Sleeping Beauty: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Book review: My Year of Rest and Relaxation 

by Ottessa Moshfegh

In Haruki Murakami's After Dark we meet Eri, an attractive young woman who has decided to “go to sleep”, and who lies in bed in a sort of suspended animation, a cross between a latter-day Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Murakami's is a magical world, and typically, no explanation is given to us as to the why and how of this extraordinary event.

Not so in Ottessa Moshfegh's latest novel. Its narrator is a 24-year old Columbia graduate who, having lost her parents in close succession, and disillusioned with the art scene in which she works (and with the world in general) decides to undergo a self-imposed regime of 'sleep therapy'. There are those who, faced with an existential crisis, go on a retreat or undergo a spiritual epiphany. Instead, over a 12-month period between 2000 and 2001, the novel's protagonist goes into near-hibernation, with the help of a mind-numbing list of mind-numbing substances. These are conveniently prescribed and sometimes supplied by her psychiatrist Dr Tuttle : There was no shortage of psychiatrists in New York City, but finding one as irresponsible and weird as Dr Tuttle would be a challenge... Solfoton, Ambien, Robitussin, Nembutal, Zyprexa - anything to go to sleep. And then there's Infermiterol - the closest we get to a magic potion in this book. Each pill sends the narrator on a three-day long bout of sleepwalking, of which no memory remains after the event except for photographs evidencing nights of riotous hedonism.

This novel is an uncompromising work. It displays acerbic wit and a strong dose of black humour, but whether this will provide the reader with any "rest and relaxation" is a different matter altogether. For a start, its protagonist is difficult to love (incidentally, in her interviews and articles, the author himselfs displays a persona which is very similar to that of her narrator - not sure whether this is itself a fiction or marketing ploy...). 

Clearly highly intelligent and spot-on in her observations, the narrator is also egoistical and egotistical, and her apparent disdain of society also extends to her only friend, whom she treats with an irritating sense of superiority (or is hers an inverted inferiority complex?) The vacuity of a year spent in hibernation, the images of soulless sex and materialistic, degraded art, sometimes rub off on the novel itself, which grows tiring at intervals. 

And yet there's much to admire in this work, whether one opts to read it as an expression of millennial angst or a darkly comic critique of the contemporary art world or, indeed, of 21st Century Western society. The pleasure afforded by this novel is at times akin to the guilty, voyeuristic fascination some find in watching a car crash. But perhaps this is how it is meant to be.

***

There are, of course, safer ways to go to sleep. One is to put on the album "Sleep" by classical crossover composer and performer Max Richter.  A musical project based upon the “neuroscience of sleep, it has been described by Richter as "an eight-hour lullaby", "a piece that is meant to be listened to at night ... structured as a large set of variations."  

Sweet dreams...and happy reading!