Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona: How to Make Rape, Cannibalism, and Incest Boring.
- the australian
Fighting through Ottessa Moshfegh Lapvona (three times, that’s how much I searched for a redeeming feature) left me wishing no one would write, read, or review another novel ever again. Relentless in its severity, blatant in its arbitrary violence, and uncompromising in its refusal to grant any narrative satisfaction, Lapvona he manages to transform the novel’s form into a decadent, self-deprecating indulgence. And in a way, that’s an achievement. Moshfegh has form in this sense.
Your Shortlisted Booker eileen featured a protagonist with poor personal hygiene and a fondness for laxatives, while the TikTok sensation My Year of Rest and Relaxation followed a rich young woman who deals with a feeling of boredom by taking drugs to sleep for a year. Adored by legions of young (mainly female) fans, Moshfegh’s work is, above all else, stubbornly unedifying.
Lapvona extend this to the extreme. The title refers to a medieval fief where life is cheap and miserable. In it, 13-year-old Marek is desperate for love. He is small, with a crooked spine, misshapen head, and bowed legs. These deformities are the result of his mother’s attempts to abort him, but also, we find out later, because he is the product of sibling incest. He lives with his father-who-is-not-his-father, the cruel Jude, who beats him for the slightest fault. Marek’s only solace comes from suckling, either from his own sheep or from Ina, a blind old woman whose milk supply never ends.
Despite his victimhood, Marek is not a sympathetic character: he is cruel and manipulative in his own way, and the novel revolves around his murder, in a fit of jealousy, of Jacob, the son of Lord Villiam of Lapvona. He is brought before Villiam to face justice, but the lord simply adopts him as a replacement son. Living in the mansion, Marek realizes that Villiam is totally corrupt, with an insatiable appetite that burns the produce of starving villagers. When a drought hits, he secretly directs the water into the mansion through a dam. Outside its walls, villagers resort to eating dung from animals, dogs and, in one particularly horrific passage, each other.
The finer points of the plot aren’t really that important. Suffice it to say that each character becomes more and more corrupted, either by luxury or scarcity. Perhaps Moshfegh wants to show that women can write amoral fiction too: move on, Nabokov. Yet while Nabokov’s writing is beautiful and deeply thoughtful, in Lapvona we find linguistic gifts such as: “He didn’t even show Clod his pubis. He was too embarrassed, he put it in his mouth and swallowed it” and “He turned his head and his body throbbed, his throat and guts writhing as he regurgitated Klim’s little finger, small and roasted, with the nail sticking out.”
Moshfegh is surprised by this novel, but at 50 pages she barely manages it. When it comes to baby-murdering, she prompts little more than a defeated shrug. Forget her moral emptiness. LapvonaThe biggest crime of is being boring.
