My year of rest and relaxation could be read as a critique of escapism as a coping mechanism; perhaps, a commentary on the Western world before and after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York; a lot of irony is also directed to contemporary art, which is one of the major themes.
Upon your blog being commended to me I clicked first on your Ottessa Moshfegh review, since I've read enough conflicting opinions regarding "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" that I could never quite make up my mind whether to read it or not myself... You singled out a passage to denigrate, I think unjustly. "Sleep felt productive," &c. Extensive studies have shown not just that the mind keeps working 24/7/365, even whilst we sleep, but that the unconscious mind does a great deal of work in those sleeping hours and that people who report more active and complex dreams show better outcomes in terms of processing and moving through and recovering from trauma, and indeed in improving the circumstances of their waking lives. I refer you especially to the work of the late Dr Rosalind Cartwright, Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychology at Rush University. Sleep is productive. Things do get sorted out.
There's even a specific therapy modality called EMDR, which mimics REM sleep in order to help patients process traumatic events.
Sleep as a response to 9/11 is nowhere near as avoidant as it sounds.
Of course I've no idea whether Moshfegh was or was not aware of this literature when she penned her own; but there is precedent for novelistic intuition. Marcel Proust, for instance, knew by instinct that memory is a process rather than a repository, that each recollection is only as real as the last time you recalled it, that the truth of memory is imperfection and reconsolidation, nearly a century before Nader/Shafe/LeDoux began to prove it so by doing ghastly things to rats in the early 2000s.
I don't think it would really take awareness of neuroscientific research to write that passage, though, or to come up with the general premise of the book (as I understand it). All Moshfegh would've had to do is to talk to one (1) person living with chronic illness or disability. We all feel that way. That if we could only sleep, if we could just get some real rest and build up some real reserves, we might recover and begin our lives anew. I think it is a more common sentiment than an able-bodied reviewer could credit.
You've convinced me I should read it, though, and for that I thank you. :)
I did not “single out a passage to denigrate” — I did not denigrate anything. I quoted the passage because it felt exemplificatory of the protagonist's project of sleeping until she could be “better”. I don't doubt that sleep helps restore the body and the mind, in fact I am convinced it does, but the book's protagonist isn't seeking natural sleep at all, she's drugging her body into a stupor and hiding from her problems, choosing to seek drugs from an incompetent therapist instead of seeking a competent one who'd *actually* help her. She falsely pretends to be insomniac so the doctor will give her the strongest drugs available to knock her out. She has no chronic illness or disability. This is not something I am making up, it is literally in the text of the book.
In regards to your claim that “Sleep as a response to 9/11 is nowhere near as avoidant as it sounds.“: as mentioned, sleep is not framed as a response to 9/11 in the book because it simply hadn't happened yet during the sleeping project.
I am glad that my review still managed to convince you to read it, so you'll make up your own mind on the text!
Upon your blog being commended to me I clicked first on your Ottessa Moshfegh review, since I've read enough conflicting opinions regarding "My Year of Rest and Relaxation" that I could never quite make up my mind whether to read it or not myself... You singled out a passage to denigrate, I think unjustly. "Sleep felt productive," &c. Extensive studies have shown not just that the mind keeps working 24/7/365, even whilst we sleep, but that the unconscious mind does a great deal of work in those sleeping hours and that people who report more active and complex dreams show better outcomes in terms of processing and moving through and recovering from trauma, and indeed in improving the circumstances of their waking lives. I refer you especially to the work of the late Dr Rosalind Cartwright, Professor Emerita in the Department of Psychology at Rush University. Sleep is productive. Things do get sorted out.
There's even a specific therapy modality called EMDR, which mimics REM sleep in order to help patients process traumatic events.
Sleep as a response to 9/11 is nowhere near as avoidant as it sounds.
Of course I've no idea whether Moshfegh was or was not aware of this literature when she penned her own; but there is precedent for novelistic intuition. Marcel Proust, for instance, knew by instinct that memory is a process rather than a repository, that each recollection is only as real as the last time you recalled it, that the truth of memory is imperfection and reconsolidation, nearly a century before Nader/Shafe/LeDoux began to prove it so by doing ghastly things to rats in the early 2000s.
I don't think it would really take awareness of neuroscientific research to write that passage, though, or to come up with the general premise of the book (as I understand it). All Moshfegh would've had to do is to talk to one (1) person living with chronic illness or disability. We all feel that way. That if we could only sleep, if we could just get some real rest and build up some real reserves, we might recover and begin our lives anew. I think it is a more common sentiment than an able-bodied reviewer could credit.
You've convinced me I should read it, though, and for that I thank you. :)
I did not “single out a passage to denigrate” — I did not denigrate anything. I quoted the passage because it felt exemplificatory of the protagonist's project of sleeping until she could be “better”. I don't doubt that sleep helps restore the body and the mind, in fact I am convinced it does, but the book's protagonist isn't seeking natural sleep at all, she's drugging her body into a stupor and hiding from her problems, choosing to seek drugs from an incompetent therapist instead of seeking a competent one who'd *actually* help her. She falsely pretends to be insomniac so the doctor will give her the strongest drugs available to knock her out. She has no chronic illness or disability. This is not something I am making up, it is literally in the text of the book.
In regards to your claim that “Sleep as a response to 9/11 is nowhere near as avoidant as it sounds.“: as mentioned, sleep is not framed as a response to 9/11 in the book because it simply hadn't happened yet during the sleeping project.
I am glad that my review still managed to convince you to read it, so you'll make up your own mind on the text!