“Lapvona wasn’t disturbing or gross. It’s the medieval times that scared me blind.”
About the Author: Lapvona was written by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Ottessa Moshfegh is an American fiction writer from New England. Her previous work includes; Eileen which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Award and won the prestigious PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction. Many people know her from her second novel, My Year Of Rest And Relaxation which was alongside Death In Her Hands a New York Times bestseller. She also wrote a novella; McGlue and a short-story collection; Homesick for Another World.
Synopsis: The book is set in a medieval fiefdom called Lapvona.
One of the main characters is Marek who lives with his shepherd father Jude. Motherless, and born with a twisted spine he lives in this fictional Eastern European village while his heart is longing for acceptance and motherly love. At the same time watching his father’s masochistic self-punishing rituals made him equally thirsty for violence. Shaping his personality and unknowingly; his future.
He often visits Ina, the extremely old herb woman of the village who was also a nursing mom not just to him when he was a baby but to almost all the villagers. Ina is blind and extremely old ( according to the medieval Lapvonians a 28-year-old woman is already way too old to have children) but still active and powerful.
We also get to know Villiam, the gluttonous almighty lord of Lapvona who could have merrily stepped out of a Game of Thrones book without hesitation. His ignorance and spoiled life made him a childish halfwit who was mostly ignored by even his closest advisers. Who were mostly charlatans in the first place. Moving forward we get to know Marek’s mother’s past, Lapvona, and mostly Marek’s future and by the end of it we will be grateful that these times are gone and this village although sounds very real, in fact, is fictional.
Structure: Lapvona has 320 pages and 5 chapters; Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring again.
Published by Jonathan Cape an imprint of Vintage, Penguin Random House.
It wasn’t an easy read but it did grip my interest and pulled me in if I could push through my personal focus spam. Which is ridiculously short, probably ‘I would never finish my Astronomy degree without discipline’ kinda short. The narration happens in the third place which is probably the best choice based on the plot. It jumps from character to character but it always goes back to the handful of main characters who were introduced in the beginning. What I loved about her writing is the way her narration becomes so anonymous that it feels like she almost disappears while writing this book.
And it’s not actually Ottessa but Lapvona who is telling this disturbing tale.
I also loved her choice of words and how she played with classical pairs; pain and beauty or with faith and paganism just to tell you a few examples. How she could steal some good-hearted characters into the story and make them shine bright just by their intelligence of common sense.
My take on it: I don’t know if I’m right with this, but I feel like Ottessa has a very fine dark and sarcastic humour.
I don’t know if I’m right with this, but I feel like Ottessa has a very fine dark and sarcastic humour. I don’t like medieval times. I never did. Ever since I was a child I was absolutely scared, disgusted, and freaked out by it. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t as shocked as so many people who read this book before me. I mean people were genuinely crazy in these times and if you found one person who had even the slightest common sense that person looked like an alien.
A time traveler who didn’t belong to a place where grown-up men were breastfeeding, suckling on a century-old woman’s breasts. Where a priest can diagnose a pregnant woman as Mary, the virgin.
Now it seems crazy and disturbing but if you stop for a second and look around and I mean really look around, you can still find these same aberrations anywhere and everywhere.
So I’m not sure if Ottessa was not just showing a mirror into our faces without a single twitch on her own face.
Her books are not the ones that I could read one after another but that’s just because of the state of my mental health which is as stable as a castle made of cards at the moment.
I became a huge fan of her and can’t wait for the next ride into Mirrorland.
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