Dhe work by the American Ottessa Moshfegh raises the question of how unsympathetic fictional characters can be with renewed verve. “We need novels that live in an amoral universe, beyond the political agenda on social media,” demands the 41-year-old. Her latest novel “Lapvona” takes place in a medieval setting of an undefined country and takes this attitude to the extreme so consistently that even Moshfegh’s usually so shrewd English-language literary criticism reacted with conspicuity.
The “Guardian” accused the American of fetishizing repulsive things and raising disgust as an end in itself. Other critics were bothered by the “fatphobia” that runs through her work and see the point at which the author can no longer escape behind her ableistic characters.
Indeed, the fictional medieval Lapvona is a playground of idiots, over which hangs a grotesque veil of cynicism: beatings, murder, incest, cannibalism, rape, theft, starvation, corruption, abuse, fraud, desecration of corpses, mutilation, anything human can come up with atrocities, we experience here from the perspective of the perpetrators – who are mostly naive, often just too stupid to recognize the horror they are bringing into the world.
On the surface, Moshfegh not only exceeds the limits of disgust, but also those of good form, for example when she tells a rape from the perspective of the perpetrator from an almost unbroken closeness. That is their hair-raising strength: Just when you think you could catch your breath, projectiles fly at you from another corner and you don’t know whether they are made of medicinal herbs or excrement.
But to dismiss “Lapvona” as violent porn or as a provocation for the sake of provocation would do the brilliantly constructed punchline firework an injustice. After all, isn’t the woman who enjoys eating human flesh also the one who previously lovingly nursed all the children in the village on her breast, some even with erotically caring hints into adulthood? And is not the one who regularly beats his son almost to death and rapes a mute woman, but also the one who raises a strange, deformed child like his own, who never says a bad word about its missing mother, who loves his sheep more than anything and saves a corpse from desecration?
One cannot and will not excuse the monstrosity of the characters, but it would be wrong to claim that they have no love within them, a love not only for the immediate, but also for the divine and the transcendent.
On the cover of “Lapvona” is a sheep
Source: Hanser Verlag
Only: should the purifying impulse that motivates Moshfegh’s penchant for the morbid free us from the ugly or from our contempt for the ugly?
Moshfegh’s fifth novel ventures out of familiar territory, especially formally. For the first time, she does not describe the stream of consciousness of a single character (usually a woman) in a time similar to the present, but develops a broad arsenal of characters in the third person, including genders, ages, origins and classes. It’s her most action-driven, wildest experiment yet. While breaking up well-known genres has always been one of Moshfegh’s specialties, with “Lapvona” she lets her skills play in a particularly sophisticated way. One completely unpredictable twist follows the next. The humorous, suspenseful material is just begging to be turned into a Netflix series.
From tragedy to farce
In between, the novel even changes genre. Moshfegh illustrates how the tragedy becomes a farce with the help of a repeated stone throw, which ends fatally the first time. The second time, no one even notices him. A character cannot be exposed to ridicule more mercilessly. The change in genre goes hand in hand with an economic boom. Out of jealousy, the shepherd boy Marek kills Jakob, the same age as the son of Prince Villiam, who is growing up in material luxury. But instead of punishing his son’s murderer, the prince takes him into his castle as a surrogate son.
The rags-to-riches myth has never been so monstrously perverted, and “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” has never been interpreted so jaded. As in My Year of Peace and Relaxation, the inner perspective of a depressed, privileged New Yorker who decides to sleep straight for a year on pills, in the second part of Lapvona, Moshfegh designs an aesthetic of decadence that undermines morality checkmates.
He doesn’t want to torment the prince with his gardens, banquets and plays, he wants to have fun. he wants beauty. But it turns out that money doesn’t buy happiness. neither is poverty. Religion creates havoc. No religion either. You might not find more message in “Lapvona”, but that speaks not to the author’s intellectual arrogance, but to her will to entertain. It’s possible she’s making us residents of Lapvona, but more likely we always were.