Homesick For Another World

Ottessa Moshfegh

The first time I ever heard about Ottessa Moshfegh was in a bookshop, where a girl was insistently recommending My Year of Rest and Relaxation. By the look of the book, I instantly thought it was one of those shallow reads I wouldn’t enjoy. Little did I know at that time, Ottessa would become one of my favorite writers, whose work I would eagerly consume. In her book Homesick for Another World, my favorite story is called “An Honest Woman.” As happens in most of her works, her characters are a mesh of dark and weird traits, doing completely normal things but with the most twisted feelings at times. None of the characters she creates are the kind of profiles we would care to look at twice in real life—probably ones we would avoid as much as possible. Her female characters mainly feel out of place, longing to escape but unsure of what they are escaping from. They end up doing things they don’t particularly desire, and most of them wear blue eye shadow. The men she describes often have pimples, bad teeth, and a sense of self-delusion. None of these characters are made attractive, and I think that’s precisely because Ottessa aims to show us a different kind of protagonist in her stories. I can almost hear the pages asking: what about the rest of the world? And that’s exactly what this book is about—the rest of the world and its not-so-popular protagonists. Empty shopping malls with deserted corridors, Egyptians running convenience stores where their bitter black coffee is mostly consumed by workers and outcasts, and the all-nighters. None of these characters are written to evoke sympathy. They simply exist, just like we all do. Probably, Homesick for Another World is not a starter book for readers who want to discover the world of Ottessa. I would recommend reading her book Eileen first.
I thoroughly enjoyed every page of her short story collection and was in awe of her simple writing style, which condenses so much observation.