Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

 

At the beginning of Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, the protagonist, Vesta, finds a note in the woods behind her house asserting that a woman, Magda, was killed, that her body will never be found, and that the author of the note did not kill her.

Or maybe she doesn't find that note. By the end of the novel, the narrator seems to be, to put it politely, unreliable, or to put it less politely, crazy. We can see that she might be have been made so by the pain she carries from her earlier life as wife to an unsympathetic and unfaithful professor, and that this pain might have been exacerbated by the solitude in which she lives, in a cabin on a disused girl scout camp. We go back and question things that she has told us.

Vesta recounts her efforts to understand who the victim named in the note, Magda, was and who might have killed her. Doing this, she is, in essence, creating characters: Magda, her lovers, her killer. She imagines (she might say "discovers") what they did. In this sense, the novel seems to be to some extent about writing: imaging a story, populating it with characters.

At novel's end we have come to distrust the narrator, but to her credit, Moshfegh makes no clumsy effort to step in and clarify things. She leaves us with questions that keep the novel a presence long after we turn the last page.