The hustle and bustle of Lapvona full of blood and depravity will make Shakespeare blush

Jam Ottessa Moshfegh conjures up a broken and unwelcome protagonist who walks across the world leaving destruction in their wake. McGlue, the author’s 2014 novella, a 19th century anthem, features a drunken gay sailor who may kill his best friend. Moshfegh’s 2015 debut novel, Eileen, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, centers around a self-loathing petty criminal. In his famous book in 2019 My Year of Rest and Relaxationwe become unfortunate observers of the interior life of a lazy misanthrope locked in a year-long drug-induced seclusion.

In Moshfegh’s latest novel, Lapvana, The author trades his distinctive first-person voice to introduce the ranks of suburban residents living in a post-epidemic medieval village of Lapvona, where life is hard, and life is cheap. This proved a ripe setting for Moshfegh to happily indulge his appreciation for the odd; just don’t expect him to conform to historical accuracy.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel pushes the boundaries of existential nihilism.Credit:Alamy Stock Photo

Teen anti-hero Marek lives with his physically and emotionally abusive father, Jude, a shepherd who hates his illegitimate child and prefers the company of his sheep. With a face not even a mother could like, but with a searing Oedipus complex, Marek had “grow up crooked, his spine bent in the middle” with a “deformed head”. She is a failed abortion attempt and a descendant of incest. Marek believes his mother Agata died giving birth to him; in fact, he fled to the convent and then made a surprise return in Marek’s life.

The boy fell in love with pain: “He lives for adversity. It gave him a reason to prove himself superior to his mortal suffering.” In his search for a mother figure, Marek suckles the blind and withered witch, Ina, once a village nurse, whose milk has long since dried up.

The slaves of Lapvona are ruled by a corrupt lord, Villiam, a lazy and self-obsessed boy who makes sports to humiliate his servants and believes in “Terror and sorrow. [are] good for morals.” Villiam is spoiled by the sycophantic priest, Father Barnabas, whose “head is soft, as if the fat on his face has gone up and accumulated there” and who loves “not Christ but himself and the sensation of keeping people in line”. With the encouragement of the priest, the lord deceives his subjects and secretly hires bandits to sack the village at any sign of rebellion.

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh.

The predictable rhythm of life in Lapvona begins to unravel when Marek kills – or was it an accident – ​​Villiam’s dashing son, Jacob. To settle the score, Villiam trades his dead son for Marek. Jacob’s death has supernatural consequences: the rain stops falling, plunging the once fertile village – “the land of Lapvona is a good land” – into a long and hard drought and famine. Many of the locals starved and died, while others survived by eating “dead bees, bats, pests, dung… pastries from animal dung” and finally – because Moshfegh couldn’t resist the temptation to scare – one another.

Meanwhile, life of abundance continues for Villiam and his crew, with village water diverted to the manor, and Marek driven from a life of squalor to be anointed as son and heir to the king, drowning in gluttony and indolence.

From this point in the novel, Moshfegh unleashes a cacophony of plot twists and gore that would make Shakespeare blush. He treats us with headless bodies, evisceration, hanging, cannibalism, rape, human excreta, floods, fire, incest, death by poisoning, virgin birth and human sacrifice. A parade of gruesome characters mine the depths of depravity; deep antics lapvona remember the writing of the Marquis de Sade, except in the novel Moshfegh, it spills over to the absurd; he hits the reader to the point of desensitization.

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