Death in Her Hands Pdf Summary
Death in Her Hands Pdf is a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense about an elderly widow whose life is upturned when she finds a cryptic note on a walk in the woods that ultimately makes her question everything about her new home.
While on her normal daily walk with her dog in the forest woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with a frame of stones. “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body”. Our narrator is deeply shaken; she has no idea what to make of this. She is new to area, having moved her from her longtime home after the death of her husband, and she knows very few people. And she’s a little shaky even on best days. Her brooding about this note quickly grows into a full-blown obsession, and she begins to devote herself to exploring the possibilities of her conjectures about who this woman was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and with mounting excitement and dread, the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But as we follow her in her investigation, strange dissonances start to accrue, and our faith in her grip on reality weakens, until finally, just as she seems be facing some of the darkness in her own past with her late husband, we are forced to face the prospect that there is either a more innocent explanation for all this or a much more sinister one – one that strikes closer to home.
A triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, ‘Death in Her Hands’ asks us to consider how the stories we tell ourselves both guide us closer to the truth and keep us at bay from it. Once again, we are in the hands of a narrator whose unreliability is well earned, only this time the stakes have never been higher.
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Death in Her Hands Book Reviews (Amazon)
5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling and well-crafted.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 28, 2020
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The impression I got from “Death in Her Hands” is that, of all Ottessa Moshfegh’s novels, this one is closest in spirit to the short stories in her collection “Homesick for Another World.” While I’ve enjoyed each of her novels, that collection is my favorite of all her books.
As with any work of art, the nuances are all-important: beyond the plot of an elderly woman named Vesta finding and deciphering a cryptic note saying that someone was murdered, what counts is the experience of the protagonist and, therefore, the reader. Vesta’s psyche is on display as she struggles to make sense of the note and live her life — the distinction between these two activities becoming increasingly blurred.
The writing itself is seamless, pithy, superbly crafted. But the end (last four pages) missed the mark for me — I thought the novel was building up to something more clever, less facile. However, as I’ve been pondering it, it’s been growing on me. “Less is more” and all that.
Having checked out some of the other reviews on amazon, I noticed many reviewers assume Vesta is becoming psychotic. This would be the conventional — expected — interpretation. However, I think it doesn’t fit because Vesta’s voice is rational and common-sensical. Another possibility is she’s tapping into the quantum-physics nature of the universe (where time, space, and reality are co-created — some scientists say wholly created — by consciousness), and the various wildly-implausible and mystifying synchronicities she comes across are just par for that course. Her “breakdown” may be a shamanic breakthrough as she outgrows the bourgeois prison of her lifelong persona.
(For more on quantum physics, see books such as “The Quantum Revelation” by Paul Levy or “The Physics of Miracles” by Richard Bartlett.)
Also, some reviewers complained of “animal cruelty” (which does not actually occur in the book) and “fat phobia.” It’s as if these readers want to read only literature which excludes things they don’t like or that are “not nice.” Obviously, that being the case, their potential reading list would be quite small.
Overall, “Death in Her Hands” is a compelling novel from a major talent.
1.0 out of 5 stars No plot and animal cruelty makes this a terrible book
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 25, 2020
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I was so excited by the premise of this book when I pre-ordered it. I expected weird, but I also expected a story. With the exception of two somewhat creepy scenes, the plot doesn’t really progress beyond the first few pages. The majority of the book is stream of consciousness from the narrator, a 72 year-old widow with regrets, loneliness and a touch of incoherence. She creates a whole fantasy murder mystery around Magda. Also, anything with animal cruelty is an automatic “don’t read” for me, so I wish I knew. I wish I could get my money back.
2.0 out of 5 stars Awkward & Disappointing Book !
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 25, 2020
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I enjoyed several of Moshfegh’s previous books, and was enthused about reading this one. I was heartily disappointed..!! This book was disjointed, rambling, and actually made no sense.
Vesta is an elderly widow who recently moved across the country. She purchased a former Girl Scout camp with lots of land. Charlie, a mutt she adopted is largely her only company.
She stumbled across a note during her daily walk in the woods, and she her mind goes on a wild goose chase., creating scenarios that have no basis in reality.
You get glimpses of Vesta’s former life, her long and unhappy marriage to her deceased husband, Walter and so on.
There were glimmers of goodness here and there, but largely, I had to struggle to finish this. Not Moshfegh’s best work by a long shot.
About Ottessa Moshfegh Author of Death in Her Hands Pdf Book
Ottessa Moshfegh the Author of Death in Her Hands Pdf Book, 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.
Death in Her Hands pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Penguin Press; 1st Edition (June 23, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1984879359
- ISBN-13 : 978-1984879356
- Item Weight : 13.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.78 x 0.98 x 8.6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #423,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,559 in Occult Fiction
- #4,399 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #23,507 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews: 3.7 out of 5 stars 1,049 ratings
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