![]() ![]() ![]() Sure, her abhorrent behaviour and thoughts are ‘subversive’ because she’s a woman. ![]() But I did not find Eileen’s obsession with bodily fluids, her abject view of her body (and those around her), her stalking and OTT creepiness to be that disturbing. Here Moshfegh is much too heavy-handed when it comes to the ‘gross’ stuff, and every paragraph, or so it seemed, tried to be as repulsive and ‘shocking’ as possible. ![]() Maybe it’s because I can’t help but compare this unfavourably to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest of Relaxation. Alas, in this instance, a re-read failed to make me a fan of Eileen. I picked Eileen up again hoping that, as was the case with other novels that I originally ‘didn’t really get’ (an example would be hangsaman, a book i consider to be an all-time fave now), a re-read would improve my opinion of it. The first I read it was back in 2018 I wasn’t particularly impressed by it, and in my original review I wrote that I found many elements within its story ‘excessive’ and that overall I found the narrative ‘flat’. These are some of the words that come to mind when I think of Eileen. Vile, vulgar, grotesque, sensationalistic, morbid, dismal, gratuitous, self-indulgent. There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. “I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life-the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. Compared to My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Eileen just ain’t it. ![]()
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