Moshfegh, O: My Year of Rest and Relaxation Nominiert: Wellcome Book Prize 2019

...because this book will wear you out, no matter what time it is. I loved the writing style and the fact that the protagonist wasn’t very likeable. (But honestly, I tend to favor books with unlikeable characters.) It all just makes absolute sense. Just let her sleep.

Do you ever just want to sleep for a year? That's the plan our protoganist forms at the start of this book. Super unsettling but also weirdly humorously written. A strange book for strange girls.

If you like books with a lot of action, a bunch of plot twists, and tension, this is probably the wrong book for you. I enjoyed it a lot, though 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' is not a book that is trying to make itself enjoyable for the reader – quite the opposite, in fact. The protagonist is a beautiful, depressed New Yorker who decides to hibernate for a year, hoping to emerge renewed, with purpose and the fulfillment her current life lacks. Her methods, though, are... questionable. Instead of following the usual ‘self-optimization’ tactics like yoga and meditation, she opts for a wide variety of pills, VHS tapes, and isolation. What made this book so fun to me was how the satire flew right over a lot of readers' heads. It explores themes of capitalism, dissatisfaction despite privilege, grief, and superficiality in such a distinctly dry and dark sense of humor that it seems undigestible to some – making the book feel boring or even enraging to them. I liked that I hated every new decision she made, and how she was just as unbearable a character as her toxic ex-boyfriend and ignorant best friend. Throughout the book you notice how our nameless narrator changes, wether it's for the better or not, that's something must decide for yourself. Overall, it’s a nice read – even if some parts felt dragged out at times, it was a very fun satirical novel that, if you let it, might even reflect some of your own worst qualities in the protagonist.

Sleeping for days on end seems like a really relaxing experience, so tell me why our narrator still seems to be stressed? I kind of liked the idea and irony behind this book but somehow it did not capture me the way I expected it would. I was bored during some chapters and had to listen to the audiobook instead, just so I wouldn't loose the flicker of interest I still had left. Maybe I just didn't get the deeper message behind this, maybe I did but I was bored nonetheless, I don't know.