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A review by lavinia_reads
McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh
5.0
Ottessa Moshfegh is a tremendous literary talent. She is one of the most interesting contemporary American writers.
The first book of hers I read it was a book of short stories, titled Homesick for Another World which it blew me away. It was such an unusual narrative, an extraordinary, otherworldly book that skilfully balancing sympathy and disgust.
I was so excited by Moshfegh’s work that I just had to read more of her books. A couple of months ago I read her last book the wonderful and strange, almost surreal, My Year of Rest and Relaxation a book that operate, in a certain sense, between disgust and repellence.
Finally, a few days ago, I borrowed from the library McGlue, the first book that Ottessa Moshfegh had published in 2014. I read it all in one sitting and I will read again before I return my copy. It is an extraordinary novella, a sea-faring tale of love, dependency and murder. McGlue, a rather dysfunctional sailor has acquitted on account of murder, having murdered his friend and fellow sailor Johnson in the port of Zanzibar in the spring of 1851. He was sent to prison in Salem, Massachusetts, but the judge deemed him unfit to stand trial because he committed the murder in a state of blackout caused by heavy drinking and because of an accident that he had cracked his head.
Through Moshfegh’s writing you can feel McGlue’s pain and the depth of his suffering from alcoholism. He is a man desperate for love, but he doesn’t know how to love and as it usually happens in tragic love stories, he destroys the thing that he loves most.
Reading McGlue feels like an intense and disturbing virtual reality experience, mostly because of Moshfegh’s unique writing, dark and intimate, beautiful and authentic.
McGlue is such an awfully impressive book. A contemporary classic.
Read the full review at Athena reads
The first book of hers I read it was a book of short stories, titled Homesick for Another World which it blew me away. It was such an unusual narrative, an extraordinary, otherworldly book that skilfully balancing sympathy and disgust.
I was so excited by Moshfegh’s work that I just had to read more of her books. A couple of months ago I read her last book the wonderful and strange, almost surreal, My Year of Rest and Relaxation a book that operate, in a certain sense, between disgust and repellence.
Finally, a few days ago, I borrowed from the library McGlue, the first book that Ottessa Moshfegh had published in 2014. I read it all in one sitting and I will read again before I return my copy. It is an extraordinary novella, a sea-faring tale of love, dependency and murder. McGlue, a rather dysfunctional sailor has acquitted on account of murder, having murdered his friend and fellow sailor Johnson in the port of Zanzibar in the spring of 1851. He was sent to prison in Salem, Massachusetts, but the judge deemed him unfit to stand trial because he committed the murder in a state of blackout caused by heavy drinking and because of an accident that he had cracked his head.
I wanted to lie down with it and strangle it and kill it and save it and nurse it and kill it again and I wanted to go and forget my face and I wanted to drink and get my head ruined but I certainly hadn’t thought about making it. That wasn’t anything I’d ever sought out to do.
Through Moshfegh’s writing you can feel McGlue’s pain and the depth of his suffering from alcoholism. He is a man desperate for love, but he doesn’t know how to love and as it usually happens in tragic love stories, he destroys the thing that he loves most.
Reading McGlue feels like an intense and disturbing virtual reality experience, mostly because of Moshfegh’s unique writing, dark and intimate, beautiful and authentic.
McGlue is such an awfully impressive book. A contemporary classic.
Read the full review at Athena reads