V171 reviewed Homesick for another world by Ottessa Moshfegh
None
4 stars
A weird little book following weird little people, in many ways expected, but in many ways new. Homesick for another world feels familiar but fresh that fans of Moshfegh will appreciate.
The standard disclaimers apply: it is difficult to give a star rating to short story collections obviously, but given the consistent writing style, I don't think many of these stories actually varied all that much in quality, each ranging from fine to quite good. We follow various individuals in various levels of degeneracy. An elderly man is stalking the local cashier at the internet cafe because he's obsessed with her, a woman is summering in her vacation home in a drug riddled dying town as she partakes in whatever hard drugs the locals want to give her, a man goes on vacation to find the male prostitute he suspects his recently deceased wife had sex with right before she …
A weird little book following weird little people, in many ways expected, but in many ways new. Homesick for another world feels familiar but fresh that fans of Moshfegh will appreciate.
The standard disclaimers apply: it is difficult to give a star rating to short story collections obviously, but given the consistent writing style, I don't think many of these stories actually varied all that much in quality, each ranging from fine to quite good. We follow various individuals in various levels of degeneracy. An elderly man is stalking the local cashier at the internet cafe because he's obsessed with her, a woman is summering in her vacation home in a drug riddled dying town as she partakes in whatever hard drugs the locals want to give her, a man goes on vacation to find the male prostitute he suspects his recently deceased wife had sex with right before she died.. everyone is welcome here! Perhaps degeneracy is a harsh term, it is really an exploration of people in varying levels of desperation for different circumstances, and often the story does well in either introducing a neutral character to us and slowly making us dislike them, or, more interestingly, the opposite; introducing an unlikable character but through the context of the story, making them to be more sympathetic.
This isn't going to be for everyone though, I think if you really liked Eileen, you will like this, but not necessarily if you liked Death in Her Hands. There are aspects of Moshfegh's writing that are hard to swallow for certain audiences. For example, she's often criticized for being fatphobic in her portrayal of fat people as objects of disgust, and even I was surprised with the amount of r-slurs in this short story collection, but in my opinion, it is all in the service of character development, though the pattern is certainly suspect. If you have read many of this author's works and enjoyed them, you'll probably like this, but I wouldn't say this is a good entry point into her works, unless you want to get a shotgun blast of exposure to her writing style.