Lapvona

Marek a god-fearing shepherd's boy does his pious best to make sense of grim life circumstances until one day he makes an impulsive decision during an excursion with the landlord's son. The book reads like The Life of Brian crossed with Caligula or something directed by Branden Cronenburg.

It's a pithy study of resentment in all its flavors. Ludicrous and depraved yet readable. The characters are often preoccupied with wrongs, slights, past mistakes and post facto justifications of behaviour. Most of them are either idiots or scoundrels. Ina, a longlived wet-nurse, and Grigor, an elderly man turned Cynic (the original Diogenean sense of cynic) were my favorites.

The setting is never stated but my guess is circa 5th century Anatolia or Armenia. The early book refers 'fair northeners' who are 'amoral' and 'well suited to servile tasks', which I read as slavs of some description. A key scene indicates the place is mountainous, and nearby place names bear some resemblance to real locales such as Pripyat, Ukraine and Istria, Croatia.

A minor gripe from a non-American reader: on a few occasions I got taken out of the setting due to Moshfegh using Americanisms, such as 'moseying'. The author is American so it's kind of understandable, but it still struck me as a weird word choice given the subect matter.

When Marek was born, his mother died, or so he was told. He lives with his father, a shepherd, in Lapvona, the fiefdom of a corrupt, feckless and incompetent lord. Marek is the line that runs through Lapvona. He was born with skeletal deformities that earn him the contempt of Lapvona villagers, including his father. However, he makes friends with the lord’s son, although the prince treats him more as a hunting dog than as a friend. The relation between Marek and the prince is the feeble engine driving whatever plot there is in Lapvona. Overall, Lapvona reads like a truly terrible year, from spring to spring, at a tyrannically-run Ren Faire: murderous bandit raids, drought and starvation, relentless poverty and grinding work. Add to that humanity’s propensity to lie, and the almost impossibility of meaningfully connecting with another person, and you get a Boschian horror-show from which there is no escape but death, and no dignity even in death.

It’s hard to say what kind of story Lapvona is telling. Despite the corrupt, feckless and incompetent lord, it’s not a political allegory because there’s no politics. Although the fantastical happens, it’s not a fantasy because there’s no quest or rescue. It might be a fairy tale — a pauper does become a prince — but there’s no moral, and it’s hard to make up an edifying one that’s even tenuously connected to the story. It might be journalism, but the narration is omniscient and shifting, and the fantastic moves it into some other world despite the medieval-like, middle-European-like setting. It might be satire — the priest and the lord examine a pregnant nun and conclude she’s a virgin, even though they have no idea what they’re looking at, or what they’re looking for — but repeatedly hammering the same few nails becomes numbing. The story’s God-soaked, but not in any way that can be considered sacred. It’s more accurate to consider it an anti-God story, but the arguments against are a thin thread of commonplace hypocrisies. Probably the best way to take Lapvona is as it’s offered: a carnival ride of gross-outs and horrors.

So, are there trigger warnings? Oh yeah, there are trigger warnings out the ass: rape, incest, body horror, child abuse of various kinds, animal cruelty, blasphemy, cannibalism and its aftereffects, some kind of crypto-Aryanism, shit play of various kinds (you thought that “out the ass” was gratuitous, didn’t you?). Fortunately, Moshfegh’s prose style works well with this problematic litany. The flat and characterless descriptions efficiently move the reader from one gross-out or horror to the next, and give no reason to tarry; on the other hand, they also provide no place for the reader to hide. Occasionally Moshfegh waxes lyrical, usually about nature, and only for a sentence or two, otherwise it’s this atrocity, then this one, then this one.