Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

Book review by Ariel Jennings

The lamb on the cover of Ottessa Moshfegh’s fourth novel, Lapvona, stared at me for months. I picked it up long ago, got thirty pages in and was horrified by what I was reading. This is not quite the Ottessa Moshfegh I’ve come to know and love. I ignored the book as the weather got cold. I listened to the same Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift albums on repeat. I needed to feel something different. Much like the people of Lapvona, I chose pain. 

 In the spring, the medieval fiefdom of Lapvona is God-fearing and poor. They worked the fields relentlessly in hopes for holiness, usually cultivating only violence and more poverty. Villiam, eccentric and cruel, rules over from atop a hill with money, power and bandits. Just below the manor Jude the shepherd rules over Marek, his young, fragile and slightly grotesque son, with equal parts devoutness and evil. Marek’s only friend is Ina, who despite her age and blindness, nursed him and half of the village. An impossibly old woman with a vast knowledge of plants and medicines, she’s the witch in the woods that we all aspire to be. By summer, all their lives will change, as tragedy strikes to bring them together in the most brutal of ways. 

Summer brings natural disasters, famine and all notions of civility to leave the village.   We learn more about these power hungry, gruesome characters. Jude is a truly disgusting man, especially towards women. Yet, he offers the most insight into femininity, saying of mating  rituals, “It was an invasion and a penalty for her sex to be so brutalized, and then so burdened.” The least of his sins is whipping himself every Friday and enjoying it too much.  Villiam is almost comically insecure, filling his voids with gluttony, constant company, and “a special taste for freakishness”–readers are left wondering: what he was actually up to on that hill?

The most appealing character of the novel is not these weak, unlikable men but Ina, the cave-dwelling witch. The only survivor of a great plague long ago, she loses her vision and is exiled from the town.  Blinded, she hides in the woods for a generation and reemerges as a goddess-like savior of the town, burdened by her gifts of milk and medicine. (What an inspiration!)  Her story in particular calls back imagery to Vesta’s haunted bloodline from Death in Her Hands. I would’ve liked the entire novel to be about Ina’s magic.  

Lapvona seems to be a departure from Moshfegh’s usual work. Eileen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and even Death in Her Hands shared the same level of grotesqueness, taboo, and, yes, problematic subject matter, but each was balanced by an unapologetic female heroine and a message of urgent relevancy.  However, this novel reads like a Shakespearean tragedy with some of its nonsensical plot twists, crooked clergy in cahoots with men in power, endless violence, and depravity. 

Beyond the shock value, Lapvona will force the reader to address their own sins and the darkest parts of themselves. That’s what Ottessa Moshfegh does best, with absolute biting wit and breathtaking prose. .“A warm wind was coming in from the south and with it the strange, wistful scent of violets.” Violets AND violence.  The novel asks the question: what are you motivated by, godliness or greed? An old question for sure but just as tragically relevant today. If you find yourself needing to feel something visceral, this is the novel that will do it. Check the trigger warnings, and, if you need a break from the depravity, binge a TikTok series called “Werner Herzog’s Sad Beige Clothes for Sad Beige Children” — it fits the mood in the best way. Stay warmer than the characters of Lapvona…. 

Ariel Jennings is a lover of books, cats and nature. She works in the medical marijuana industry cultivating magic and medicine.