I'm really sorry to the people in the queue for this book (all 11 of them) but I had not finished and now it's with me in Torquay and will not be back in Manchester until Thursday. On the up side Claire is getting to read it too as I did finish reading it on the train.'Eileen' by Ottessa Moshfegh was one of those books that you read in horrid fascination, willing someone to help, or for Eileen snap out of her self-obsession and look at what is happening. It is told by elderly Eileen, almost as if she is talking about someone else, she is so far removed from the events that she relates. Young Eileen lives with her alcoholic father in a dump of a house, neglected beyond reprieve since her mother died, and works in a children's detention centre, dealing with the daily realities of young boys who have fallen between every crack. She is consumed by self hatred, deprives herself of nourishment and is horrified by sex and the notion of being an adult woman, physically scrubbing herself clean of any sexual urges. Into her life arrives Rebecca, beautiful and elegant, and somehow out of place, and throughout the story we are told to anticipate her necessary and imminent departure from her home town because of the relationship with Rebecca. It is a book that is all build up, the tension ramped up over the chapters, while she draws a detailed picture of the sad, cold, empty life that Eileen leads, until the fateful denouement.
"And back then - this was fifty years ago - I was a prude. Just look at me. I wore heavy wool skirts that fell past my knees, thick stockings. I always buttoned my jackets and blouses as high as they would go. I wasn't a girl who turned heads. But there was nothing really so wrong or terrible about my appearance. I was young and fine, average, I guess. But at the time I thought I was the worst - ugly, disgusting, unfit for the world. In such a state it seemed ridiculous to call attention to myself. I rarely wore jewellery, never perfume, and I didn't paint my nails. For a while I did wear a ring with a little ruby in it. It had been my mother's." (p.2)
In the story it is the end of days for young Eileen. Old Eileen knows that things will never be the same again, and you feel that, even though we are given only hints of the future, the events that Rebecca brings about transformed young Eileen's sense of herself and old Eileen lived a better and more meaningful life because if it. I don't want to give any spoilers, so there you are. I leave you with Eileen and the dead dog:
"One day I went out back to hang the laundry and found the dog belly-up in the uncut grass, tall and dried and dead in the bleaching sun. Perhaps God took the wrong soul, I thought in a freak moment of sentimentality, and I cried quietly, back pressed up against the house. I left the wet laundry in the basket, but draped a sopping pillowcase over Mona's body. It took a day for me to muster the courage to go back out there. By then the laundry had congealed and dried, and the sight of the dead dog when I lifted the pillowcase made me gag and spill the contents of my stomach - chicken, vermouth - into the dry dirt. It took me several hours to dig a sufficient hole with a trowel, push Mona in with my foot - I couldn't bring myself to touch her with my hands - and cover the body with the brittle earth. A week later, when my father kicked over the dog's dish of stale and smelly kibble, he simply said, 'Damn dog,' and so I threw the whole thing out, and told no one. A few days later my mother was dead, and I let the tears flow openly at last. It's a romantic story and it may not be accurate at this point since I've gone over it again and again for years whenever I've felt it necessary or useful to cry." (p.85-6)
Stay safe. Be kind. Enjoy the view.
