My Year of Rest and Relaxation: a trendy, silly, fun, bizarre read
a trendy, silly, fun, bizarre read. set-up is a very slim, tall, attractive protagonist (by absolute eurocentric standards) living in NY off of her dead parents’ inheritance. she decided that she wants to take as much time as possible to retreat into sleep. to achieve such a state, she’d need to take as many combinations of sedatives as possible to put herself into a chemical hibernation, and she honest to god stopped caring about anything and anyone, and slept and woke and fell asleep in front of the TV again, for loops of days, weeks, months, each moment present. minimum effort. in semi-sleep-awake states, she’d carry on with lucid blackouts and perform libertine acts in the backdrop of mild misanthropy. this book was a weird one, because in some ways this protagonist was objectively beautiful and blonde and privileged and squandering all of her life into a retreat, yet at the same time, it appeals to an inner irrational desire that some of us have at times, to dissipate into a fog of detachment, to numb all pains, and fully cleanse and reset and reinvent the wheel of life. the dynamic of female friendships in this novel was so grotesque, where our protagonist saw her best friend Reva as the most jealous and assumed the worst of Reva’s intentions, where both girls simply see the appeal of being prettier and thinner and more ‘cultured’ than each other as the singular objectives worth pursuing. in the book, the additional embedding of super weird, disgusting, and atrocious art concepts was both entertaining and emetic. i think this book is amusing because of its sharp contrast layered together intelligently. the protagonist/narrator in this one is definitely deeply mentally ill, so much that she displays such classic DSM behaviours and has repulsive thoughts and is frequently repulsed by herself, and is so self-centred that she is capable of lying and cutting people off and out to get what she wants.
some excerpts are so sarcastically amusing. inserted below.
In college, the art history department had been rife with that specific brand of young male. An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskin pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger — usually Asian — girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side. Nobody up there listened to the Moldy Peaches. Nobody up there gave a shit about “irony” or Dogme 95 or Klaus Kinski.
