Ottessa Moshfegh – Lapvona (2022) Review

9/10

A long time ago in a land far, far away…. there was a country named Lapvona in which everything was awful. The Lapvonians were filled to the brim with violence, guilt, hatred, greed and self-loathing. Moshfegh’s anti-fairy tale is certainly an arresting experience. The writer seemingly did everything she could to make this story and its characters shocking and vile, and I almost wonder if it makes me a weird person for liking it. But Lapvona is not a mere caricature of a fantasy tale. The writing is too sophisticated and the characters too psychologically complex to dismiss the whole thing as caricature. This is artful perversion. 

The first character that stands out is Marek, a malformed boy with a twisted spine who lives with his abusive father at a little sheep farm. His deformity makes it easy to feel for him and he also seems to have a least a little capacity for seeing beauty in the world and wanting to be a good person. He is the first person to connect with as a reader. Marek is a victim of his upbringing, but the more we get to know him, the more he becomes a hypocritical, snivelling little turd who takes masochistic pleasure out of getting beat up. Religion plays an interesting role here as it is constantly used to justify anything. Marek himself says that if you think long enough, you can convince yourself of anything, and he himself believes that all the abuse and pain will make God love him, while he enjoys seeing his guilt-ridden father flagellate himself after beating him. 

If Marek is the self-pitying, religious masochist, the governor Villiam is the ultimate consumer. This man feels like a farcical representation of the modern consumer mindset of people who want to be entertained at all times and at great cost to the world without caring about anything. A superficial black void of a person that can never be filled. A third fascinating character is Ina, the village witch. She represents womanhood in a way, or even Mother Earth overlapping that, a creature feared for her perceived magical powers but also dismissed, uncared for, while actually playing wet-nurse for the entire village with endlessly-giving breasts.

These psychological profiles are more important for the narrative than any plot or world-building that is going on, and having a mainstream literary writer write a sudden medieval tale of awfulness in this time makes it very tempting to connect these personality profiles with real world equivalents in our own time, on the level of individuals or even on the level of whole social classes or peoples. Not that Moshfegh would agree about any underlying messages if one reads her infamous Vulture interview, but tropes and personality profiles are impossible to avoid and interpretation is a reader’s privilege. Especially if you set your tale in a fantasy world. Capitalism, socialism, feminism and religion, commentary on this can all be found in here even if only subconsciously filtered through the writer’s brain.

What I enjoyed the most about this novel is following these strange characters with their unusual personalities and odd ways of thinking. They are created monstrosities and their interactions cause unusual, unpredictable events. Marek, his father Jude, Villiam and the rest often act on misunderstandings and assumptions that make the story swerve this way and that, often ending in disaster. There are concentrations of irony here strong enough to melt steel.

Moshfegh’s wry, matter-of-fact language allows the readers to maintain a little emotional distance from what is happening, and to follow the actions of these characters is like watching a farcical, scatological stage play. To smirk at it is dangerous, though, because it feels equivalent to agreeing with messages that one could take from it, such as that yes the world is shit and full of hypocrisy and so are people and their hopes and dreams and what we tell ourselves is also shit. That may not be to everyone’s taste. I smirked, and the novel will stay in my mind for a long time.