Death in Her Hands

So, what's with the synchronicities between this and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead? Both feature a reclusive old woman living in the woods; give prime significance to a dog; riff on the murder mystery genre; use Blake (albeit in different ways); and tackle the oppressions of living under a patriarchy. The more overt engagement with the Catholic church in Drive manifests as teasing hints in Death: Magda, Ghod, Vesta (vestments?), the town where she lives, Bethsmane, a kind of linguistic mash-up of Bethlehem and Gethsemane... One big difference, though, is that while I didn't get on *at all* with Drive Your Plow, I *loved* this!

Moshfegh continues to awe with her originality, her cool and controlled writing, her sheer interestingness (and if that's not a word, it ought to be!). Here, she's attentive to reading, having Vesta parse a brief note to infinity and offering up a model of how to read from all angles. She also delivers a sly masterclass in how to create characters as we watch Vesta - a rich character in her own right - 'create' Magda from nothing.

At the same time, Vesta's own life and personality seep out from behind the smokescreen of plot. In another story, Vesta could have been just one of those women who represent a generation who must have been born in the 1950s: in Moshfegh's hands, she's also an individual, unique, whose voice may have been muted all her life but who steps alive, now, off the page... even as the text itself reminds us that she's a creature of the writer's imagination. Did I say this is seductively meta?

This is less obviously grimy than Eileen, with more ostensible plot than My Year of Rest and Relaxation. There are flashes of Moshfegh's subversive humour (on the now empty urn that held her husband's ashes: 'What would I fill it back up with? Dirt from the garden? Plant a tulip bulb?') and the sheer intelligence, both literary and emotional, shines through. Marvellous, undoubtedly set to be one of my reads of the year - and my book-crush on Moshfegh continues!

A clever and knowing book that subverts expectations. Death in her Hands has a wry and caustic humour that fans of Muriel Spark will enjoy.

Death in Her Hands had all the markers I've come to expect from an Ottessa Moshfegh book. Just as Eileen followed a woman alienated from her surroundings, coming from an abusive family, embroiled in some kind of adventure but detached from reality, Death in Her Hands follows a 72 year old woman who lives in a forest with her dog Charlie, trying to summon up the courage to spread her husband's ashes. She comes across a note about someone named Magda who is now dead, she is told, and no one will know who killed her. From there, Vesta constructs a very convincing story of who Magda was, until the lines of her fiction and her reality blur and the reader is left unsure of what is really true.
I ended up feeling sorry for Magda even though I knew explicitly she was made up by Vesta. Of course I knew that Vesta was made up by Moshfegh which the story within the story calls attention to. Moshfegh's writing plays with the reader, keeping them from stability even when the writing (especially in this book) is calm and still. In so many ways it reminded me of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, to the extent that I wonder if this is intentional. In contrast to Moshfegh's other protagonists, and like in Drive Your Plow, I actually liked Vesta a lot and wanted the best for her. I finished this book in a few hours - I had to know what the conclusion was and it didn't disappoint.