![]() There’s nothing sexy or pleasant or charming about our titular Eileen, and it’s a breath of fresh air. She excels at crafting female characters who are sympathetic enough to warrant investment but abhorrent enough to shatter the conception that even the most contentious of antiheroines must above all else be likable. I didn’t love this quite as much as My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but I think I can confidently call myself an Ottessa Moshfegh fan now. I’m still going to read everything Moshfegh writes… I’m just hoping for more novels from now on. Apparently my average rating for all these stories was 2.7 stars, but I’m rounding down due to the dread I felt about picking this back up when I wasn’t reading it. Moshfegh has such a unique voice as a writer that shines through all of the stories in this collection, but rather than bringing me the same kind of offbeat joy as her two novels, this collection just started to make me miserable after a while. That’s two out of fourteen that made an impression on me. I think it speaks volumes that the best story in the collection is the one that’s least like the others A Better Place is wildly inventive and not quite as grounded in gritty realism as the others, but still dark and twisted and more haunting than the rest of the stories combined. And A Better Place ends the collection on a positively eerie note, telling the story of two young twins who are convinced that they weren’t born on earth, and to get back to that other place, they need to either die or kill someone. Unpalatable as this couple may be, like all of Moshfegh’s protagonists, we actually are able to get invested in them before the story takes a turn for the macabre. ![]() Two stories stood out to me: The Beach Boy follows an older married couple returning from an island vacation, only for the wife to die unexpectedly as soon as they arrive home. It’s easy to become desensitized when you feel like the author’s main objective is to shock you. Reading story after story about humanity’s capacity for cruelty starts to feel like a shtick after a while, like a party trick that’s worn out its welcome. It turns out that bite-sized stories about awful characters doing awful things and thinking awful thoughts are so much less interesting when their behavior isn’t rationalized or contextualized in that same way. What made Eileen‘s titular protagonist and My Year of Rest and Relaxation‘s unnamed narrator so fascinating wasn’t just the fact that they weren’t particularly likable people their thorny exteriors were a result of two distinct tragic backstories, whose ramifications Moshfegh deftly explored throughout the course of each novel. So it was with optimism that I approached her short story collection Homesick for Another World – I was looking forward to more delightfully awful antiheroines and sardonic humor and a heightened awareness of the mundane. Ottessa Moshfegh has to be one of my favorite writers that I discovered in 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation both thrilled and unsettled me, and after I finished that I proceeded to devour her debut novel Eileen. Before landing on Poor Things, he also considered adapting the American novels Pop, 1280, a macabre crime-thriller by Jim Thompson, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, about a woman who attempts to sleep for an entire year.HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD by Ottessa Moshfegh Lanthimos made two short works – Nimic with Matt Dillon, and a collaboration with the Greek National Opera with Stone and Damien Bonnard – whilst choosing his next feature project. Film4, which has been involved with Lanthimos’s three prior English-language works, developed the film, alongside US distributors Searchlight Pictures. ![]() The novel, which is told in an epistolary form, was described as “magnificently brisk, funny, dirty brainy” in a contemporary review by the London Review of Books.Įd Guiney and Andrew Lowe will produce for Element Pictures ( Room, Normal People), alongside Lanthimos and Stone for her own production label. But soon, Bella becomes more sexually curious and interested in other men, and elopes across Europe with the characters to be played by Ruffalo, and then Youssef. ![]() In the novel, Bella is reanimated by a grotesque brain transplant from the foetus she is carrying, with Godwin intending her to be his romantic companion. Stone plays a young woman named Bella, brought back to life by the brilliant scientist Godwin Baxter (Dafoe). Based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, considered one of the finest and most visionary Scottish authors, Poor Things is a Victorian-set tale heavily inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
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