Book Review: Homesick for Another World announced Ottessa Moshfegh as the empress of ennui, the princess of pointlessness, and the icon of the isolated. I prefer her longer works to the stories collected here, but that's only saying I prefer ice cream to cheesecake. While the novels pack a harder punch, in the stories I can see the world through Moshfegh's compound eye and piece it together like a shattered mirror. Roaming my reactions to these stories my vocabulary becomes: bleak, pointless, flawed, false, disgust, directionless, illusions, twisted, resignation, unrealistic, unambitious, hopeless, absurdist. One wonders why a pulverizingly intelligent writer is so interested in such people; she must've met Ignatius J. Reilly. A few years from now decoding Homesick for Another World will be a college thesis to jump start some lit-major's career. The stories are short and quick reads, almost more like sketches. I limited myself to a couple a day to let them sink in. Eight of the 14 stories are written from a male (not always hetero) perspective. No other author writes so skillfully and so often from such varied points of view (in the stories it's not all as binary as it sounds). As with her novels, Moshfegh's take on human beings of any sort is done convincingly and blindingly well. But still, the stories in Homesick for Another World have an irony, a skepticism bordering on insincerity, always a shade apart from the world most us live in. Although the characters dabble in the grimy and grubby, the litany of inversions doesn't discourage the reader: we're all adults here. A necessary chunk of the Moshfegh canon. [4★]
No comments:
Post a Comment