Ottessa MoshfeghDeath in Her Hands

Abstract

that she recounts in her written soliloquy, an internal monologue of sorts. “I do not know how else to put it,” she writes, “but I feel like an imaginary woman who took a plunge into the sea of eternity and now doesn’t remember how to pull herself back onto the firm shore of the present. At times I ask myself: Am I really real?” The novel is divided into three main chapters, evoking Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory , Paradiso. In “Inferno,” the heroine is sadistically attached to matters of the flesh as she tries to adapt to God’s environment; in “Purgatory,” she and God visit the real world; and “Paradiso” features their return to heaven. The protagonist’s relationship with God is intriguingly complex. She and God quarrel like a typical married couple, debate like master and disciple, and argue like patient and doctor who disagree on a cure. Among the most frequent topics of their disagreement is the role of literature and its relation to the human condition. Despite God possessing the most magnificent library, he owns no fiction because he despises literature , reducing it to the Platonic outlook of fabrication, a detachment from the real. “‘I don’t understand why they need to invent things that don’t exist,’ He says,” whereupon the narrator wonders, “I am baffled: Isn’t that exactly what He did?” The novel curiously weaves into its fabric the ubiquitous postmodern theme of equating author with God. Throughout the narrative, Michalopoulou displays her literary influences by interjecting references to an array of texts and interlocking various disciplines, thereby affirming the place of fiction in the realm of intellectual discourse. The novel is a brilliant work of art. Its simple structure and minimalist plot illuminate its explorative ideas and its profound engagement with abstract intellectual content. At the heart of it lie a philosophical rumination, an existential crisis of the self, a sociological exploration of gender roles, spiritual and religious angst, and literary contemplation on the relationship between life and fiction. Michalopoulou’s language is refined, inviting in its details, and pensive in its articulation, all qualities richly maintained in Barbeito’s outstanding translation. Austere yet poetic images quiver along the protagonist’s wistful voice to create a world that constantly wavers between the quasireal and the ethereal. Michalopoulou is the author of eight novels, three short-story collections, and numerous essays written in Greek. Many of her literary works have been translated into twenty other languages. She is also the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and literary grants worldwide. God’s Wife is her third novel appearing in English. Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis New York Institute of Technology Ottessa Moshfegh Death in Her Hands New York. Penguin. 2020. 272 pages. OTTESSA MOSHFEGH’S women do not assimilate. Whether the eponymous protagonist and her scatological fascinations in Eileen or the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation who medicates herself into a yearlong sleep, Moshfegh’s protagonists are fractures in the veneer of social sanity . These women are tenants of varying states of suspension. A character mishears Vesta Gul’s name as “vestibule,” which in the grand scheme of things is no accident. These characters oscillate between the lives they aspire to live and the ones they actually inhabit, unable or unready to drop anchor on either side. Seventy-six-year-old Vesta lives with her dog and her husband’s ashes in an urn in a lakeside cabin. Walking in the birch woods, she finds a note with “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body” nondescriptly inscribed on it. But Vesta has a taste for the literary; instead of informing the police, she decides to write Magda’s story. “What a strange responsibility it was, to hold someone’s death in your hands,” she remarks as she sets about inventing lives for those who never lived, spiraling into a quagmire where she gradually becomes unable to separate her life from her art. “Were you still dreaming? Was I?” she asks. Often there is no answer. Predicated on a whodunit, Death in Her Hands is anything but boilerplate. This...