‘Eileen’ – Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen

I became aware of this when I saw it was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, so I was pleased to receive an advance copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The most obvious thing to say upon completing the book is that this will not be to everyone’s taste.

The narrator of this story is Eileen Dunlop, a woman of indeterminate age, and she is looking back on events that took place around Christmas 1964.
Eileen is not a character you will easily warm to. As she describes herself – and we obviously don’t know to what extent she is manipulating our perceptions of her – we see a lonely twenty-four year old woman who behaves like a little girl in many ways. She lives with her alcoholic father and has a mediocre job in the local boys’ prison. She dresses in her dead mother’s clothes, has evident body issues, is quite unpleasant to those she encounters and has an obsessive need to detail her bodily functions. Yet there is something utterly fascinating about this quite grotesque character.

For a lot of the novel very little happens. Then Eileen meets new colleague Rebecca and her life changes.

What follows was not at all what I expected. It’s better to not know the details in advance, but Eileen gets to be the heroine of her own story. I was surprised that events took the turn they did, and the ambiguity of the ending sums up for me the utter selfishness of Eileen. What happens to others is simply irrelevant-once they don’t impact on her life it is as though they don’t exist.

I found this a puzzling but seductive read. Having enjoyed it so much I purchased my own copy.