My Year of Rest and Relaxation — sounds like a great idea, right? Who wouldn’t love to take off a year to chill out and relax (assuming one is able to do so financially). It is certainly a unique premise for a book, which I was eager to devour. After reading it, I must confess that the story is not exactly what I expected.
The narrator of A Year of Rest and Relaxation wants to sleep away the year by using all sorts of prescription drugs she is too readily able to get from a psychiatrist she selected from the yellow pages because she was the only one that answered her phone at 11pm. As bizarre as the premise of this book sounds, I have to admit, I loved it. Perhaps my background in psychology biased my reading experience — I don’t know.
Our narrator is obsessive-compulsive about sleep — she absolutely loves it!
Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.
I’d always loved sleeping. It was one thing my mother and I had enjoyed doing together when I was a child. She was not the type to sit and watch me draw or read me books or play games or go for walks in the park or bake brownies. We got along best when we were asleep.
She truly believes that if she sleeps continuously for a year, her neuroses and troublesome memories will vanish and life will begin anew for her.
I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is more of an in-depth character study than a story per se. We get to know the narrator, who interestingly enough is nameless, very well. To say she is self-alienated is the understatement of the year. She is very self-absorbed and has a destructive relationship with her boyfriend Trevor that is on again and off again and on again, etc. We get glimpses inside her head and follow her thoughts, free associations and self-analysis. She is actually a tragic figure that doesn’t seem to want to work out her psychological issues but rather prefers to be in denial and deludes herself into thinking that sleep is a panacea.
Nothing seemed really real. Sleeping, waking, it all collided into one gray, monotonous plane ride through the clouds. I didn’t talk to myself in my head. There wasn’t much to say. This was how I knew the sleep was having an effect: I was growing less and less attached to life. If I kept going, I thought, I’d disappear completely, then reappear in some new form. This was my hope. This was the dream.
At times, the story is just so outlandish that it is amusing and/or outright laugh out loud funny.
Dr. Tuttle,” I began, “I was wondering if you could prescribe something a little stronger for bedtime. When I’m tossing and turning at night, I get so frustrated. It’s like I’m in hell.”
“Hell? I can give you something for that,” she said, reaching for her prescription pad.
Having a trash chute was one of my favorite things about my building. It made me feel important, like I was participating in the world. My trash mixed with the trash of others. The things I touched touched things other people had touched. I was contributing. I was connecting.
The writing is very descriptive and smart. The metaphors are clever and seamlessly integrated into the narrative.
Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could crash and sleep again.
I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere….
While the premise sounds like the book could become boring at times, I didn’t find that to be true at all. My Year of Rest and Relaxation is well-written and captivating with a very unusual storyline. I am very interested to read more by Ottessa Moshfegh.
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