Death in Her Hands: A Novel
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Ottessa Moshfegh. (2020). Death in Her Hands: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group.

Ottessa Moshfegh. 2020. Death in Her Hands: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group.

Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group, 2020.

Ottessa Moshfegh. Death in Her Hands: A Novel. Penguin Publishing Group, 2020.

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Death in Her Hands

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Death in Her Hands

fullDescription

"[An] intricate and unsettling new novel . . . Death in Her Hands is not a murder mystery, nor is it really a story about self-deception or the perils of escapism. Rather, it's a haunting meditation on the nature and meaning of art."
-Kevin Power, The New Yorker
From one of our most ceaselessly provocative literary talents, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds an ominous note on a walk in the woods.
While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, and she knows no one.
Becoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our narrator imagines who Magda was and how she met her fate. With very little to go on, she invents a list of murder suspects and possible motives for the crime. Oddly, her suppositions begin to find correspondences in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to fade into menacing certainty. As her investigation widens, strange dissonances accrue, perhaps associated with the darkness in her own past; we must face the prospect that there is either an innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one.
A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, Death in Her Hands asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both reflect the truth and keep us blind to it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, and the stakes have never been higher.

reviews

1. • premium: True
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     November 4, 2019
     Moshfegh’s disorienting latest (after My Year of Rest and Relaxation) sends up the detective genre with mixed results. Vesta Gul is an elderly woman who has moved to an isolated cabin on a lake after her husband’s death—with only her dog, Charlie, to keep her company. Vesta finds a note in the woods that reads “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” But there’s no body to be found. While Vesta does do some detective work (such as using Ask Jeeves to search “How does one solve a mystery?”), mainly her mind imagines Magda’s life, to the point where the people Magda knew bleed into Vesta’s own life. Moshfegh clearly revels in fooling with mystery conventions, but the narrative becomes so unreliable that it almost seems random, and readers may wish for more to grasp onto, or for some sort of consequence. There’s an intriguing idea at the center of this about how the mind can spin stories in order to stay alive, but the novel lacks the devious, provocative fun of Moshfegh’s other work, and is messy enough to make readers wonder what exactly to make of it. Agent: Bill Clegg, The Clegg Agency.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 15, 2020
     On a spring morning walk in the woods with her dog, 72-year-old Vesta Gul (whose last name should sound like "gull" but is pronounced "ghoul" by most) finds a note: "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." Vesta pockets the note and retreats to her home, a former Girl Scout camp without a working phone. A fractured, startlingly human narrator in Moshfegh's (My Year of Rest and Relaxation, 2018; McGlue, 2019) inimitable style, Vesta quickly reveals a relentless imagination matched only by her desire to uncover the truth. She tries to solve the mystery but before long she's writing it (if there's a difference), conjuring Magda and all the other key players, whom she begins to meet in real life. As she conjures, readers learn all about Vesta herself, particularly life with the academic husband whose ashes she's been meaning to get rid of. Cleverly unraveling, linguistically brilliant, and limning the limits of reality, this will speak to fans of literary psychological suspense.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from February 15, 2020
     A note suggesting a woman has been killed in the woods captures the imagination of an elderly woman, with alarming intensity. Vesta, the extremely unreliable narrator of Moshfegh's fourth novel (My Year of Rest and Relaxation, 2018, etc.), is a 72-year-old widow who's recently purchased a new home, a cabin on a former Girl Scout camp. Walking her dog through the nearby woods, she sees a note lying on the ground which says that a woman named Magda has been killed "and here is her dead body," but there's no body there or any sign of violence. Call the police? Too easy: Instead, Vesta allows herself to be consumed with imagining what Magda might have been like and the circumstances surrounding her murder. Whatever the opposite of Occam's razor is, Vesta's detective work is it: After some web searching on how mystery writers do their work, she surmises that Magda was a Belarussian teen sent to the United States to work at a fast-food restaurant, staying in the basement of a woman whose son, Blake, committed the murder. Moshfegh on occasion plays up the comedy of Vesta's upside-down thinking: "A good detective presumes more than she interrogates." But Vesta slowly reveals herself as what we might now call a Moshfegh-ian lead: a woman driven to isolation and feeling disassociated from herself, looking for ways to cover up for a brokenness she's loath to confront. Over the course of the novel, Vesta's projections about Magda's identity become increasingly potent and heartbreaking symbols of wounds from the narrator's childhood and marriage. The judgmental voice of her late husband, Walter, keeps rattling in her head, and she defiantly insists that "I didn't want Walter in my mindspace anymore. I wanted to know things on my own." You simultaneously worry about Vesta and root for her, and Moshfegh's handling of her story is at once troubling and moving. An eerie and affecting satire of the detective novel.

     COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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"[An] intricate and unsettling new novel . . . Death in Her Hands is not a murder mystery, nor is it really a story about self-deception or the perils of escapism. Rather, it's a haunting meditation on the nature and meaning of art."
-Kevin Power, The New Yorker
From one of our most ceaselessly provocative literary talents, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds an ominous note on a walk in the woods.
While on her daily walk with her dog in a secluded woods, a woman comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground by stones. "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." But there is no dead body. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to this area, alone after the death of her husband, and she knows no one.
Becoming obsessed with solving this mystery, our...

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