![]() ![]() She has a singular instinct for the jangled interiority of loners and outsiders, most of them women, and for their uncomfortable and often unpretty inhabitance of their bodies. The guard grips her shoulders, but after she explains that she got dizzy, the guard lets her go, and she is free. Then she places her whole palm on the surface of the canvas. Instead, she puts her hand out and touches the frame of the painting. 'Step away,' a guard reprimands her when she gets too close to a painting. Moshfegh’s extraordinary prose soars as it captures her character’s re-engagement. ![]() It’s her own desire to be an artist that has been reborn. By the end of her self-imprisonment, a transformation does occur. ![]() The narrator recalls her mother, a vain and distracted bedroom drunk. Surfaces are important in My Year of Rest and Relaxation. In Persona the two at first seemingly opposite women begin to meld.similarly, as Moshfegh’s novel progresses, Reva and the narrator, at first strikingly different, increasingly resemble each other. ![]() In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the relationship between Reva and the narrator is reminiscent of Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, in which a stage actress suffers a breakdown and becomes mute. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh’s darkly comic and ultimately profound new novel, also concerns itself with a miserable woman in her mid-20s seeking 'great transformation'. ![]()
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