![]() ![]() They weren’t particularly healthy-bleached flour, full of preservatives-nor were they very tasty. The bagels I had every morning for breakfast were from the supermarket and came precut in a package of half a dozen. ![]() But Vesta’s breakfast habits tell us far more than any plot summary: Vesta has recently moved from the Midwest to a former campsite in the Northeast with her new dog, Charlie, after the death of her old husband, Walter, a professor of epistemology. She tells us that it’s pronounced “gull”, like the bird, but people keep pronouncing it “gool”, like the corpse-eating monster, which might be revealing. Our narrator turns out to be a 72-year-old widow named Vesta Gul. “But,” our narrator tells us, “there was no body.” There is only the handwritten note, and for the reminder of the novel, the narrator’s interpretations. And so, Death in Her Hands, Ottessa Moshfegh‘s new novel, opens with these italicized words: It’s a mystery in the sense of religious awe: that which awaits interpretation. But not in the sense of the literary genre, or a secret. What happens to a murder mystery without the murder? ![]()
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