Lapvona

“A tooth skipped out of his mouth and landed in a little shard of light coming through the doorway, the last of the sun between the trees. He watched the light play on his glistening tooth. He'd seen a lot of blood today. That was all right.”

Lapvona's characters felt less to me like human beings and more like miniatures acting in a stop-motion dark comedy, just dancing around and killing and dying for the heck of it. this may be because without exception, everyone in Lapvona is painfully miserable and/or evil, causing the characters to feel somewhat one-note and end up bleeding together in my mind.

the grossness for the sake of being gross didn't particularly bother me. though it did feel almost excessive at times, i think this is actually pretty integral to Moshfegh's individual writing style and meshes with the themes her work usually revolves around. the casual depravity of the characters was more disturbing to me. i think the bluntness with which abuse, poverty, exploitation, and death were approached in this novel expressed that trauma doesn't care whether you survive it or not, and it certainly doesn't care to be palatable.

though this novel was more ambitious in many ways than Eileen (the only other work of Moshfegh that i've read in its entirety), i have to say i prefer the simplicity and realism of Eileen and its exploration of feminine obsession over the more absurd and grotesque but ultimately meaningless medieval setting of Lapvona.

trigger warnings:
- incest
- rape
- homicide
- cannibalism
- abortion and infanticide
- starvation/disordered eating
- extreme poverty
- death/gore
- pedophilia/CSA
- animal cruelty
- child abuse/domestic violence