My Year of Rest and Relaxation: Sleeping Your Way into Life

If you have spent some time on Goodreads, you have probably heard of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. For those unfamiliar with this title, it might be helpful to look at the novel’s cover, which features a painting by Jacques Louis David. Before reading the book, I had caught about a thousand glimpses at the apathetic expression of the woman in the artwork. I did not predict that the cynicism pictured in the face of the protagonist of the cover would reflect that of the book’s main character. The two heroines look nothing alike: the muse of the painting is a brunette with soft curves, while the book’s nameless leading figure describes herself as a slim, tall blonde. What makes the two similar, in my eyes, is the boredom apparent in their faces.

The narrator and protagonist of the novel is a young, rich, and, as she herself repeats, beautiful art history graduate. She lives in the buzzing New York of the year 2000. Tired of being awake and facing reality, she starts to take a concerning amount of sleeping pills and anxiety medications with the aid of her very irresponsible psychiatrist. Her goal is to spend a year sleeping. She hopes that, in the end, she will wake up a different person.

The book’s wealth is in its absorbing nature: it completely trapped and consumed me. Its style is sometimes dry, sometimes introspective. Its irregularity catapulted me inside the insufferable protagonist’s brain. She is arrogant and looks at the world with spite, but I understood her, because I was given the chance to closely follow her thought process. While reading, I almost felt like I was morphing into this character. I picked up the book when I was already burnt out and, the more I turned its pages, the more I felt that sleeping my days away and escaping my surroundings was a good idea. Thankfully, I did not do this. However, the point is that the book put me in the uncomfortable position of despising the protagonist and simultaneously paralleling some of her tendencies.

What affected me the most about the character was her complete lack of empathy. We are immediately made aware, at the beginning of the novel, that her best friend Reva’s mum is about to die. The protagonist is irritated by her friend’s sadness and is not there to comfort her. Her cynicism is rooted so deeply within her because of the traumatic experiences she went through during her childhood and young adult life. Despite this, though, I rarely managed to muster up the strength to pity her.

Another characteristic of the narrator is her tendency to see the worst in everyone. When I first read the book, I was naively convinced by her descriptions of her acquaintances. A second examination made me feel like a lot of the characters in the novel might have been deformed by her cynical eye. This is glaringly obvious when one observes the disconnect between Reva’s words and actions, and the protagonist’s depiction of her. Reva is always there for the main character, even though she herself is in a dark phase of her life. Despite this, she is described by the narrator as envious and inauthentic.

It is my belief that the main character is resentful towards her best friend because she ardently desires something that comes naturally to Reva: the willingness to try in life. Reva is a try-hard. She puts effort into everything, from her body to her adherence to the most recent trends. Reva and the protagonist are polar opposites. The former lives with her eyes wide open, always attempting to be better; she faces the unknown with courage, even until the very end. One could argue that she lives her way into death while the latter wants to sleep herself into life. She wants to passively wait, in a state of semi-death, for life to happen to her.

With its ability to anger me, turn me into its main character, and prompt reflection, My Year of Rest and Relaxation was one of my favourite recent reads.

Image from Wikimedia Commons