![]() He sucks from his 100-year-old wet nurse’s papery nipples until “her pubis would pulsate and emanate a smell.” There is plenty more. Having ratcheted her perversity up to an 11 in her fiction - in “Eileen,” the main character bare-hands her crotch in public and in “ My Year of Rest and Relaxation” another character has her anus waxed in her sleep - Moshfegh cannot resist throwing everything she’s got at “Lapvona.” The main character soils himself 40 pages in. ![]() Except in this case the office is a fiefdom and instead of cubicle spats there are marauding bandits, a punishing drought and an unfortunate episode of cannibalism that ends with a “regurgitated pinky toe, small and roasted, its little nail sticking out.” ![]() There is a gluttonous priest and a power structure so lopsided that this grotesque little fable somehow turns into a workplace satire, like quite a bit of Moshfegh’s earlier work. When I read her work, I imagine Monty Python’s oppressed serf calling out, “there’s some lovely filth down here,” gleefully harvesting a great big pile of squelching sludge.īooks You’re probably wrong about Ottessa MoshfeghĬelebrated for her novels, occasionally vilified for a persona she can’t control, the author of “Death in Her Hands” is our prophet of loneliness. Moshfegh, in her fourth novel, thrives in the mire, a happy little worm sliding dirt down her gullet. It doubly connotes glandular filth and manual labor, and it’s just banal enough to leave you annoyed with yourself for caring about how gross it is. “Greasy penis” is the ultimate Moshfegh-esque word pairing: sex-adjacent but unenticing. In Melissa Broder’s “The Pisces,” it’s “pink and slimy.” Ling Ma’s “ Severance” has “an ugly sea cucumber.” In Ottessa Moshfegh’s “ Lapvona,” the designated putrid penis is described as “greasy,” and though I know she didn’t start this daisy chain of repulsive anatomical description, I hold her most responsible for the sheer bounty of it. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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