PositiveThe Irish Times (IRE)Strange, surreal ... A committed, inventive and often comedic exercise in abstraction that by its disquieting final pages has moved beyond themes of exile and return to depict something more tragic.
Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen
PanThe Irish Times (IRE)What does it mean to be a novelist? How does one go about becoming one? How is a novel even written? All fine questions to pose, but the answers, as Murakami presents them in his new book Novelist as a Vocation, are somehow unsatisfactory. For one thing, the book doesn’t seem to know what it is. Is it a memoir? A collection of essays? A how-to guide? A setting straight of the record? No doubt books can and have been more than one thing, but Murakami is not exactly breaking new ground in the field of non-fiction writing. Nor does he want to, it should be added: he’s simply \'jotting down [his] thoughts\' ... Some thoughts are interesting; some are better left in the notebooks they’re scribbled in. The author’s stories from his days as the owner of a jazz cafe in the earlier part of the book make for quite engaging reading, though one wishes that the \'master storyteller\' (according to the back of my proof copy) might have used that mastery a little more in the telling of the rest of his story. Instead, the book devolves into a rather boring essay on literary prizes and how little the author cares about them (why, then, has he penned a piece on the matter?) ... The takeaway of these essays is there from the beginning: there’s no one way to becoming a novelist. My two cents? You might not even need to read a book on it.
Ottessa Moshfegh
MixedThe BafflerWhereas the extent of Moshfegh’s previous narrators’ own delusion has been ambiguous or slowly revealed, Lapvona gives away its secrets fast and for free. A barrage of forthrightly narrated insider knowledge, attributable to no one, leaves the reader with an unshakeable sense of how stupid, deluded, and misguided its characters are, how little they know of themselves and their relationships to one another ... doesn’t push the reader to feel much else for this tragic cast of characters ... This unrelenting cruelty and borderline sadism undoubtedly make for an interesting, if difficult, reading experience, and Moshfegh certainly pushes the boundaries of how much of it she can enact from her godlike perch ... the novel itself is revealed to be largely beside the point, its readers stupid for reading it. Throughout, Moshfegh lobs pointed comments at the creators and consumers of entertainment, to the extent that one wonders whether she is parodying the critical reception of her work ... A glimpse of the gutter would unnerve the best of us, but falling into it, fully, ought to devastate. Lapvona leaves the reader cold ... This is a novel that wants to—and succeeds—in alienating its readers, even the \'good\' ones. This is not because its characters are unsympathetic, or because of the farce it reveals itself to be, but because Moshfegh wields a crude power in her omniscience, at the expense of elegance. Lapvona’s narrator apparently knows everything, and the truth they deign to tell us is that everyone is delusional, stupid, and disgusting. There is admittedly something difficult about this truth, but the harder truth is that even delusional, stupid, and disgusting people are not devoid of their humanity.
