She compares the women from the neighbouring township to cows or clapping seals and is less than impressed with their fashion sense: “ women mostly dressed in cheap synthetic material… had tattoos on their arms….

Vesta is a troubled, lonely, and disagreeable person. In an industry where women must be portrayed as sympathetic and where only men have the permission to be unlikeable, Moshfegh is one of the few writers (Claire Messud is another) giving voice to feelings of paranoia, self-loathing, and hatred from a female perspective. Given her isolation, Vesta becomes convinced that the note has been written for her: “Who else but me would have found it?… It may just as well have been addressed to me,” and with little to occupy her mind, she begins to fabricate a backstory for both the author of the note, whom she names Blake, and, of course, the victim: “I pictured her teenaged, lithe and slouchy with long black hair… with a name like Magda there must have been something exotic about her.” As Vesta’s obsession with Magda (and Blake) spirals out of control, we get a glimpse into the psychological abuse Vesta endured at the hands of her husband, Walter. She lives alone, with Charlie, her dog, in a cabin that was once the location of a summer camp for Girl Scouts. Whereas the protagonists of Moshfegh’s previous books were younger women, Vesta is in her seventies, recently moved to the Levant following the death of her husband. Like her two previous books – Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation – both of which I loved, Death in Her Hands is an intense, psychologically driven and female-centric character study (still a rare beast in the publishing world). This is the eerie opening to Ottessa Moshfegh’s third novel Death in Her Hands. No tangle of hair caught on the coarse fallen branches, no red wool scarf damp with morning dew festooned across the bushes.” Just the note. Here is her dead body.Įxcept there is no body, “no bloodstain. Vesta Gul (pronounced “like the ocean bird”) is walking her dog, Charlie, through the woods when she finds a note on the ground. Death in Her Hands, Ottessa Moshfegh ( Penguin Press 978-5-6, $18.99, 272pp, hc) April 2019.

Death in her hands book review