![]() The name Vesta is a compound of Hestia, a Greek Goddess who was swallowed whole by Kronos then rescued by Zeus the Ottoman-derived surname Gul translates into English as "rose". Indeed, Vesta is a kind of a narrative nest for Moshfegh a corridor without end. Her name sounds like "Vestibule", as one policeman jokes in the novel, or receptacle, a holder of (other people’s) things. The daughter of two immigrants, Vesta is the widow of a German epistemologist named Walter. We may be forgiven for believing that this story is about Magda, alive or dead, when it is in fact a novel-length portrait of the passive and seemingly unremarkable Vesta. Instead, the narrator creates a series of imagined scenes or depictions of death, a kind of “death porn” if you like, which help her come to accept the terms of her own inevitable decline.ĭeath in Her Hands follows Vesta Gul, a self-proclaimed “little old lady” who happens to unearth a note recounting the death of a woman called Magda. Moshfegh’s third work of fiction is a murder mystery, but without the death. ![]() Her work has been described as “otherworldly” and “unearthly”. ![]() Death in Her Hands is an example of Moshfegh hemmed in. ![]() ![]() Moshfegh’s attraction to creating obsessive personalities breeds a type of paranoia in her readers, who may very well remain unsure about whether her narrators speak in earnest or in jest. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |