Book Review: "Lapvona" by Ottessa Moshfegh

I have pretty much read all of Ottessa Moshfegh's books to date and they are all amazing. My favourite so far has to be Death in Her Hands and Lapvona is closely taking over as being either on par with Death in Her Hands or better than it. Lapvona is different to Ottessa Mosfegh's usual writing requests seeing as this one is not set in her usual modern day, but in Medieval Europe instead and this one also does not have a main character that is a woman, instead it has Marek - a deformed young boy who is pretty ostracised by his community. All in all, I found this one extremely interesting because it shows us that Ottessa Moshfegh is expanding her horizons into new and exciting areas.

This book is about a town called Lapvona in Medieval Europe. In this town there is a young boy called Marek and his father Jude who work on the land. Marek is a strange little boy who is beaten by his father and sent to a woman called Ina in order to redeem himself. A god-fearing man, Jude tries to keep his son under control whilst he harbours increasingly dangerous secrets about the boy's mother who apparently died a long time ago. When Marek comes to his father to tell him another young boy has died after falling from a cliff, Jude must take the issue to the head of the town - Villiam, who tries to make a case for Marek in spite of the circumstances. A gorey, fleshy and often very disutrbing novel, these god-fearing people lie, manipulate and hack the storyline in order to find the most uncomfortable positions to put the reader in to show us that the minds of men are paranoid, disturbed and sociopathic.

There is a scene in this book that I don't think I will forget for a long time and that is when Ina and Jude are in Ina's house and Ina is basically shrivelling up because of the drought and there being no food or water to quench her and sustain her. Ina then asks Jude to bring her the dead man that is lying there by chopping him up and roasting his body on the fire. Jude and Ina then sit together and eat the dead man until hardly anything is left. Jude finishes the meal by eating the man's head and talks about making a pocket bag out of his skin in order to carry some meat home. The torso is the only thing that is left and, after the meal, Jude takes it home with him. I think I was probably most disturbed by that particular scene. It comes at a very strange time in the book too where basically people are blaming other people for the drought and obviously, Jude blames Marek. You find out that the god-fearing aspect of their lives is a ruse to hide behind when they mess things up or a justification for things that they do that are horribly unethical.

Apart from Agata's storyline reminding me of Titus Andronicus, I thought that this is probably Ottessa Moshfegh's most male-centric novel to date and I also believe that she is showing us something about the fleeting nature of man's resolution that, despite considering themselves to be god-fearing and good, they must outwardly approach that on to everyone else whilst doing nothing in order to actually show it. In the case of these men, the words mean more than their actions and Ottessa Moshfesgh shows us that the class divide may be the one thing that breaks the camel's back when it comes to whether we act or whether we don't.