Book Review - Lapvona

 It has been a very long time since I read a book that left me feeling vile for having read it. Lapvona is one of those. It feels like the definition of nihilism, gross for the sake of "look what I can write and make you read." 

I can't recall the title of the book prior to Lapvona that left me ill for reading, but it would have been in 1997 while living in Egypt, a book my friend, Betsey Arrigoni, passed to me. It featured long scene with a severed head.  I just completed Lapvona in 2026, so almost 30 years have passed since words on a page left me feeling so violated. It was actually my 12--year-old daughter, Sage, who picked up Lapvona at a school book swap. The cover and summary caught her attention. At the same time, the cover was eery enough that she wasn't ready to crack open the book yet. That's how it came to me, and I'm very happy I read it before she got to it. 

Lapvona, a novel by Ottessa Moshvegh, takes place in a an undefined medieval territory of fertile land not far from the sea governed by a feudal lord in his castle and a Christian priest moving between the church below and the castle above. As the book opens the priest is manipulating the blind faith of the common folk while on the margins of society a lonely shepherd and his afflicted boy make their own connection to God. There is also an old blind woman who is Lapvona's herbal healer and former wet nurse, also living on the margins, and who may or may not be a witch. The Church could easily claim that she consorts with the Devil, but from her own perspective she simply has a pragmatic drive to live.  She is the story's original nihilist. The  story slowly reveals connections between a large cast of characters, slowys lets us in on how base and selfish they are, how greatly removed they are even from basic ties that should bind a community together.  They are all nihilists by the end. 

What left me so hollow by the end was that Moshvegh hints at redemption as she drags her cast ever deeper into moral depravity and strips away their beliefs. I wanted to believe her goal was to arrive at a larger discourse of faith, or even just politics or community. But she never gets there. The book becomes an orgy of foul acts - murder, torture, rape, incest, cannibalism, desecration. I feel the arthur mocking me: "There you fool, look at the excrement I dragged you through. Welcome to the real world." 

This is not the world I am looking for. It is not the world I want for my children.