Readers who wade through some of the more confusing passages and remember Vesta's state will be rewarded by the portrait of a woman that remains in their own, rational minds for a long time.We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for DEATH IN HER HANDS … then take off on your own:ġ. Ottessa Moshfegh has crafted an unusual, messy, and fascinating look into the "little gray cells" so beloved of Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective created by Vesta Gul's beloved Agatha Christie. Vesta, whose unreliability is almost absolute, is locked into her own mind, where nobody will ever know her, regardless of what happens next.
The statement isn't the end to a mystery, but it also isn't the beginning to one. Nobody will ever know me, just the way I've always liked it." She's not dead yet. When the book's end comes, Vesta thinks: "My name was Vesta. It's also a portrait of how a person can become so cut off and beyond help in our modern, increasingly connected culture, how, if some people can remain in contact 24/7 via text and chat, others can lose contact for days, weeks, months at a time. This is a portrait of a person losing her mind, from inside her mind, while she tries to keep it, using a pretend murder mystery. This is not a murder mystery, conventional or otherwise. It's neither as energetic as the horror story of Eileen, nor as thought-provoking and relevant as Rest and Relaxation. The author has said that she wrote the manuscript between those other two novels and put it away for a while.
Readers who have read and loved Moshfegh's Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation may find less to love in this strange, affectless protagonist. Still others, like Vesta, become sucked into a rabbit hole of what-ifs and wonderment, looking for questions in a life that has had too many answers already. Some might show it to a spouse or the police. Some might chuckle and attach it to a pinboard. What would you do, if you found a note like that? Some of us might ignore it. Until the day when Vesta finds a note under a rock that reads: "Her name was Magda. There she lives simply with her beloved dog Charlie, taking long rambling walks through the woods and interacting with virtually no one.
Vesta Gul, a widow in her seventies, has relocated from the Northern Midwest leaving behind the home she shared with her husband Walter, for a cabin at a decommissioned Girl Scout camp in an unspecified Northeastern state.
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