eileen shortlisted for the man booker prize 2016 ottessa moshfegh

We are intended to question the social realities of the book. It would defeat the purpose of the book-I'm reminded of Brecht and his technique of alienation. None of the characters in the book are likeable they are not meant to be. The older Eileen is intriguing as we never quite understand what happened to her after the 'event'. We have the voice of Eileen as a 24 year old woman and the voice of a much older Eileen looking back over her life. No, it isn't fast paced with a murder on every page but the unfolding of Eileen's dreary prison life both at home and where she works is utterly compelling. After looking at some of the negative reviews I am at a loss to understand why. This book sat on my Kindle for ages before I got around to reading it. For fans of Plath, Highsmith, this book will be a joy, especially the way it all comes together at the end. This doesn’t help the older Eileen’s storytelling, as she misses basic decencies the author uses this to fuel interest in both versions of Eileen. The author achieves this by setting the two Eileens fifty years apart, an older Eileen plays sympathiser to past Eileen’s motives. Narrated grim detail show how a nasty and weak character can have a reader cheer for her. It’s heady and seductive writing, so intimate sometimes it feels like too much. It is a study in damage, and how that is projected onto others, a private world of pain only now being shared like a sacred secret, or picked scar. Themes are strangled sexuality, the loss of body as a sensual tool, and how this manifests when faced with the mirror of an attractive, socially assured woman in Rebecca.

It is when she befriends Rebecca, a bright and breezy co-worker who is uncannily nice to her, and stalks an attractive prison guard, Randy, that it becomes clear Eileen cannot draw appropriate boundaries, quickly crushing on Rebecca, and copying her every move to the dark end.Īs in Plath’s “The Bell Jar” Eileen is unlikable and yet magnetic, whisked along by her own demons into the worst, obscure decisions instead of the obvious, happier solution, in the vein of Plath’s fatalism. Her story builds a picture towards something terrible, as she describes her suffocating near-sexual co-habitation with her widowed father in a dirty, hoarded house, the pair held together by a fragile loyalty to her dead mother. An elderly Eileen relates her young, twisted life from fifty years ago in Boston.

Eileen shortlisted for the man booker prize 2016 ottessa moshfegh