Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hi, welcome to The Bookshelf on RN on ABC Listen on your podcast catcher of choice. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough. And we're looking forward to our next book club with you where we'll be talking about the winner of this year's Miles Franklin Award. It was announced last night. Did you catch it?
You can find out what the winner was and get the book and get reading because you also have to read, have to, I say have to, you have to read Miles Franklin's famous book, My Brilliant Career as well, for that episode, which will be in the first week of August.
And in between time, head over to the ABC Book Club Facebook group to tell us what you think of the book.
And if you're not on Facebook, that's fine. Just send us an email. Head to the Radio National homepage and find the bookshelf and you can send us an email there.
Now to a collection of new fiction, though. Catherine Nosky will be along with some Australian Gothic fiction for us a bit later on the show, and I'll be talking to Indian writer Meka Majumda, too. Her novel A Burning gives us three characters walking through a fictional city that's a bit like Kolkata.
But first to Otessa Moshfeg's new book, Death in Her Hands. If I had a dollar for every time, Kate, someone mentioned her on the bookshelf, I'd be rather rich. American writer Atessa Mosfeg's novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation was about spending a year inside, not getting out of bed. How prophetic is that? Well, maybe not as prophetic as others, but pretty close.
Mosfeg is an American writer of both short stories and novels, and now she's written a new one called Death in Her Hands.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Ottessa Moshfegh's 'Death in Her Hands'?
Mosvick in general, and they described her prose as something that you can drink like water. But perhaps it's water with something dissolved in it that you shouldn't be drinking. I'm not sure. But yeah, again, it's this mysterious sort of gripping nature of the way that she writes.
I mean, I think one of the things that's really interesting about this book is that there is never any easy answer offered. Everything is a hypothetical and A lot of this book takes place in Vesta's imagination.
And to explain how that works so that people can imagine what this book is doing, she reads these few lines of this note over and over again. Her name was Magda. And she thinks, well, what sort of name is Magda? And she imagines it might be an Eastern European name. And then we discover that her parents were from Poland. And so she examines every single bit.
of this note and starts to imagine a life for magda who she was where she fits in and very quickly she decides that the the murderer or some young man is involved in the story and she even gives him a name so she creates this character in her head called blake
And so as she keeps on, almost like the way you might scan a piece of poetry, she goes back over each word and is almost trying to solve a mystery from the note rather than even from the landscape.
Yeah, it's a really fascinating conceit. And I think what's interesting as well is that the discovery of this note marks a real turning point in Vesta's life. She has been, I mean, early in the novel, you find that she's someone that sticks to routine. She's reasonably recently widowed.
And since the death of her husband and moving to this new area, she gets up in the morning, takes the dog for a walk, gets home, drives to the shops, buys her coffee, buys her bagels, comes home.
Oh, it's the same thing every single week.
Every week. So she's very much, yes, exactly. So she's very much a creature of routine until this note comes into her life. From there, you know, this case becomes an obsession for her, but it also becomes a kind of energiser. She goes from being What some might think is a little too routine-based and a bit boring to this energized, imaginative thinker, which I think is a really interesting idea.
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Chapter 3: How does alienation manifest in Moshfegh's characters?
Like, as we've already said, nothing particularly untoward has even happened at the start of the book. And yet there is this overwhelming sense of dread that continues to build. The mechanics of which I haven't quite got my head around yet because I don't know why I enjoyed this book as much as I did, which is often a sign of a good book, I suppose.
Well, part of the reason I liked it is the way that it forced you to be attentive and pay attention to words. And so it felt like there were clues, not necessarily clues to a murder mystery, but clues to something in there. So I started to notice the oddness of the place names. So she lives in an area called Levant. She used to be in a place called Monolith. So it's not Monolith, it's
so there's a sort of missing O, and there's a nearby town called Bethsmane. So it feels like it should be Bethsemane, but it's not. So everything's just a little bit off kilter.
That's right. It's these kind of tiny little sort of bumps in the road that you're not necessarily conscious of as you begin the book that sort of begin to accrue until you get this very strange sort of off-kilter view of the world, which I think is, in a sense, a kind of an alternative version of what Mosfick is always doing, which is essentially showing us how dark the world can be.
And we don't need to worry really about talking too much about the plot because in a way there are no spoilers to be spoiled. It's not that kind of book, but it's a book that draws you through with its language and with your interest in this character.
That's right. And I think, you know, one of the things that's really interesting about this book is that in its initial pages might seem a bit like a conventional mystery, but what it's really about is the is about creating stories and creating mysteries for yourself and creating reasons to get up every morning, essentially.
So this means really it's a novel that hangs on one conceit, which could almost have been a short story rather than a novel. And I did wonder at the beginning how long she was going to be able to sustain this, the conceit of the note. So did it make you think of other books that have done something similar?
One book that really came to mind was Kazuo Ishiguro's book, The Unconsoled, which similarly is a long novel that hangs on a singular conceit, which is in the case of The Unconsoled, a man trying to get to a concert. But the book itself is written totally in dream logic.
So I don't know if anyone's had dreams like this where you're trying to get somewhere, but you never quite make it because you keep getting sidetracked by people asking you questions or you keep getting turned around in the hallway and going the wrong direction. And when you start reading this book, you sort of think, how on earth are we going to do this for 200, 300 pages?
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