Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... Eileenby Ottessa Moshfegh
  
Books Read in 2017 (79) Books Read in 2016 (106) Booker Prize (102) » 18 more Books Read in 2023 (164) Diverse Horror (13) Contemporary Fiction (66) Best Noir Fiction (127) Female Protagonist (822) Reading 2016 (5) sad girl books (31) No current Talk conversations about this book.  ElizaJane | Sep 2, 2023 |  Not at all what one would expect...but oddly familiar at the same time. Half "coming-of-age" half "rustbelt noir"...worth savoring. (  ) AmandaPelon | Aug 26, 2023 | (7.5) I chose this for my crime fiction read. What a disturbing and depressing scenario is painted in this book. I struggled to like or even feel compassion for the protagonist. (  ) HelenBaker | Aug 17, 2023 | I liked this novel a lot, as I had the prior one of hers that I had read, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. This book is centered on a 24 year old woman who feels very little, longs for quite a lot, and seems stuck in a bizarre & horrible home life, while working as a secretary at the local youth prison. The author does very well in giving us knowledge of who Eileen is, how she got there & what her daily life is. And I found Eileen to be a very interesting protagonist, and also appreciated her perspective on the other people in her life. This is a terrific book. ( ) RickGeissal | Aug 16, 2023 | Ottessa Moshfegh is so good at these isolated, outsider characters who aren't particularly nice people but I can completely understand how they feel, and how they got to the dark places they occupy. I loved [b:My Year of Rest and Relaxation|44279110|My Year of Rest and Relaxation|Ottessa Moshfegh|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1597676656l/44279110._SY75_.jpg|55508660] and this was just as good. Eileen is a much darker novel. She lives a very sad isolated life with her alcoholic father and harbours a lot of anger and resentment over the hand life dealt her. The story is told by a future, older Eileen looking back on her younger self so she can comment on how judgemental and repressed she once was from the perspective of growth and experience of the wide world. I really like this framing of the story. I never really knew how the novel was going to end - there were quite a few turns it could have taken and I couldn't predict which one we were going to get which was great! Loved it! I'm 2/2 great reads with this author, excited to see what else she has! ( ) ImagineAlice | May 8, 2023 |
Excess drives the descriptions. It is as if Moshfegh has grasped the fact that few things excite modern publishers more than the grotesque and an author daring to be offensive. As a bottom-scratching, finger-sniffing, no hand-washing creation, Eileen never becomes more than a disgusting, impersonal caricature caught up in her fascination with her self-loathing: “Having to breathe was an embarrassment in itself. This was the kind of girl I was.” Well-reviewed in the US, Eileen reveals a great deal about the gimmicky quest for the next big thing which often turns out, as it does here, to be far less worthy of attention than yesterday’s superior offerings. Eileen could have stepped out of Flannery O'Connor or Shirley Jackson. Wonderfully horrible Humbert Humbert also comes to mind. Eileen may be "unfit for the world," but I was pulling for her. I wanted her to escape the prison of life with father, wished that her dreams of fleeing to New York might come true. Eileen is a coming-of age novel about a formidable, yet flawed young woman. The norms of society disgust and seduce her at the same time. There is a sweetly sinister humor in Moshfegh's prose.  Moshfegh, whose novella, “McGlue,” was published last year, writes beautiful sentences. One after the other they unwind — playful, shocking, wise, morbid, witty, searingly sharp. The beginning of this novel is so impressive, so controlled yet whimsical, fresh and thrilling, you feel she can do anything....But for this reader, the thrill is the language. It is sentences like this: “The terrain of my face was heavy with soft, rumbling acne scars blurring whatever delight or madness lay beneath that cold and deadly New England exterior.”...Rebecca and her motivations, once we learn them, feel pasted in from another book. They do not square with the universe Moshfegh so meticulously created in the first part of the novel...The real excitement toward the end is watching Eileen come into a position of authority for the first time in her life. It’s hard to imagine the terrible, drunken, addled father who visited the toilet with a handgun ever tolerating Eileen’s “blabbering on about my ideas, regurgitating barely read synopses from the backs of books … talking about how I felt about myself, life, the times in which we lived”. The bad thing that is eventually revealed, and the bad thing that happens as a consequence, don’t quite live up to the atmospheric badness with which the novel draws along the reader. But there is something satisfyingly unsettling about the novel – the awfulness of Eileen’s life crackles throughout the air of X-Ville like static electricity, ready to discharge in some unlikely place or upon some unlikely person. And when it does, when the bell jar lifts, our heroine “open to the circulating air” and finally free, we can’t help but feel the slightest bit glad. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Dreaming of life in the city while caring for her alcoholic father and working in a 1960s boys' prison, a disturbed young woman is manipulated into committing a psychologically charged crime during the holiday season. No library descriptions found. 
|
Popular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.46)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English (1)
3
Ottessa's first book is an award winner and one of my favourites of hers. Like most of her books, the horror comes at the end but it is a bumpy ride getting there. The narrative is witty and dark. Eileen is not a likeable person but her story is compelling. As she tells this story from the future, foreshadowing keeps us on edge wondering what is going to happen. A slowly moving story with a fast conclusion; this held me riveted. (