Terrible-Beautiful "Easy-Readers" for Summer

I’ve been enjoying books lately that are terrible and beautiful at the same time. I’m sure you know what I mean, like My Brilliant Friend, or the films Blue Velvet or Melancholia. Here are a couple of summer “easy-readers” (in the sense that you read them fast) that are ideal for summer reading if you like “terrible-beautiful” books like I do.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh, 2019

I read this book in one day (when I had a cold, and was on cold medicine, appropriately) — it was so funny and delightfully terrible.

Set in New York City the year before 9/11, our protagonist, a single, young, and wealthy Columbia graduate who works in an art gallery, is sure she can recover from the grief and trauma damage caused by the recent death of her parents if she can just sleep for a year. Like really sleep.

She embarks on a progressively insane strategy to medicate herself into a blackout stupor for an entire year. She ingests a wide range of drugs to accomplish this, ultimately settling on “Infermiterol” (a fictional drug) that keeps her blacked out for days at a time.

Things truly become weirder and weirder as she begins to “sleepwalk” and ultimately “connect” with a semi-famous artist.

A quote from Vogue calls it: “Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.” 

Great provocative summer reading, My Year of Rest and Relaxation delivers one unbelievable scene after another, even when you think it can’t go any farther.

Heaven

by Mieko Kawakami, 2009

Translation from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd, who also beautifully translated her more recent book Breasts and Eggs (Also highly recommended)

A friend living in Japan first suggested late last year that I read Meiko Kawakami’s book Breasts and Eggs, which came out in 2008 as a short novel and was later re-published as a longer novel in Japan in 2019 and in English translation in 2020. So I read it and have been reading her work ever since.

Kawakami was a poet, blogger, and singer before she published novels, and she writes using the distinctive Osaka dialect of Japanese, which is spoken in the city of Osaka and its surrounding areas.

Heaven (2009) is a good introduction to her work. And it’s short enough that I was actually able to read the book in its entirety one night when I couldn’t sleep.

Kawakami has a way of communicating the interior struggles of her protagonists in a way that makes you feel like you are actually becoming them in a gritty, dreamlike way. She is empathetic and straightforward in her discussions of difficult topics and Heaven is no exception, with its story of bullying in school.

NPR compared Heaven to Elena Ferrante’s fiction and Bo Burnham’s film Eighth Grade. Like Ferrante’s and Burnham’s work, it’s a harrowing story, with the poetic writing making it beautiful and compelling. And also similarly, it creates an unusual visibility for the tormented. It forces us to consider the interior justifications that not only the tormentors, but the tormented children create.

In Heaven, a fourteen year old boy, known only as Eyes” — even to the reader — due to his lazy eye, is intensely bullied by the boys at his school in Japan, who lock him in lockers and beat him up in horrible ways.

He begins a friendship with his classmate, Kojima, who is herself bullied, and who leaves secret notes in his desk. Their connection is based more on their shared misery than anything else, and reveals the dark differences in how they see their lot as victims of their schoolmates.

Kawakami explores the two students’ viewpoints of each other, themselves, their classmates, and their heartbreaking and sometimes chilling experiences and how they each see them and respond to them.

It sounds intense, and it is. But it’s also worth it, like any terrible-beautiful book worth its salt.