Lapvonas cacophony of gore and depravity would make Shakespeare blush – Sydney Morning Herald

Ottessa Moshfeghs jam is conjuring broken, unlikeable protagonists who lurch through the world leaving ruin in their wake. McGlue, the authors 2014 novella, a 19th-century dirge, featured a gay, drunken sailor who possibly murdered his best friend. Moshfeghs 2015 debut novel, Eileen, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, centred around a self-loathing petty criminal. In her acclaimed 2019 book My Year of Rest and Relaxation, we became unfortunate observers of the interior life of a lazy misanthrope locked away in a year-long drug-induced self-exile.

In Moshfeghs latest novel, Lapvona, the author trades her distinctive first-person voice to introduce a conga line of fringe-dwellers who live in the post-plague medieval village of Lapvona, where subsistence is tough, and life is cheap. It proves a setting ripe for Moshfegh to gleefully indulge her appreciation for the grotesque; just dont expect her to conform to historical accuracy.

Ottessa Moshfeghs latest novel pushes the boundaries of existential nihilism.Credit:Alamy Stock Photo

Teenage anti-hero Marek lives with his physically and emotionally abusive father Jude, a shepherd who detests his bastard son and prefers the company of his lambs. With a face not even a mother could love, but with a searing Oedipus complex to boot, Marek has grown crookedly, his spine twisted in the middle with a misshapen head. He is a failed abortion attempt and the offspring of incest. Marek believes his mother Agata died birthing him; in fact, she ran away to a nunnery and later makes a surprise return in Mareks life.

The boy is in love with pain: He lived for hardship. It gave him cause to prove himself superior to his mortal suffering. In his search for a maternal figure, Marek suckles the withered and blind witch, Ina, once the village wet nurse, whose milk is long dried up.

Lapvonas serfs are ruled over by the corrupt lord, Villiam, a lazy, self-obsessed man-child who makes a sport of humiliating his servants and believes Terror and grief [are] good for morale. Villiam is pandered to by the sycophantic priest, Father Barnabas, whose head was soft, as though the fat in his face had travelled upward and collected there and who loves not the Christ but himself and the thrill of keeping people in line. With the priests encouragement, the lord swindles his subjects and secretly hires bandits to sack the village at any sign of insurrection.

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh.

The predictable rhythm of life in Lapvona begins to unravel when Marek murders or is it an accident Villiams dashing son, Jacob. To settle the score, Villiam trades his dead son for Marek. Jacobs death invokes supernatural consequences: rain ceases to fall, plunging the once fertile village Lapvona dirt is good dirt into a long, harsh drought and famine. Many locals starve and die, while others survive by eating dead bees, bats, vermin, dirt desiccated cakes of animal dung and finally because Moshfegh cant resist the temptation to horrify each other.

Meanwhile, a bountiful life carries on for Villiam and his crew, with the villages water diverted to the manor, and Marek is propelled from a life of squalor to being anointed the lords son and heir, sinking into gluttony and indolence.

From this point in the novel, Moshfegh unleashes a cacophony of plot twists and gore that would make Shakespeare blush. She treats us to headless torsos, disembowelling, hanging, cannibalism, rape, human excrement, floods, fire, incest, death by poisoning, a virgin birth and human sacrifice. A parade of monstrous characters mines the depths of depravity; the antics in Lapvona recall the writing of the Marquis de Sade, except in Moshfeghs novel, it spills over into the absurd; she bludgeons the reader to the point of desensitisation.

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Lapvonas cacophony of gore and depravity would make Shakespeare blush - Sydney Morning Herald