Again, we encounter a woman trying to take control of her own narrative by opting out of community, conventional relationships and consumption again she is living off an inheritance from a despised family member again she becomes unhinged even as she clings to a highly controlled routine.īy the time the story begins, Vesta is a year into her isolation in a lakeside cabin on the site of a former Girl Scout camp, where she moved after her German scientist husband, Walter, died. Ostensibly it’s about her amateur investigation into a murder on her land, but we soon realise Moshfegh is returning to the themes of loneliness and confinement. In between these two novels, she wrote Death in Her Hands, which has only just been disinterred, and reveals Moshfegh is not only interested in jaded young women but jaded old women too.Ī slow-build whodunnit, the novel inhabits the “mindspace” of Vesta Gul, a widow in her early 70s who lives alone in the woods with her dog. This was followed by My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), a darkly funny book about a beautiful, twentysomething New Yorker who spends a year hibernating in a narcotic haze. Moshfegh’s Booker-shortlisted novel Eileen (2015) was a 1960s noir about an inward-looking anorexic alcoholic young woman (“I hated almost everything”).
And like Nabokov’s unreliable narrators, we can never take them at their word. In a mixed review, Publishers Weekly criticized the novel's narrative as being overly unreliable and wrote that the novel "lacks the devious, provocative fun of Moshfegh's other work".You could say these characters are modern female analogues of the radically self-sabotaging antiheroes of late-19th century works like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground or Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews called it an "eerie and affecting satire of the detective novel." Reception Īt the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the novel received a cumulative "Positive" rating based on 35 reviews: 7 "Rave" reviews, 19 "Positive" reviews, 8 "Mixed" reviews, and 1 "Pan" review.
The novel was ultimately published by Penguin Press on June 23, 2020. Vesta becomes obsessed with discovering who Magda was and the circumstances surrounding her death.ĭeath in Her Hands was originally scheduled to be published by Penguin Press on April 21, 2020, but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here is her dead body." However, no body is in sight. Vesta Gul, a 72-year-old widow, is walking her dog in the woods and finds a note that reads: "Her name was Magda. Death in Her Hands is a 2020 novel by Ottessa Moshfegh.
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