Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh: book review

Homesick for Another World (2017) is a collection of 14 short stories set in America.

The first is about a school teacher on the verge of resigning. The second is about a man who was secretly in love with a woman he saw at an internet café – the most beautiful woman in the world. In another story, another man is in love with Terri, the most beautiful woman in the world.

One story is about a couple who met ‘one summer day through the high chain-link fence between their backyards.’ In Nothing Ever Happens Here’ the white stucco, ranch-style house in Los Angeles has a crumbling pool full of rust stains, where a budding actor prays to be rich and famous.

The stories are about love, trying to be in love, being in love with an addict, looking for love, or leaving love. The characters – all flawed in some way – are all looking for something else in life.

The connector between the stories is the word “better” – bettering myself; never felt better; we’d better do it; and finding a better place.

This is not a happy collection of stories about happy characters. The characters are trying, but life is hard, and the harder they try to better themselves, the more things seem to go wrong. These trials are told in a quiet, sometimes disturbing way in which the characters often fail to meet their own expectations of themselves, no matter how high or how low.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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