By This is a tough one. Ottessa Moshfegh is one of my favorite writers; she always finds a way to create an atmosphere of intense dread and transfixing disgust in the worlds she creates.
NOTE: This review contains spoilers!
About the Book
Title: Lapvona
Author: Ottessa Moshfegh
Published: 2022
Genre: fiction, horror
My Rating: 3/5 stars
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life’s few consolations for Marek is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him as a baby, as she did so many of the village’s children. Ina’s gifts extend beyond childcare: she possesses a unique ability to communicate with the natural world. Her gift often brings her the transmission of sacred knowledge on levels far beyond those available to other villagers, however religious they might be. For some people, Ina’s home in the woods outside of the village is a place to fear and to avoid, a godless place.
Among their number is Father Barnabas, the town priest and lackey for the depraved lord and governor, Villiam, whose hilltop manor contains a secret embarrassment of riches. The people’s desperate need to believe that there are powers that be who have their best interests at heart is put to a cruel test by Villiam and the priest, especially in this year of record drought and famine. But when fate brings Marek into violent proximity to the lord’s family, new and occult forces upset the old order. By year’s end, the veil between blindness and sight, life and death, the natural world and the spirit world, civility and savagery, will prove to be very thin indeed.
My Thoughts
Lapvona is a very different book than Ottessa Moshfegh’s previous works. Unlike the rest of her books, which are mostly contemporary fiction and told in the first person, Lapvona takes place in a “medieval” village and is told in third-person by an omniscient narrator.
The setting was an odd one, and I didn’t think, even with my limited knowledge, that the depiction of medieval life was very realistic. That said, I don’t think that historical accuracy is really what Lapvona was aiming for; rather, I think the setting was constructed specifically to help along the messages about organized religion, corruption, and the general nastiness of being a human being. And nastiness there was. Much like its principal cast of characters, Lapvona revels in its filth. There is cannibalism, pedophilia, rape, eating grapes out of someone’s asshole… the usual happenings of life. This quote from a review in The Guardian made me laugh and says it best: “As well as grown men breast-feeding from eldritch old women, we are presented with ejaculations, incest, botched abortions, arse-sniffing, rapes, pube-plucking, tongueless or eyeless women and a scene involving a servant girl and a grape that could have sprung from some dank 4chan cellar”
The story follows Marek, a rather dumb and impulsive child who kills the king’s son in a fit of jealousy (and likes to suck on women’s breasts as a thirteen year old apparently). As punishment for this deed, he is sent to the palace to be a stand-in son for the king, Villiam, and there witnesses the depravity of Lapvona’s rulers firsthand.
Lapvona‘s principle theme seems to be that human existence is disgusting and that people are universally corrupt. There is not one good person in the book, except for possibly Lispeth, one of the servents. Villiam, the primary antagonist, is a hedonistic and perverted king who lords over Lapvona, intentionally starves the population to secure riches for himself, and subjects his servants to degrading performances for his entertainment. He is comically unaware and selfish, making the stupidest decisions to fulfill his base needs. Jude, Marek’s father, masturbates in front of his son, and engages in weird masochistic rituals with him. (I read a review of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood that described it as “a book about a bunch of suicidal perverts”– now that description, I think, would apply even more aptly to Lapvona )
Lapvona as a Satire on Religion and Power
The most interesting aspect of Lapvona was definitely its satirical depiction of religion and how organized religion so often functions as a vehicle through which the rich and powerful exert their influence and subjugate the population.
Villiam’s rule over Lapvona is legitimized by the church, a loosely Christian religion whose creeds and beliefs are left rather ambiguous, owing to the fact that even the priest himself seems to know nothing about them. The religion is hollow; those who establish its dominion lack belief, but the population dutifully worships regardless.
The “Good Book” sets rules and threatens the common people with hellfire that is never feared by the ruling class, who is anything but holy. Constantly throughout the novel, Villiam and the others in the palace eat meat, even though the consumption of dead animals is forbidden by their religion– and so the reader, and Marek, learns that the rules simply don’t apply if you are powerful.
“Marek guessed that Villiam could use his wealth to influence God’s will. That was the way things worked, Marek thought. If you didn’t have money, you had to be good.”
When Agata, the mute woman who we find out is Marek’s mother, is discovered to be pregnant, the palace erupts in celebration, declaring this child a virgin birth, the Second Coming of Christ– when in reality, the child is a child of rape. Not only does this underscore the lack of agency of the women in this story (Agata was raped when she had Marek too, and though she tried desperately to have an abortion, she failed), it also demonstrates the absurdity of the palace’s religious proclamations. Even Villiam tries to simultaneously declare the child as his and as a virgin birth.
Lapvona’s Ending Explained
I want to take some time to talk about the ending of Lapvona , however, as it threw me for a loop. At the end of the story, Agata has given birth to “the new Christ”, and Marek takes the baby up to the same cliff where he killed Jacob. It’s strongly implied that he tosses the baby off the cliff.
When I first read this part, I was unsure of where Moshfegh was intending to direct the reader’s interpretation. Was this one last fruit of Marek’s envious, selfish personality? Was it Agata’s revenge from beyond the grave? Or was it merely another way to show us the depths to which these characters will stoop?
Final Thoughts
My favorite part of Lapvona was its somewhat surprising layers of symbolism and meaning beneath the heaps of shock-value scenes and nauseating details. I was more disappointed, however, by how deeply it was buried under said heaps.
If you liked this post, consider subscribing to Frappes & Fiction. I post about the books I read (even if they’re not fiction), the books I think YOU should read, and anything else on my mind.
Find me elsewhere:
Frappes and Fiction 