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SPOILERS
SPOILERS
Summary:
Summary:
An unamed woman who I named Vanessa becayse sayinbg unamed woman is too many letters to type narrates her life for about a year starting in 2000. Vaneessa is beautiful, morose, depressed, educated, chic, and very, very sleepy.
The day to day that she describes include her sleeping, self medicating, watching VHS tapes, and half listening to her best friend Reva.
Vanessa reminices on her childhood, former job in Chelsea, and other thoughts.
Vanessa eventyually commits to locming herself completely inside her apartment to sleep for a few months.
9/11.
Noteable quotes:
Noteable quotes:
"The carefree tranquility of sleep gave way to a startling subliminal rebellion" (pg. 85)
"My mother hadn't been easy to love. I'm sure she was complcated and worthy of further analysis, and she was beautiful, but I didn't ever really know her." (pg. 135)
"I could remember the time sernior year of college when my heel broke on the way to Feminist Theories and Art Practices, 1960s019902, and I walked in late, limpping and disgruntled, and the professor ointed at me and said, "We were just discussing feminist performance art as a political deconstruction of the art world as a commercial industry," and told me to stand at the front of the classroom, which I did, my left foot arched like a Barbie's and the class analyzed it as a performance piece." (pg. 189)
"There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake." (pg. 289)
Review and notes:
Review and notes:
5 stars - brilliant, refreshing, classic, utterly perfect.
Jacques Louis David. The Death of Marat, ca. 1793
I left many post-it notes in this book, and I left on the age of the third quote (pg. 189). It reads as follows: "Ugh! The perfect irony of it all! A college class of feminist art history picking at objectively what is the most feminist thing in the classroom: Vanessa. And really she is just a thing to them. How can you claim to be a feminist when you demean the feminine experience? There is a reason Vanessa is the hero in this narrative because she's the only one with common sense enough to not engage with the backwardness of modern feminism in a college setting.' Rejecting femininity is NOT feminism, it is sexism in one of its worst forms."
Pages 188 to 190 give me an excuse to talk about "modern feminism." Let me clarify, the radical feminism I am talking about is the movement of women "liberating" themselves from the confines of patriarchal ideas of feminity and what women "should" be, i.e. beauty, femininity, diet culture, cosmetic culture. This has been demonstrated in women throwing away their makeup and scales, cutting off their hair, and embracing more masculine traits. Now, absolutely none of those actions are bad, and in fact, a lot of good can be found in many of those behaviors. The trouble comes when this "liberation" from feminity manifests itself as a rejection of feminity, a demeaning of femininity. In women's quest to escape patriarchal confines, they have forgotten the beauty of femininity and found feminity itself to be disgusting, low, and dumb, exactly how men have found feminine activities to be dumb for years. Modernly this is seen with the "Not like other girls" trend. I find women rejecting feminity for the sake of feminism to not only be sexist in itself but simply tragic. Feminity is perfect, beautiful, and sublime. Femininity is powerful* and should be celebrated by men and women alike.
*Moshefgh's reference to Barbie in this quote could very well have been an accident but I love how, and this focus on Barbie is definitely sped up by the 2023 movie coming out, Vanessa is compared to a Barbie here in order to show how silly and dumb she is being seen as by her college class, when in fact Barbie is anything but. Yes, the literary effect of comparing a grown woman to a child's toy is to say she is dumb and an object, but through, possibly too much, dissection of the use of Barbie here as a simile, I have found the comparison to be much deeper. Barbie is strong, she's president, an astronaut, a fashion icon, extraordinarily beautiful, and yes, all of those things are equally significant. Read my essay, The Virtue of Vanity for further explanation. Yet by the media, especially seen by the conservative reactions to Barbie (2023), Barbie is seen as small, dumb, and stupid for her girliness, when her "girliness" is actually one of her greatest beauties. In this way, Vanessa really is Barbie.
My original post-it for the character of Reva: " Reva's character in this book serves multiple purposes - one is to show how impossible perfect Vanessa is. Reva is desperate, and because of that, she is pathetic. Worse - she is desperate without actually having the things she yearns for: effortless success. Reva is everything wrong with what men perceive women to be: needy, insecure, gossipping, competitive, and desperate. She is the stark contrast to Venssa's aloofness and charm. And worst of all, her beauty. Reva slaves every day in the gym, counting her macros and making herself puke (gross) all not to be half as pretty as Vanessa. It's a tragedy, really. But she'll never be able to stop trying."
I'd like to clarify first of all that (gross) is a reference to Moshfegh's way of writing gross matter (explored more in my review of McGlue). Reva's entire character is constantly reinforced with the device of comparisons to Vanessa. But more than that, I'd like to focus on the parts of Reva that are separate from Vanessa, most of all, her apartment (pp. 246-253). Every single item in Reva's apartment, from the empty yogurt containers to her diary, holds an extreme amount of precious information and insight into who Reva is, and the word that comes to mind when reading Moshfegh's words is, genius. These pages are a consecrated compendium of Reva's entire personality, and Reva herself isn't even there. The pages on Reva's apartment are really the epitome of Moshfegh's gross writing skills.
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