Dark Hygge

by Otessa Moshfeigh, Reviewed by Lauren Kay

I’ll start here: Most bizarre and vexing thing I’ve ever read. Nothing happens. But somehow I could NOT stop reading.

Our main character seems to not enjoy living very much. She has an intense apathy for life despite being fairly wealthy. I suppose losing both your parents will do that, but that doesn’t seem to be on the forefront of her mind. Instead she thinks a lot about how annoying her best friend is, how she should order food, and how the guy she’s been sleeping with is a psychopath. But most of all, she thinks about how she’d rather be asleep. Her nihilistic ponderings are also sprinkled throughout the book.

So she sets out to sleep as much as possible. Literally tries to be asleep for days at a time, waking only to eat and go to the bathroom, but eventually she finds a way to sleep through that too. The supporting character in this book is the fictional drug that helps her achieve this goal of sleeping for an entire year.

She has the notion that she’ll come out the other side of it more enlightened about life.

By the end- she does. And somehow it’s beautiful. This nauseatingly bleak book has a beautiful bittersweet ending that leaves me feeling like I just went through the same existential reset that she did. I’m writing this review over a year after I read this, and I still think about this story.