My Year of Rest and Relaxation

To say I hated this book would be the understatement of the century. I am completely baffled by the glowing reviews. It’s not often I read a book that leaves me with such a feeling of anger at having spent the time to read it, but here we are. Every character made my blood boil, especially our narrator, a self indulgent, angry, spiteful, wreckless and insufferable waste of a person. I found the general idea of this book to be interesting, but our narrator is just irredeemable. I kept hoping she wouldn’t wake up and the rest of the book would just be blank pages so that I didn’t have to read anymore.

I was excited to begin reading this book. As I read I became more and more depressed. I don’t know why I kept reading or finished it. If you feel like committing suicide read this book. I would not recommend this book to anyone. I hated it.In short this is a book about a young woman who schemes to use sleeping pills, psychotropic drugs, and alcohol to put herself to sleep for a year. What a horrible idea when so many deaths occur from prescription drug abuse. There were no redeeming qualities to this book including character development.

For years I've been longing for a novel that would compell me to read the way I did as a child--voraciously and without distraction. Given the fact that I can barely read anything these days without taking breaks to play Words With Friends, I had all but given up; then came "My Year of Rest and Relaxation." Because the novel and its author, Otessa Moshfegh, are this year's darlings, I hesitated; popular books usually disappoint me. But I read this one in two days, and would have in a single sitting if I'd had the chance. It is simply the best novel I've read by a living author, and one of the best I've read in my life. Moshgegh's unnamed narrator is 26, beautiful and model-like, a Columbia graduate with a degree in art history and a job in a Chelsea art gallery. She's also alone and completely empty inside. Her cold, distant parents died while she was in college; she has no siblings; her unofficial boyfriend is a horrible jerk; her only friend is an annoying bullemic who she mistreats at every opportunity. Caught sleeping on the job, the narrator decides to put her firing to good use by devising a year-long rest cure. Armed with a huge variety of psychotropic drugs, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medications prescribed by a shady, criminally incompetent psychiatrist, she shuts herself in her Upper East Side apartment and, supported by her inheritance and unemployment benefits, starts sleeping full-time. Nevertheless, things keep happening, both to her and to the world, during her fateful year off. Moshfegh's writing is brilliant, but what sets her apart from even the best of her contemporaries is the consistent pace of the novel. There are no dead spots, no dull passages, and none of the unevenness that ruins so many contemporary novels. "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" is that rarest of things: a profound, literary page-turner. I can't wait to read it again, along with everything else Moshfegh has published, and can't recommend it highly enough.

Critical accolades woke me to read Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. As a writer, I relish making unlikable characters interesting, if not sympathetic, and eagerly anticipated this challenge as a reader. Alas, Moshfegh’s privileged narrator has none of the above mentioned virtues. Nor does she offer unique or redeeming insights into the everyday beauty that ameliorates life’s pain. She’s as trite and tedious as the mindless state of unconsciousness rendered by her Rite Aid warehouse of medications. The reader’s boredom is not even relieved by complex secondary characters; their nastiness wallows in stereotype. While Moshfegh has a good eye for detail and is in command of her craft, the elaborate shell she creates here is hollow. Emerging from the slumber induced by this novel won’t leave readers feeling refreshed, but with a sour taste best relieved by vigorous tooth brushing and starting the new day with a more worthy book.

The "protagonist" is self-centered, lazy, disconnected, boring character, and the author goes on repetitively for chapters with the story of how one woman becomes a total sloth. I found myself skipping multiple pages at a time and the story just slogged on with more of the same. Great if you want to blow several hours with a thoroughly boring character. The 'payoff' is not worth the pain.

The main character was just about plausible enough for me to stick with this book until the end, although the repetitive, contrived, unpleasant and implausible nature of quite a lot of what was going on nearly had me giving up about a third of the way through. She was also basically quite hard to like or find sympathy for, and it was only because of her apparently mindless tolerance for such a horrible boyfriend, her attitude to her poor friend, her cold, addicted mother, and the fact she wanted to just check out of consciousness for a year meaning that she must be really miserable that squeezed a bit of affection for her out of me.I found a kind of voyeuristic interest in all the (prescription) drugs she took but whilst I don't really know enough to judge, I couldn't help thinking that if she'd actually taken all that it would have made her a lot more ill and quite possibly led to a rather different ending (and yes I know some of the medication was fictitious but I'm not sure that makes it any better). As she also seemed depressed and traumatised by her life as a backdrop to her decision to have a year of R&R, it would have been much more interesting and relevant to have heard a bit more about this and would certainly have given some colour and dimension to the character.I also thought her psychiatrist was thoroughly unlikely and the scenes between the two reminded me considerably of the much-better drawn patient/practitioner piece in Miranda July's The First Bad Man.Nice cover and intriguing title, but doesn't live up to either. Not funny either really - I get what we were supposed to be laughing at, but tbh it was not my idea of a laugh, even a dark one.

I love Ottessa Moshfegh – I hope one day to meet her at a NYC bar and spend hours drinking in her company. Do you hear me, Universe?So. "My Year of Rest and Relaxation". We are introduced to three ladies, who are presented to us solely for the sake of entertainment: the nameless main character, who God knows how is still alive if you take into account the rainbow of pharma she consumes 24/7, her beautiful friend Reva, a walking disaster and a thesaurus of quotes of the “help yourself” variety, silently suffering from bulimia, and Dr. Tuttle, a psychotherapist/shaman. All of them are multifaceted, beautiful and unique, not unlike the snowflakes. All possess a variety of problems, just dig a bit deeper. Each of them could be a marvelous heroine of a book in her own right. Love them!If you think that the book about a rich if troublesome girl ("tall and thin and blond and pretty and young") going to sleep by way of narcotic hibernation is not your cup of tea – I urge you to reconsider. This is a great book. But man this book is so much more than just a story about the nameless sleeping beauty! It's scary stuff!Moshfegh’s new book is another tough nut, which will not be liked by everyone (think about all the [metaphorically] broken teeth). But if you like black humor, sarcasm and satire – this is cool stuff. Passivity as a rebellion has never looked so enticing.Ottessa, let me buy you a drink!

Grimly unrealistic. The heroine, Eztelle, takes copious quantities of Xanax and other benzos every day for a year, then stops altogether. If she'd done this in real life, she'd be dead from the seizures that come with cold turkeying off high doses of benzos. Instead, she is fine and has a 9/11 epiphany.Eztelle isn't a sympathetic protagonist. She keeps reminding us of how beautiful she is every few pages. Just no.I won't be reading anything else by Ottessa.

I loved this in the beginning. It was one of those books that sucks you in so fast and furious, and kept up that momentum for a while, even when it’s just the protagonist trying to get her sleeping pills. It’s amusing, not out and out funny (I’m looking at the dr and the drug store employees that aren’t phased). But as another reviewer put it, it’s like Girls, where it has it’s moments but just really highlights white lady privilege- the very thing is maybe sets out to make fun of.I think I might not have ‘gotten’ it and that ending was just meh. Especially as soon as her friend got promoted, I was like she’s going to die in 9/11.Again, not sure I got it, but it doesn’t seem to be about anything. If you were to describe the plot, it would be woman wants to sleep for a year, woman takes pills to stay asleep for a year, the end.To be fair, by the time it was £1.99 on the kindle, my expectations were high. So maybe it would have always been a strong ok book.And despite saying all this, I found myself reaching for the kindle as much as possible and not noticing how far I was into it, because it sucks you up in it’s world.

Inspired by two fellow readers on Goodreads, I was encouraged to give Ottessa Moshfegh a try. As I had, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” lurking on my kindle, this seemed the obvious starting point.The narrator of this novel is unnamed, blonde, beautiful, thin and has enough money to live without working. Having given up her job in a New York art gallery, she decides to live on the rent money from her parent’s house, go on unemployment and start a plan to hibernate for a year…This is a difficult novel to review, as much of the ‘action’ revolves around the thoughts of our narrator. Her search for a therapist willing to dole out prescription drugs like sweeties, in order to aid her constant sleeping. The neediness of her friend, Reva, bulimic and having an affair with a married man. Her calls to Trevor, a past lover. Mostly, though, this is about her love affair with medication and the effects it has on her.When she begins to venture out of her apartment while hardly conscious, have black outs and spend her money on items she cannot recall ordering, you are pulled into her dreamlike world. Only events, like the death of Reva’s mother, while resented as making her interact with the world, reveal some of her own history and force her outside the walls of her self-imposed house arrest. I was stunned by this novel and adored every page. I need to read more by the wonderful Ottessa Moshfegh and I am grateful that I was led to read her.