‘Jude regurgitated Klim’s pinky toe…’

Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel is a medieval nightmare of dangling eyeballs and torture. What’s the point?

320pp, Jonathan Cape, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

Lapvona, the fourth novel from American author Ottessa Moshfegh, is without doubt the most violent book I’ve ever read. Set in a medieval fiefdom, it describes events that take place over one year and begin at Easter; but if you’re expecting a resurrection story, look elsewhere. On the hill above the village of Lapvona, Villiam – its spoilt, cruel lord – binges alongside his charlatan priest, Father Barnabas, who keeps the population in check by feeding them dogma.

The pious villagers believe their suffering will be rewarded in the afterlife, and to keep them fearful, Villiam regularly deploys bandits to rape, pillage and plunder. Occasionally the villagers fight back. After her children are killed, one mother smashes a bandit’s foot with an axe, then he’s put in the stocks, pelted with animal excrement, and has his ear cut off by the children’s grandfather, who flings it into a “lemon tree laden with blossoms” for (he yells) “the birds to eat”. That’s paragraph one.

Anyone familiar with Moshfegh’s fiction, from My Year of Rest and Relaxation to Death in Her Hands, will be used to this uneasy mingling of sensuality and disgust. (In one interview, the 41-year-old author described her work as “like seeing Kate Moss take a s---”.) And readers expecting more-than-dislikable characters will find many: Moshfegh’s masterful close-third narration shifts between misanthropes, centring on Marek, a disabled boy whose abuse from his father Jude should elicit pity. Unfortunately, Marek has a dreadful personality, wallowing in selfpity and devoid of empathy. As the narrator points out, he’s also stupid. Despite Lapvonian views, suffering does not equate to being a good person.

The action kicks off after Marek kills Villiam’s heir, Jacob. Jude carries Jacob’s mangled body up to the manor and Villiam – who is unhinged – demands a swap. Life at the manor is an adjustment for Marek. Villiam demands constant booze, food and entertainment. There’s gluttony but not much pleasure. Then there’s Lispeth, a maid who survives on cabbage, believing that “real faith was earned through self-denial” and obliging Villiam’s bawdy games, such as catching grapes which he had plucked from Marek’s anus.

Next, summer comes. Villiam diverts the river into a secret reservoir, leaving Lapvona to drought and famine. Down in the village, Jude rescues the corpse of blind man Klim from cannibalism and takes it to Ina, the blind old woman who suckles the village children (and a few adult men). When Ina orders Jude to roast Klim, he obeys.

For most of 300 pages so far, I had read frozen, occasionally letting out a little scream. But at a certain point, you start laughing. Jacob’s dangling eyeball didn’t do it, nor the disembowelling, vomit, crude abortion, paedophilia, or when Jude wakes up with his nostrils and mouth full of bees. Moshfegh’s deadpan “feed the blind to the blind. It had a certain logic to it” made me grimace. But when Jude “regurgitated Klim’s pinky toe”, I cracked up.

When the rain finally comes, half of the village is dead and the survivors want to forget. Father Barnabas reassures them that the devil is contained (if there’s a God in this novel, his creed is social homeostasis). The villagers are so relieved not to be starving that they remain in denial about Villiam’s abuses. Meanwhile, Marek’s mother, Agata, long believed dead, turns up at the manor, pregnant and dressed as a nun. Having had his current wife killed, Villiam realises that Agata’s baby must be Christ, and decides to marry her. You just have to accept this.

It would be tempting to read Lapvona as a parable, seemingly without a lesson. Religion can be coercive, power corrupts – we know these things. Perhaps it’s a parable about what it takes to hold our attention.

When her debut novel, Eileen – an unconventional thriller about a prison clerk desperate to escape her small life and alcoholic father – was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016, Moshfegh revealed that she’d used a “how to write a novel” book. She has contempt for the popular view that books have to be about issues and Lapvona proves her point. She holds us with blunt prose; there is no story, only a farcical sequence of grotesque events.

Despite its medieval setting, Lapvona feels like a pandemic novel – particularly in showing how wealth disparity can be a cause of suffering – and also like bingeing on a rotting feast. But I was left wondering: after so much excess, how will this novelist shock us next?

Jude, an abusive father, wakes up with his nostrils and mouth full of bees

g ‘Feed the blind to the blind. It had a certain logic to it’: Christ in Limbo by Hieronymus Bosch, c1575