Review: 'Death in Her Hands' by Ottessa Moshfegh

I have been wanting to read something by Ottessa Moshfegh since everyone got obsessed with My Year of Rest and Relaxation in 2018. I loved the idea of unlikeable female characters getting to exist no matter what in Moshfegh's books, so when I saw Death in Her Hands in a German bookstore I put my hands on it straightaway. And I was in for quite an interesting reading experience!

Pub. Date: 5/13/2021
Publisher: Vintage

While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, and she knows no one.

Becoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how she met her fate. With very little to go on, she invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to fade into menacing certainty. As her investigation widens, strange dissonances accrue, perhaps associated with the darkness in her own past; we must face the prospect that there is either an innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one.

A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both reflect the truth and keep us blind to it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, and the stakes have never been higher.

Moshfegh's books are stories about women who are on the outside, who don't quite fit in and who no one really knows or likes. They are usually isolated, either by choice or by consequence, and their worlds and lives are remarkably empty. For a 2021 reader, who has gone through successive lockdowns, this is makes for a confronting reading experience. I myself have wondered during those months of mostly isolation whether I was going slightly insane, whether the sounds I was hearing was actually just the neighbours or something else, something more sinister. But where we have all been suffused with a sense of panic, terror and heightened alertness, Moshfegh's characters are really just bored and aimless. Where we have been highly focused on others, whether it is family members we hope are safe or random passersby who refuse to mask, Moshfegh's women honestly don't really care for others. They are highly focused on their own experiences, their own feelings, and the world around them has to comform to that. In Death in Her Hands, set up as a whodunnit, this leads to the odd feeling that either Vesta is majorly onto something or solidly insane.

Vesta has retired to a small village, now living in a slightly damaged cottage, after her husband's death. Accompanied by her dog, she goes for daily walks and lives a quiet life. One day, however, she stumbles over a note left behind that says a woman named Magda has been murdered. This is where Vesta's story really begins as she starts to see clues and connections and plots everywhere. Who is behind Magda's murder? Where is she buried? Who knows what? As the reader, we are entirely with Vesta throughout Death in Her Hands, stuck with her in a loop of questions upon questions. Vesta has a vivid imagination and it took me a good 3 chapters until I realised that she couldn't be trusted. Vesta is an unreliable narrator par excellence, a woman who distrusts community, has strong opinions, and is rather neurotic. As we get to know more about her previous life with a slightly possessive husband, she begins to narrate Magda's story, unable herself to separate fact (of which there are few) from fiction (which abounds). 

As I said above, Ottessa Moshfegh's main characters are a specific type. In many ways they are reminiscent of the self-sabotaging (male!) heroes of some of the "Great Novels", whose characters are deeply flawed but who are saved by a few poignant realizations along the way. So you don't need to like these women in order to understand them. At least, I think that is the point. But Vesta's story in Death in Her Hands never quite reaches the point where you know what she wants. You move between feeling sympathy for her loneliness, to being outraged by her opinions, to just feeling a bit numb as you watch her work herself into a frenzy. There is a desire to be provocative, I think, in Death in Her Hands. Vesta is frequently fatphobic and a thread runs through her narrative of her trying to control her own body as she loses control of her life. But this is never really explored. Instead we get the shock but none of the emotional weight that makes it hit. As I was reading around about this novel I did not that the lack of engagement with Vesta seems to be a common thread among readers, so perhaps this is a bit more of a miss. While I was engaged with the writing and intrigued by the think I thought Moshfegh was trying to do, none of it really stuck. I do plan to read Eileen and My Year of Solitude at some point this year and I hope they will strike more true.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

Although I think Death in Her Hands has a great set-up and is, in many ways, an intriguing parody of crime and thriller novels, it didn't really stick the landing. 

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