avolok's reviews
172 reviews

i CANNOT BELIEVE how this ends. well i can. the foreshadowing is less so and more so frustrating—if not tasteless—reminders of the inevitable, but it still hits so hard?? genuinely baffled by what Moshfegh attempts and somehow pulls of. some wonderfully delightful and sad and beautiful prose in there. need to reread or think or see what others have to say but i am shocked. this could be a masterpiece!! tempted to bestow upon it the title of “yassified Nausea” but i don’t know if it’s accurate enough to be funny or, preferably, off-base enough to warrant confusion. alas!

“All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”

quite easily the most beautiful and moving book i’ve ever read. countless passages from front to back that capture within them an ineffable beauty crafted from a place of pain and love. in awe of the magnitude of the writing on display, equal parts lyrical and direct. effortless jumps from prose to verse that encapsulate the depths of the human experience through language. how anyone can write this good is beyond me.