6/26/2023 0 Comments Ottessa moshfegh eileen reviewMaybe it’s because I can’t help but compare this unfavourably to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest of Relaxation. Alas, in this instance, a re-read failed to make me a fan of Eileen. I picked Eileen up again hoping that, as was the case with other novels that I originally ‘didn’t really get’ (an example would be hangsaman, a book i consider to be an all-time fave now), a re-read would improve my opinion of it. The first I read it was back in 2018 I wasn’t particularly impressed by it, and in my original review I wrote that I found many elements within its story ‘excessive’ and that overall I found the narrative ‘flat’. These are some of the words that come to mind when I think of Eileen. Vile, vulgar, grotesque, sensationalistic, morbid, dismal, gratuitous, self-indulgent. There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. “I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life-the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. Compared to My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Eileen just ain’t it.
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