Book Review: Eileen - O. Moshfegh

“Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don’t apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I’m thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life.” 

I am not sure how this has been described as a masterpiece, I personally found it dull, boring, slow, twisted and it just left me a sense of frustration  towards the non-actions that characterized the majority of the novel. It picks up slightly towards the end, but by then I was so tired of Eileen and her father and the story that I did not have enough attention left to dedicate to the book.
A complete disappointment for me.

Overall rating:  5     Plot: 5     Writing style: 5      Cover:  6

Title: Eileen

Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Publisher: Vintage
Pages: 272
Publication year: 2016

Plot:

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop. Trapped between caring for her alcoholic father and her job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, she tempers her dreary days with dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, her nights and weekends are filled with shoplifting and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes.
When the beautiful, charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counsellor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted, unable to resist what appears to be a miraculously budding friendship. But soon, Eileen’s affection for Rebecca will pull her into a crime that far surpasses even her own wild imagination.

The Author:

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Moshfegh was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother was born in Croatia and her father was born in Iran. She lived in China in her early 20s. She has struggled with depression, eating disorders, and ennui, but writing has helped her find purpose and a place, and the creative process brings her into occasional contact with something transcendent: a state of heightened receptivity.

Moshfegh is a frequent contributor to the Paris Review; she has published six stories in the journal since 2012. Fence Books published her novella, McGlue, in 2014. Her novel Eileen was published by Penguin Press in August 2015, and received positive reviews. The book was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. Homesick for Another World, a collection of short stories, was published in January 2017.