I didn't want to be wandering around Levant once night fell. It would be a very strange thing to see, some old woman in her dusty coat grasping Death in her hands and whistling into the forest. Ghod, on his way to the party, would surely stop to ask if I'd lost my mind.
Death in Her Hands is (no surprises here, coming as it does from the singular mind of Ottessa Moshfegh) weirdly experimental and oddly affecting. Whereas Moshfegh's previous bestsellers (Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation) used black humour and uncomfortably unmentionable material to explore the
Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body.
While out walking her dog Charlie (“some bastard combination of Labrador and Weimaraner” according to the vet) in the birch woods adjacent to her cabin, Vesta Gul (meant to sound like the seabird but the locals keep mispronouncing it as “ghoul”) discovers this note on the path, and quickly pockets it. Vesta – a longtime reader of detective fiction – begins to obsess about the details of the note: Who could Magda have been? Is she really dead? Who wrote it? As Vesta begins to imagine answers to these questions, she finds herself both creating a mystery narrative and starring in one, and as the story evolves, the line between imagination and reality becomes ever more murky; the dangers ever more manifest as Vesta goes about her life in a remote cabin in the woods, no phone, no family, no friends, with only her dog for protection and companionship.
What if the doctors were wrong? What if the mindspace was not something made by the brain, and what if it continued even after death? Oh, I could get carried away imagining all sorts of theories. At times I wondered, Walter, are you hearing all this? Was he still up there, sharing the mindspace with me? What would he think if he could see me in this new life in Levant, a single old lady in the woods, with a dog? Walter always hated dogs. How did I love a man who hated dogs? We all have our quirks and issues, I told myself.
There's plenty that could be said about the strange metafictive mystery-story-within-a-mystery-novel, and the intriguing clues from the Bible and Blake (not just the weirdly Biblical place/character names and the serendipitous discovery of “The Voice of the Ancient Bard”, but the fact that “blood-rimmed tide” can be found in both the Bible and Blake). But the most interesting aspect of Death in Her Hands, to me, was the slow revelation of the details of Vesta's long marriage to the academic Walter Gul, a German epistemologist, and the sad fact that his lecturing and condescending voice was still dominating her mindspace after his death. Every impulsive decision or action that Vesta takes seems to be in defiance of the lingering Walter's expectations, and that not only makes more sense of some strange events, but it also feels very truthful...and sad.
The last thing I want to note has to do with the strange formatting of my digital ARC. I don't know why it caught my eye, but the copyright page for Death in Her Hands has a longer statement than usual: Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. I don't know if that's Penguin's usual statement, but it does, naturally, make me doubly uneasy about quoting even as meagerly as I did here. But what's even stranger, is that the words “Not for Distribution” are stamped on some of the pages throughout this book, in a ghostly background font, sometimes all three words, and sometimes just one or two. Lines of the text can also be broken up, stuttering or appearing out of order, in large, bold letters, and the ghostly Not for Distribution seems to interact intentionally with these phrases – as though it's Walter, as negative and prescriptive as in life, interrupting Vesta's thoughts. A more or less random example of one page in its entirety:
