The Reading Chair: “Death in Her Hands” by Ottessa Moshfegh
An American Miss Marple goes mad in a literary murder mystery minus some important clues.
Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press) opens on an intriguing note — namely the mysterious handwritten one found along a woodland trail.
“Her name was Magda,” it reads. “Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.”
It’s a strange doorway into a mystery novel, all the more since there’s neither a corpse nor any other clue about; to you and me, it might be a prank; to Vesta Gul, the old woman who finds the note, it’s definitely murder most foul. From there she becomes engulfed by two mysteries: the one of a murder without a body, and the other of who wrote the note and why.
While paying tribute to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Moshfegh’s fertile imagination reimagines the cold keen-eyed spinster and amateur gumshoe as a grieving widow through whose lonely eyes and splintering cognition the story unfolds. It eventually becomes apparent that the mystery of loneliness and the crime of unwilling isolation are the real concerns here (with maybe an echo of our current situation).
Following the death of her husband a year before the story begins, Vesta Gul moved cross country to the outskirts of Levant, a dismal New…
