![]() His priest offers the less vulgar term excrement. “Cabbage, and something a bit worse than that. The lord himself, a pervert with no interest in governing, makes his servant girl catch shit-stained grapes in her mouth and present her rump for sniffing. Meanwhile, at the manor on the hill, servants fertilize the lord’s vegetables with fecal matter from the lord’s chamber pots and feed the lord’s livestock hay grown in his own ordure. “Lapvona dirt is good dirt,” the villagers tell each other, referring to the fecundity of the local soil, but when drought strikes, they will resort to eating dried-out cakes of animal dung as well as the dirt itself. In the village of Lapvona, shit is everywhere: in the air, in the earth, splattered onto clothes, and crusted onto bodies. Moshfegh’s latest piece of shit is her new novel, Lapvona, a dark medieval farce about a woebegone hamlet in quasi-historical Eastern Europe. “What kind of stink do I want to make in the world? My new shit becomes the shit I eat.” “In writing, I think a lot about how to shit,” she once advised her fellow fiction writers. She finds in it not just pleasure and shock but a serious analogy for the literary act, which she has described as a cycle of defecation and coprophagia. ![]() “What do you think?” Like Sade, Moshfegh also has a philosophical interest in human waste. The “Marquis de Sade says anal sex is best when the ass is full of shit,” she once wrote to a man who had asked her out for ice cream. It’s tempting to chalk up the butt stuff to a fixation that Moshfegh says dates back to her 20s. The beautiful protagonist of her 2018 novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, embarks on her quest to sleep for a year by shitting directly onto the floor of the fancy art gallery that employs her. Mainstream success did nothing to soften Moshfegh’s stomach for bodily functions. The book won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize critics praised it for being a Trojan horse, a study in human depravity hiding in the bowels of a commercial thriller. Moshfegh’s 2015 debut novel, the noirish Eileen, follows a laxative-abusing secretary at a boys’ prison who stumbles into a mystery involving nightly enemas and anal rape. Her early literary fiction is dotted with scatological detail: a smear of bird shit, an anal dildo, buckets for defecating in ass-to-mouth play, sodomy with a broken bottle, a colostomy bag full of digested Mexican food. ![]() But the acclaimed author has also spent the last decade writing about the anus. Moshfegh has dedicated her career to writing about assholes: cruel, pathetic people who do cruel, pathetic things. But no man who lighteth a candle hideth it under a bushel, and in the end, hoping to work a miracle on his dying mother, Brom will demand his anus be cut open with a sword. ![]() His name for this practice is illumination: “A few things I’ve managed to illuminate are worth noting: a small bottle of sherry, my sister’s confirmation crown which I snatched from its velveteen case and hammered down straight and flat, a rabbit’s foot, a brass corkscrew, an ivory penknife.” Brom, you see, believes his colon houses the light of God, safely concealed from his serfs, whom he torments, and his servant girl, whom he imprisons and feeds horse manure. “Coaxing something up there, into the light, can take all day,” reports the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Brom,” a 2017 short story about a shut-in feudal lord who spends his days easing foreign objects into his rectum. If you have ever worked with one, you’ll know that assholes don’t respond well to input.
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