Eileen

by Ottessa Moshfegh

So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back.

This is the story of how I disappeared.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.

Genres: Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Contemporary, Mystery Thriller

260 pages, Hardcover

First published August 18, 2015

About the author

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands, her second and third novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.

Reviews

[Rania]

لو عايز رواية بتسخر من الابطال، بطلتها سوداوية تكاد تكون شريرة دي الرواية ليك.
حياة ايلين فكرتني بحياة كاري لستيفن كينج.
بس النهايات تختلف كل الاختلاف.
تحكي القصة عن ايلين الفتاة المتناقضة بين ما تظهره و بين عالمها الداخلي، فهي عذراء متزمته جنسياً و لكنها تحمل رغبات و شهوات جنسية تجاه أحد نزلاء الاصلاحية التي تعمل بها.
تعيش مع والدها مدمن الشراب الذي تحرش بها و هي صغيرة و يبغضها و هي تبغضه و لكنه يحب اختها. و لكن ايلين مكروهه من عائلتها و هي ليست شخصية تحب بإي شكل من الاشكال بالنسبة لي، فهي لا تهتم باطفال الاصلاحية و ان كانوا ابرياء و لا تحب احد و عندما اعجبت باحد شخصيات القصه كان أعجاب مراهقات شاذ تنعدم فيه الشخصية.
ايلين كإي شخصية ضعيفة لم تشعر بالقوة الا عندما امسكت مسدس لاول مرة في حياتها و ظهرت عندها شخصيتها الحقيقية. انعتقت من حياتها السابقة و من اواخر محاولة ابهار اناس اخرين لتتسم بشخصيتها الحقيقية التي هي اقرب للشر من الخير.
لم تعجبني القصة كثيرا و لكنها مكتوبة بعناية و الشخصيات حية للغاية