things continue in this vein when Rebecca drops the gun that Eileen happens to be carrying because her drunk father can’t be trusted with it anymore and, lo and behold, it accidently shoots the implausibly bound captive mother in the arm. It all feels a bit slapdash especially after the fantastic plot twist with Rebecca.
There are some excellent portions of dark humour in the book. Eileen’s awakening after a night of drinking with Rebecca on p152 is funny and accurately describes the disorderly aftermath of extreme intoxication. On p202 Eileen is perturbed by ‘Rebecca’s disregard for decorum, to put it lightly’ when, in the absence of a corkscrew, she smashes open the bottle of wine Eileen has brought on the countertop. Conversely, the scene where Eileen steals Jesus’s swaddling from the nativity scene to wrap up the bottle of wine seems a forced and clunky attempt at symbolism.
The book had some really great bits but wasn’t consistently good. It had an uneven, patchy pace and structure. With the exception of the scenes in Rebecca’s ‘house’ and the associated plot twist, I prefered the more quotidien sections. Everything I have read by Otessa Moshfegh is so militantly depraved and ugly, I wonder why she chooses to exclude more positive feelings and sentiments from her work so entirely. Perhaps it is something deep and philosophical relating to sin and moral corruption being more permanent facets of the human character than, for instance, joy, love and beauty. Whatever the case, I didn’t dislike this book for being dark. I did feel that it is overdone and poorly executed in some places. If it remains the sole focus of her work, would this end up making her a rather one dimensional author? It’s surely too early to tell but I think it would be a shame if such a good writer limited herself in this kind of way.
Saturday 25 August 2018
Thursday 16 August 2018
Otessa Moshfegh - Homesick For Another World
The prose is excellent and highly readable. It sounds casual and unrehearsed, like the author is simply writing down their internal monologue. However, there’s such a wide range of characters contained in this collection of short stories this can’t be the case. These, seemingly off hand, reflections also convey rich narratives of surprising depth even though the stories are rarely more than 20 pages of double spaced text. It’s impressive and very skillfully done. The language isn’t overly pretentious and the author does a good job of effacing her own style and personality from the writing. There’s the occasional glimpse of the writer behind the characters. For example, any beige substance is usually referred to as ‘dun’ coloured and body parts are often called by the physiological name for the bone within them - mandible, clavicle.
In spite of the broad variety of characters there’s a distinctive aesthetic to the stories. It’s a bit like Wes Anderson films. It’s identifiable and somewhat dreamlike but as opposed to being cute and quirky, it’s dark, nightmarish and misanthropic. Sometimes this goes a little far for my tastes. Everyone’s a dysfunctional drug addict or alcoholic. All marriages are empty and loveless. All sex involves extensive anal fingering or dildoing. The story that best exemplifies this is The Locked Room. It’s so outlandish but retains an ostensibly realistic setting unlike A Better Place, which is explicitly other worldly and much better for being so. The Locked Room felt self-consciously weird and disgusting and this made it cartoonish, shallow and meaningless. Malibu also falls into this category. As do Mr Wu, An Honest Woman and The Surrogate in less gratuitous and definitive ways. They all had a slightly inauthentic ring. This isn’t always the case by any means. The boyfriend in The Weirdos is odd and wonderfully unpleasant in an entirely believable and interesting way. The self-obsessed hipster in Dancing in the Moonlight is also brilliantly observed. Even if his abysmal negotiations in acquiring an ottoman are a bit of a stretch. Most of the other stories were engaging, credible and well written. Her younger characters have a richer texture than her older ones. A good example of this is An Honest Woman where the only thing less plausible than the narrative is the behaviour of the old man. I suppose that could be because the author is younger but some of her best characters are male and she’s not a man!
I really enjoyed reading this largely for the excellent prose. The narratives can be a little too self consciously gruesome or downright unlikely, which is also the case for a few of the characters. Nonetheless, the stories are rich and create a powerful ambience. When good characters and narrative combine it’s fantastic as the writing is of a uniformly high quality.
In spite of the broad variety of characters there’s a distinctive aesthetic to the stories. It’s a bit like Wes Anderson films. It’s identifiable and somewhat dreamlike but as opposed to being cute and quirky, it’s dark, nightmarish and misanthropic. Sometimes this goes a little far for my tastes. Everyone’s a dysfunctional drug addict or alcoholic. All marriages are empty and loveless. All sex involves extensive anal fingering or dildoing. The story that best exemplifies this is The Locked Room. It’s so outlandish but retains an ostensibly realistic setting unlike A Better Place, which is explicitly other worldly and much better for being so. The Locked Room felt self-consciously weird and disgusting and this made it cartoonish, shallow and meaningless. Malibu also falls into this category. As do Mr Wu, An Honest Woman and The Surrogate in less gratuitous and definitive ways. They all had a slightly inauthentic ring. This isn’t always the case by any means. The boyfriend in The Weirdos is odd and wonderfully unpleasant in an entirely believable and interesting way. The self-obsessed hipster in Dancing in the Moonlight is also brilliantly observed. Even if his abysmal negotiations in acquiring an ottoman are a bit of a stretch. Most of the other stories were engaging, credible and well written. Her younger characters have a richer texture than her older ones. A good example of this is An Honest Woman where the only thing less plausible than the narrative is the behaviour of the old man. I suppose that could be because the author is younger but some of her best characters are male and she’s not a man!
I really enjoyed reading this largely for the excellent prose. The narratives can be a little too self consciously gruesome or downright unlikely, which is also the case for a few of the characters. Nonetheless, the stories are rich and create a powerful ambience. When good characters and narrative combine it’s fantastic as the writing is of a uniformly high quality.
Tuesday 7 August 2018
George Orwell - A Clergyman's Daughter
This is the worst Orwell book I’ve read so far. The book starts off well enough with a good description of a clergyman’s daughter’s life of drudgery. Her father is stuck up, lazy, distant and lives beyond his means, which makes her life all the more difficult. He squanders what savings he does have speculating on the stock market with disastrous consequences. This is very sad because they could be used to help his daughter’s desperate attempts to keep him in the style he has become accustomed. All of a sudden, she finds herself homeless and on the streets in London. This is where the trouble began for me!
From a narrative perspective, it feels a lot like Orwell has decided that he wants to write about something else or doesn’t know how to continue with the story and so attempts a clumsy segway into something else he has written. Dorothy's life on the street reads a lot like Down and Out in London and Paris and I had a suspicion that this was excess material from Orwell’s tramping trips that had been adapted to flesh out this novel. This suspicion was reinforced by the fact that Orwell makes no real attempt to explain how Dorothy came to experience such a dramatic change in circumstances. All that’s offered by way of an explanation is that she, ‘lost her memory.’ The newspaper articles that appear about her disappearance reproduce her nosy neighbour’s account that she eloped with the loose living Mr Warburton. However, this isn’t supported by the later stages of the book when Dorothy recovers from her amnesia. There’s no proper account of what happened to her and I found that deeply unsatisfactory.
Dorothy’s amnesia also seems to be a strange mixture of remembering some things while forgetting others. Usually, she forgets those things that would be most beneficial for the plot and this is an annoying and lazy characteristic of the book. She also fails to be prompted about her identity by photos of herself in the paper, the incongruity of her accent and education or any other of a thousand possible signs that might give her pause for thought. She dumbly accepts her circumstances and moves through periods of hop-picking, sleeping rough and begging until Orwell runs out of scenes of life ‘on the road’ and has her remember who she is all of a sudden. For me, this was a very weak narrative.
Once she does remember who she is, her father disowns her because of the scandal and she receives help from her aristocratic cousin who gets her a job as a school mistress. This period is just as disjointed as the other scenes of life on the road and reminded me of Bronte’s Villette, which I consider to be a terrible book! Eventually, she is given the sack by the abominable proprietress of the school. Luckily, it turns out that the slandering neighbour who gave the account of Dorothy’s elopement with Mr Warburton has herself been discredited and that Dorothy’s reputation is now clean. Again, this all struck me as rather too convenient and another example of Orwell’s lazy narrative construction in this book. Far from showing her horrible father any resentment for being tardy in helping her once she did eventually remember who she was, Dorothy seems delighted to return to her former life. This is implausible. For someone to show no anger or bitterness at having had such gruesome experiences of poverty and homelessness is frankly unbelievable. Indeed, Dorothy hardly seems to have undergone any changes whatsoever and moves seamlessly from her original condition to homelessness and complete amnesia to being a school mistress and back to her original condition! It’s all far too clumsy and facile to make a decent plot. The only substantial change that seems to have happened to her is that she is no longer religious. One might think that this loss of faith might have some impact on her choice of life but apparently she is just as happy to act as a church slave without belief as she was to act as one while she still believed! The book finishes with some trite, sentimental philosophising from Dorothy about the joy of duty and performing her plodding toil without complaint.
The prose in the book is good and this is its salvation. There are also some enjoyable portions like the opening chapters describing her life with her father and the ones about hop picking. However, the book as a whole had a very slapdash feel and an almost inconceivably weak narrative. It’s as if Orwell wrote three different stories; one about the domestic life of a clergyman’s daughter, one about life as a hop picker and vagrant and another about life as a schoolmistress in a bad school. It seems like he then tried to join the three parts together in five minutes while using as little of his creativity and intellect as possible! Both the plot and the psychology of Dorothy are unimaginable in the extreme and this really spoiled the book for me.
From a narrative perspective, it feels a lot like Orwell has decided that he wants to write about something else or doesn’t know how to continue with the story and so attempts a clumsy segway into something else he has written. Dorothy's life on the street reads a lot like Down and Out in London and Paris and I had a suspicion that this was excess material from Orwell’s tramping trips that had been adapted to flesh out this novel. This suspicion was reinforced by the fact that Orwell makes no real attempt to explain how Dorothy came to experience such a dramatic change in circumstances. All that’s offered by way of an explanation is that she, ‘lost her memory.’ The newspaper articles that appear about her disappearance reproduce her nosy neighbour’s account that she eloped with the loose living Mr Warburton. However, this isn’t supported by the later stages of the book when Dorothy recovers from her amnesia. There’s no proper account of what happened to her and I found that deeply unsatisfactory.
Dorothy’s amnesia also seems to be a strange mixture of remembering some things while forgetting others. Usually, she forgets those things that would be most beneficial for the plot and this is an annoying and lazy characteristic of the book. She also fails to be prompted about her identity by photos of herself in the paper, the incongruity of her accent and education or any other of a thousand possible signs that might give her pause for thought. She dumbly accepts her circumstances and moves through periods of hop-picking, sleeping rough and begging until Orwell runs out of scenes of life ‘on the road’ and has her remember who she is all of a sudden. For me, this was a very weak narrative.
Once she does remember who she is, her father disowns her because of the scandal and she receives help from her aristocratic cousin who gets her a job as a school mistress. This period is just as disjointed as the other scenes of life on the road and reminded me of Bronte’s Villette, which I consider to be a terrible book! Eventually, she is given the sack by the abominable proprietress of the school. Luckily, it turns out that the slandering neighbour who gave the account of Dorothy’s elopement with Mr Warburton has herself been discredited and that Dorothy’s reputation is now clean. Again, this all struck me as rather too convenient and another example of Orwell’s lazy narrative construction in this book. Far from showing her horrible father any resentment for being tardy in helping her once she did eventually remember who she was, Dorothy seems delighted to return to her former life. This is implausible. For someone to show no anger or bitterness at having had such gruesome experiences of poverty and homelessness is frankly unbelievable. Indeed, Dorothy hardly seems to have undergone any changes whatsoever and moves seamlessly from her original condition to homelessness and complete amnesia to being a school mistress and back to her original condition! It’s all far too clumsy and facile to make a decent plot. The only substantial change that seems to have happened to her is that she is no longer religious. One might think that this loss of faith might have some impact on her choice of life but apparently she is just as happy to act as a church slave without belief as she was to act as one while she still believed! The book finishes with some trite, sentimental philosophising from Dorothy about the joy of duty and performing her plodding toil without complaint.
The prose in the book is good and this is its salvation. There are also some enjoyable portions like the opening chapters describing her life with her father and the ones about hop picking. However, the book as a whole had a very slapdash feel and an almost inconceivably weak narrative. It’s as if Orwell wrote three different stories; one about the domestic life of a clergyman’s daughter, one about life as a hop picker and vagrant and another about life as a schoolmistress in a bad school. It seems like he then tried to join the three parts together in five minutes while using as little of his creativity and intellect as possible! Both the plot and the psychology of Dorothy are unimaginable in the extreme and this really spoiled the book for me.
Saturday 4 August 2018
George Orwell - Burmese Days
The prose in this book was a bit more floral than what I’ve come across in Orwell before. The voice is more confident than that of Down and Out in Paris and London but also more verbose. I found it inferior to the more matter of fact tone of Down and Out in Paris and London. On the other hand, this book is more a through-going novel and so probably requires a slightly more expansive style. There is a lot more dialogue, which isn’t always a good thing. It’s not as lucid and pithy as his later books like 1984 and Animal Farm. Some of the description is a bit self-conscious and occasionally floral. I wouldn’t call it bad but it’s not as tight as the other Orwell I’ve read.
The characters and the subject matter are far better. The lonely, debauched figure of Flory is very well drawn. He is at once pitiable and detestable. His solitary existence amongst the boring, racist pukka sahibs of the club is excruciating. The inhospitable climate and the extreme isolation of his station complete the misery. His recourse to boozing and fornicating seem understandable and I was sympathetic to the self-loathing he experiences as a consequence. Against this, the spineless way he refuses to support his friend Dr Veraswami is horrible to read and really turned me against him.
The appearance of a young Elizabeth seems to be his salvation and no one seems to believe this more readily than Flory even though the two are a wildly unsuitable match. Elizabeth is a dyed in the wool racist and of the same species as the rest of the club bores. However, in his desperation to find something that he likes about himself and his life, Flory thinks she’s everything he needs to make his life complete. After an amorous shooting trip where Flory kills a leopard, which proves to be a strong aphrodisiac for Elizabeth, I thought he would propose. Flory wastes this opportunity and is then cast aside by Elizabeth when she learns Flory keeps a local mistress. Elizabeth has also been informed by her Aunt that a better prospect was arriving in their remote region of Myanmar. This part of the story is very good and the unrequited fawning of the locals on the newly arrived Military Police officer, his singular interest in a casual acquaintance with Elizabeth and his vanishing departure are all excellent. Rather less good is the way Flory wastes another chance at proposing to Elizabeth by being loquacious. I thought that after his first experience that he would not lose even a second in proposing to her when his fortunes had, unexpectedly, turned. I was also rather disappointed that Flory didn’t have more of an epiphany about Elizabeth’s suitability after being so unceremoniously dumped by her in favour of the dapper young Verrall. That he thinks he is still in love with her is probably only an indication of how dire his life is and how little he is prepared to do about it given his indolent nature.
Flory’s great moment of triumph is good scene. It’s nice to see him act decisively for once! In the aftermath of the riot I was also pleased to see that Dr Veraswami’s stock had risen and U Po Kyin’s machinations against him appear to have failed. The two plots of native, subordinate scheming and love story of a despairing colonial are skillfully intertwined. I also liked the way the book ended with evil eventually triumphing. This seems an appropriate outcome given the acerbic criticism of the colonial system that Orwell maintains throughout the book. Of course, it’s sad to see Flory, a not wholly unsympathetic character, commit suicide. Nonetheless, I felt it was in keeping with Orwell’s criticism of the colonial system that no good should come of it. The only issue I had with the final plot twist, where Flory’s mistress runs into the church to disgrace him in front of the whole congregation including Elizabeth, is that it is hardly new information. Elizabeth is already aware of Flory’s actions. First, through her Aunt and then through Flory’s letter to her admitting his sins but asking for forgiveness after she dumps him for the first time. I suppose it is plausible that the hypocritical, superficial colonial society, as Orwell paints it, would only be prepared to tolerate indiscretions if they were kept semi-private. For example, Elizabeth’s uncle’s furious womanising whenever he gets away from his wife. This phenomenon seems to be well known within colonial society but perhaps doesn’t draw the same disgrace because it isn’t as highly visible as Flory’s embarrassment. Nevertheless, even though the scene is dramatic enough, it felt a bit hasty and stretched from a narrative perspective. Flory’s suicide also seems an overreaction if it is taken as an isolated response to this incident. It makes more sense if, like me, you feel he is pretty close to suicide at the beginning of the book before Elizabeth turns up. The scheming, unctious U Po Kyin is a perfect representation of the kind of pond life that thrives under the rotten colonial system that Orwell attacks so violently. He is at once thoroughly unpleasant but strangely pleasing in his cunning. His eventual success, alongside Flory’s suicide, are the climatic damnation of colonial society and administration in Burma.
I liked this book even though the prose isn’t the finest example of Orwell’s writing. It is a scathing criticism of the colonial system. The plot is enjoyable but perhaps a little weak in the scene where Flory is disgraced in the church. The characters are excellent throughout.
The characters and the subject matter are far better. The lonely, debauched figure of Flory is very well drawn. He is at once pitiable and detestable. His solitary existence amongst the boring, racist pukka sahibs of the club is excruciating. The inhospitable climate and the extreme isolation of his station complete the misery. His recourse to boozing and fornicating seem understandable and I was sympathetic to the self-loathing he experiences as a consequence. Against this, the spineless way he refuses to support his friend Dr Veraswami is horrible to read and really turned me against him.
The appearance of a young Elizabeth seems to be his salvation and no one seems to believe this more readily than Flory even though the two are a wildly unsuitable match. Elizabeth is a dyed in the wool racist and of the same species as the rest of the club bores. However, in his desperation to find something that he likes about himself and his life, Flory thinks she’s everything he needs to make his life complete. After an amorous shooting trip where Flory kills a leopard, which proves to be a strong aphrodisiac for Elizabeth, I thought he would propose. Flory wastes this opportunity and is then cast aside by Elizabeth when she learns Flory keeps a local mistress. Elizabeth has also been informed by her Aunt that a better prospect was arriving in their remote region of Myanmar. This part of the story is very good and the unrequited fawning of the locals on the newly arrived Military Police officer, his singular interest in a casual acquaintance with Elizabeth and his vanishing departure are all excellent. Rather less good is the way Flory wastes another chance at proposing to Elizabeth by being loquacious. I thought that after his first experience that he would not lose even a second in proposing to her when his fortunes had, unexpectedly, turned. I was also rather disappointed that Flory didn’t have more of an epiphany about Elizabeth’s suitability after being so unceremoniously dumped by her in favour of the dapper young Verrall. That he thinks he is still in love with her is probably only an indication of how dire his life is and how little he is prepared to do about it given his indolent nature.
Flory’s great moment of triumph is good scene. It’s nice to see him act decisively for once! In the aftermath of the riot I was also pleased to see that Dr Veraswami’s stock had risen and U Po Kyin’s machinations against him appear to have failed. The two plots of native, subordinate scheming and love story of a despairing colonial are skillfully intertwined. I also liked the way the book ended with evil eventually triumphing. This seems an appropriate outcome given the acerbic criticism of the colonial system that Orwell maintains throughout the book. Of course, it’s sad to see Flory, a not wholly unsympathetic character, commit suicide. Nonetheless, I felt it was in keeping with Orwell’s criticism of the colonial system that no good should come of it. The only issue I had with the final plot twist, where Flory’s mistress runs into the church to disgrace him in front of the whole congregation including Elizabeth, is that it is hardly new information. Elizabeth is already aware of Flory’s actions. First, through her Aunt and then through Flory’s letter to her admitting his sins but asking for forgiveness after she dumps him for the first time. I suppose it is plausible that the hypocritical, superficial colonial society, as Orwell paints it, would only be prepared to tolerate indiscretions if they were kept semi-private. For example, Elizabeth’s uncle’s furious womanising whenever he gets away from his wife. This phenomenon seems to be well known within colonial society but perhaps doesn’t draw the same disgrace because it isn’t as highly visible as Flory’s embarrassment. Nevertheless, even though the scene is dramatic enough, it felt a bit hasty and stretched from a narrative perspective. Flory’s suicide also seems an overreaction if it is taken as an isolated response to this incident. It makes more sense if, like me, you feel he is pretty close to suicide at the beginning of the book before Elizabeth turns up. The scheming, unctious U Po Kyin is a perfect representation of the kind of pond life that thrives under the rotten colonial system that Orwell attacks so violently. He is at once thoroughly unpleasant but strangely pleasing in his cunning. His eventual success, alongside Flory’s suicide, are the climatic damnation of colonial society and administration in Burma.
I liked this book even though the prose isn’t the finest example of Orwell’s writing. It is a scathing criticism of the colonial system. The plot is enjoyable but perhaps a little weak in the scene where Flory is disgraced in the church. The characters are excellent throughout.
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