Monday, February 13, 2017

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen
by Ottessa Moshfegh

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Published: 2015
Publisher: Penguin Press
Genre: Mystery, Thriller
Hardback: 272 pages
Rating: 5

First sentence(s):
I looked like a girl you'd expect to see on a city bus, reading some clothbound book from the library about plants or geography, perhaps wearing a net over my light brown hair.

Zombie sighting:
A drawn and haggard face looked back at me. I looked like an old lady, a corpse, a zombie. -chapter Christmas Eve, page 208

A lonely young woman working in a boys’ prison outside Boston in the early 60s is pulled into a very strange crime, in a mordant, harrowing story of obsession and suspense, by one of the brightest new voices in fiction.

So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors.

Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into a complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature.


My two-bits:

A mystery, thriller and coming-of-age story that left me with a Wow!

Loved how this story gradually pulled me in and made me empathize with the protagonist to then fully understand how things came to be.

The storytelling style kept me glued to the page wanting to know... what next? And towards the end, wha????

~*~

* part of Cloak & Dagger Challenge (here)

* part of Book Passage Literary Prize Book Group (here)

Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize
Chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour

 
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