Yet other passages are lovely, filled with lyrical descriptions of the natural world and dead-on observations of rural, small-town life, including the ubiquitous radio preachers and single-pump gas stations selling coffee, bait and ice. Death in Her Hands : A Novel 3.26 (28,355 ratings by Goodreads) Paperback English By (author) Ottessa Moshfegh List price: US18. Vesta likes to think of herself as 'just a little old lady, peacefully waiting out the rest of my life' - readers soon realize she's anything but.Īs Vesta forces herself to imagine what might have happened, the writing has a tendency to become forced as well - perfunctory, writing for the sake of writing. Moshfegh, the acclaimed author of 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' has created in Vesta another psychologically fragile narrator in the process of coming undone. Soon, she's imagining an entire cast of characters including Magda, her killer and the author of the note, unless the latter two were the same - which she quickly concludes they were not. To do so, she must first imagine the corpse. Even so, she will spend the rest of the book trying to solve the mystery of its disappearance. Perhaps it’s the title, or the fact that it’s harder to make a case about someone being exploited by media in life when you’re doing the same thing after her death. Here is her dead body Vesta, the amazingly unstable 72-year-old narrator of Death in Her Hands, is my favorite of all of Ottessa Moshfegh’s growing roster of eccentric narrators. Here is her dead body.' But there is no body. The novel begins with the narrator, Vesta Gul, finding a note while she is out walking her dog in the woods.

Death in her hands review