my year of rest and relaxation – Cannonball Read 17

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My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Mosfegh

May 18, 2025 by Zirza Leave a Comment

The year is 2000, the place is downtown Manhattan. Our protagonist is young, beautiful and rich. She has a degree in art history from a prestigious university and a job at a trendy art gallery. On the face of it, she is living the Manhattan dream, but she is deeply unhappy. All she wants is to sleep. Her theory is that her cells will renew themselves that way, that she will thus become a new person. So she locks herself into her apartment, takes staggering […]

“Having a trash chute was one of my favorite things about my building. It made me feel important, like I was participating in the world. My trash mixed with the trash of others. The things I touched touched things other people had touched. I was contributing, I was connecting.”

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

February 13, 2019 by scootsa1000 3 Comments

My Year of Rest and Relaxation was on a bunch of “Best of” lists at the end of 2018, and there was something about the cover that drew me to it. And now that I’ve finished it, while I’m glad I read it to see what the fuss was all about, I honestly have no idea if I liked it or hated it. I think both. But mostly hated it. We have an unnamed narrator living in Manhattan in 1999-2000. She’s in her 20s, has […]

If I had been a man, I may have turned to a life of crime. But I looked like an off-duty model. It was too easy to let things come easy and go nowhere

July 14, 2018 by vel veeter 2 Comments

Ottessa Moshfegh books are pretty divisive I imagine. I have to only imagine since I have loved all of them, this one the most, but I can also see how unpleasant they might come across. I don’t think you have to like the narrator of this novel to be absolutely mesmerized by her and this narrative. It’s about a woman who recently graduated from Columbia trying to sleep away all of fall of 2000 and the most of 2001 using a potent concoction of various […]

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