Kris Van der Bijl

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh takes the folk horror story form towards disturbing, often funny, conclusions. The charts a year in the life of Marek, a young boy crippled both physically and psychologically, as he experiences life on both sides of the class divide in the fictional medieval village of Lapvona.

Moshfegh wrote Lapvona during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. She took up the project because of “how weird everything suddenly was.” Death, isolation, and the sense of entrapment permeate the text.

These themes are staples of the folk horror genre, and Moshfegh uses them to explore the implicit horror of the pandemic. I also think she explores how climate change and the power structures of society are entwined in a paradoxically fixed and insecure matrix.

Lapvona Summary

The plot of Lapvona revolves around thirteen-year-old Marek. He is the son of Jude, an abusive, brutish lamb herder. The novel is told in four parts. Each represents a season of the year. Nature runs the order of all the character’s lives.

Characters

The cast of characters is typical of the folk genre. There is Villiam, the Lord who never leaves the heavily guarded manor house that overlooks the village. He has a son named Jacob (who Marek accidentally kills) and the corrupt Father Barnabas, who helps Villiam justify his greed.

Ina takes a witch-like role. She is the village’s wet nurse, and no one really knows how old she is. Being blinded at an early age and shunned from the village forced her to grow up in a cave. She apparently speaks to the birds. At the end of the novel, she uses a horse’s eyes to regain sight.

And then there’s Marek’s tongueless mother, Agata. Jude had told Marek that she died during childbirth – even pointing to the blood stain on the floor of their house. She, however, ran away and ended up a nun. Her forced silence stands out as one of the most horrifying aspects of the text. Not only is she voiceless, but she is constantly at the whims of those around her, often incapable of being free.

Spring

The novel opens in Spring. We are told that bandits have just raided the town and killed several villagers. From the beginning, we see that death is part of life in Lapvona. Marek helps to bury the dead, noticing how “the children’s bodies looked like wooden dolls, stiff and adorable.” Sudden and violent death can come to anyone.

Lapvona is filled with disturbing characters and images. Early on, we learn of Ina, the witch-like figure. We know that she was shunned from Lapvona after everyone in her family – but her – died from an outbreak of plague. Blind, young Ina is cast out. She learns to live off the land, develops almost mystical powers, and communicates with birds.

But when she is older, she returns. Everyone who knew of her banishment had died. Despite her age, Ina finds that she is producing breastmilk. She becomes the wet nurse for the village. Everyone, and I mean everyone, uses her for her milk and for her herbal knowledge. But everyone still treats her as an outsider, a witch, and a ghastly figure.

Ina embodies a motherly figure. Not only does she nourish the village’s babies, but she is the one people go to when they are sick. Marek often visits her for comfort. She can identify every villager and can tell them about their birth and how they were as a baby. She is also ignored and treated cruelly.

Spring ends when Marek accidentally kills Jacob. The two boys had gone on a walk and Jacob was showing off his new shoes. Jacob is one of the more likeable characters. It’s clear that he cares more about the villagers than his father. Marek enjoys spending time with Jacob.

Additionally, he delights in the fact that he is his cousin. After Jude tells him this for the first time, Marek notes how he had “always thought of himself as a creature without history, a bloodline blurred by loss, meaningless.” It comes to be quite handy that he is related to the town’s Lord.

Jacob’s death was accidental in the sense that Marek did throw a rock at him, but he did not expect that Jacob would fall from the edge of a cliff right before a storm began. When he tells Jude what he did, Jude walks with Marek to Jacob’s dead body. He carries it to the Villiam’s Manor in an attempt to apologise.

Villiam is unconventionally maniacal. Quite simply, he is hedonism at its most extreme. A favourite hobby of his is to eat sausages until he throws up. He is described as childlike and takes pleasure in making his servants play games for his amusement.

So, when Jude arrives with Villiam’s dead son on his back, Villiam “accepted it somehow as a game”. Since Jude said that the two were cousins, Villiam proposes a trade. He takes Marek to be his son, and Jude can have the dead one.

Summer

Marek enjoys his new life in the Manor. Whereas his life in the village was one of poverty, work, and hunger, his new life is one of excess. He takes to being Villiam’s son remarkably well. Additionally, he enjoys that he is no longer beaten on a daily basis.

If Jude is a brutish and violet man who teaches Marek that pain and suffering are necessary to be allowed into heaven, then Villiam is the playful, timid, lazy man who teaches Marek about excess. Unlike Jude, Villiam is assured a spot in heaven from his royal status.

Part of this assurance comes from Father Barnabas’s manipulations of Christian scriptures. Increasing the peasant’s taxation easily solves Villiam’s overspending his budget. They will not complain because Father B can preach to them about how it is their Godly duty to toil and serve.

Lapvona is filled with excessive extremes. Villiam is so rich, so decadent, and so hedonistic, that he does what he pleases while the peasants below starve and turn to cannibalism. The two worlds couldn’t be more different. A great deal of the novel’s horror rests on such excesses.

What’s worse, these excesses directly result from Villiam’s actions. It is a drought that causes many peasants to starve while Villiam’s garden remains green and filled with vegetables they are not allowed near. This drought was caused by Villiam diverting the water to his garden and cutting the supply to the town.

No one in the town knows this. They assume their plight was caused by their lack of faith. No one can go near the Manor without being killed by the guards. They assume that Villiam is struggling like the rest of them while he lives locked down in his Manor.

Secrets pervade the text. One such secret comes to light during this time. We learn of the horrifying birth of Marek. In case you didn’t already hate Jude, we learn that he found Agata in a forest, assaulted her, and then kept her for himself. He thought that it was his right as a man. Chaining her to his house is an extension of his disturbing patriarchal thoughts.

When she gave birth to Marek, she fled. Jude assumed that she died in the cold. He did not realise that she stumbled into a nunnery. Without a tongue and clearly in distress, they locked her in. But, during the mass starvation caused by the drought, she escapes and begins to make her way back to Lapvona.

In a novel full of horror, of course Agata runs into Jude, in a forest, just like when they first met. And Jude, fueled with emotions after just eating a villager, assumes that he is seeing the ghost of his wife. He assaults her just like he did when they first met.

Agata makes her way towards the Manor. Villiam accepts the mute nun as another novel toy to add to his collection. Marek, recognising himself in her, thinks that she is the ghost of his dead mother who somehow returned.

The last significant event of Summer involves Villiam’s wife Dibra and her lover Luka. Luka disappears on a trip to the village. Only his horse returns with its eyes gouged out. Dibra goes searching for him. She, too, does not return. Villiam is relieved that the wife he hated and her lover, who most likely fathered Jacob, is gone.

Fall

Rain once again descends on Lapvona. This brings an end to the drought that had killed so many. People in the village begin to put the pieces of their lives back together. The community comes together again to bury the dead.

Ina has regained her sight. She is using the eyes of Luka’s horse. The village, while shocked, continues to treat her with disdain.

But the events of the drought are not forgotten. Grigor – whose name is often followed by “the elder” – questions why the pastures of the Lord’s Manor remained lush while the rest of the village starved. This is in response to Villiam’s ability to send shipments of food.

It’s said that “of all the residents of the village, Grigor alone questioned the rations delivered back in August. Where did they come from?” He could not understand the logic, and begins to question whether their social structures really work for everyone.

He discusses this with Ina. The two smoke canniba together and form something of a relationship. Ina takes Grigor to a waterfall near the cave she lived in for years. The note that the water is diverted towards Villiam’s Manor.

In the Manor, Marek tries to reconnect with his mother. He sneaks into her room and attempts to curl up to her, but Agata pushes him away. We learn that she finds children “selfish”. Understandably, given her situation, she sees them as something which “robs you of life.”

But Agata’s troubles are far from over. She is pregnant, and everyone in the Manor takes pleasure in this thought. Because she cannot tell them the truth, everyone assumes that she is a virgin giving birth. Villiam even compares her future son to Jesus because, of course, he would only consider a boy as an option.

Father Barnabas prepares to contact the papacy. Soon, the Manor is buzzing with the thought that the silent nun is giving birth to the saviour. Villiam notes, “If I marry this nun, I’ll be father to the son of God.” And so, farcically, the arrangements begin.

The entire village learns of this marriage. They do not ask about William’s previous wife. Conveniently, her death proves to them that he, too, suffered death during the drought. Villiam makes a spectacle of himself during the wedding.

One of my favourite, gut-wrenching lines is, “Agata made no vows, as was customary for the bride.” In Lapvona, she is silent not because she had her tongue ripped out at a young age, but because she is a woman. It’s a great example of the hauntingly detached tone of Moshfegh’s novel.

Winter

In winter, the cruelness of Lapvona’s farcical tale begins to tie itself up. Villiam dies after drinking large amounts of poison. Marek becomes more and more of a spoiled child as the attention shifts towards the silent pregnant nun. He knows that that child will be more important than him, and he cannot stand that.

Grigor becomes increasingly agitated by the lies of the church and the villager’s blindness to it all. He develops more of a bond with Ina, almost like her horse eyes give her more sense than the others.

Ina moves into the Manor to help with the birth. She locks herself and Agata in a room during the delivery. No one else is allowed inside for weeks after.

Father Barnabas begins to lose his mind. He hears voices that he assumes is the devil. While few of the real injustices committed against characters are ever resolved, this section brings justice as close as possible to those who wronged others.

Even Jude questions his actions against Marek and (somewhat) against Agata. It’s worth quoting a good chunk of the text:

To Jude, the boy [Marek] was a blight, a curse, something that had come to Earth to punish him for a sin he couldn’t recall. Hadn’t he been a good man? Hadn’t he prayed enough? Hadn’t he lashed himself correctly? It never occurred to Jude that the capture and detention of Agata as an adolescent was anything but his rightful duty as a man.

Moshfegh does not absolve Jude of his hideous actions. Instead, she uses them as a means to criticise the masculine image he represents. He does not see himself as having sinned. The church of Father Barnabas tells him to act a certain way towards God and towards women. He is following their doctrine.

Spring

The final, shortest section has Marek break into the room to see the baby he hears crying. He finds Agata dead, with maggots crawling from her mouth.

Marek takes the baby and sneaks it out of the gates of the Manor. He takes it to the same cliff where Jacob died. Lapvona ends with Marek holding the baby and telling it not to fear death. He tells it that it will never “have to walk among the monsters.”

Folk Horror and Lapvona

Lapvona utilises tropes from the folk horror genre and takes them towards extreme conclusions. These extreme views allow certain messages reflecting our current world to scream at the reader.

Dwight Garner of The New York Times calls Lapvona a “gloomy folk horror” that fixates itself on ugliness and pain. These are common to the genre, but I think there’s a good deal more value to its ugliness.

The setting of a vague European village haunted by drought, bandit raids, Christianity, paganism, and feudalism conjures a feeling of familiarity to anyone versed in the folk genre. Life is brutish and short without the social structures of the state that formed during the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

In Lapvona, place dictates the character’s lives. When Marek lives with Jude, he is a starving peasant who faces constant beating. Similarly, the people of the village are forced into cannibalism when the ground can no longer sustain crops or livestock. The Earth is central to their way of this.

Additionally, the people of Lapvona are isolated from the world around them. No aid from the drought comes from those up North. And when outsiders do enter the village, they are treated at best with distrust and, at worst, with violent death.

Within this isolated, place-centred world, the social structures are necessarily closed. Anyone who goes against what is considered normal – like Ina – is shunned and treated poorly. The challenges of survival necessitate self-centredness.

Alternatively, as in the case of Agata, difference is ascribed with meanings of transcendence. The case of her apparent virginal pregnancy has to be a sign from God since the village’s closed and prescribed world has no other meaning for it.

Their morals are skewed by their structures. The way that Father Barnabas frequently gaslights the village into paying more taxes and toiling harder, telling them that this will bring them closer to God, but really so that he and Villiam can keep partying in the Lord’s Manor, is the prime example of this.

While the people in Lapvona are tied to the seasons and to the Earth, their actions are not only a result of this. Social structures invade their relationship with nature in order to benefit the already rich and powerful. They are not cosy peasants. They are people at the mercy of a childlike man with too much power and money.

But it would be an oversimplification to say that Villiam is the sole cause of everything wrong with the character’s lives. Moshfegh does not write him to be powerful. In fact, he is portrayed as morally depraved. And given Marek’s character change towards a more Villiam-like personality throughout Lapvona, it is likely that Villiam is also controlled by the place that he is in. Recall, for instance, that he never leaves the Manor.

Brenna McPeek writes that the “novel and its characters are blatantly theatrical”. I agree. The convenience of switching one son with the next, the family secrets surrounding who is really the parent of who, and the Kafka-like playfulness of brutality mark Lapvona as deeply fictionalised. It is obviously a story with an apparent authorial figure. McPeek even goes on to say that Moshfegh acts “like a God exercising power over her characters.”

Every character is not truly in control of their lives. A figure hovers about them, writing – and therefore making – their horrors a reality. Moshfegh is the author and the only God of Lapvona.

I find this sense of powerlessness compelling. In a world that is increasingly warming, living in a country in the Southern part of the world (where the world’s wealthiest nations continue to produce a carbon footprint 100 times greater than the rest), where billionaires are free to do what they please, novel’s like Lapvona give some kind of voice. I find it comforting to sense that I am incapable of changing the horrors of the future.

The strange shift brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic is not far from Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel. Recall that she began working on it during the severe lockdowns of 2020. Locked inside, we saw richer countries stock up on limited vaccines and simply ban entry to those whose governments either couldn’t afford the price or, in the case of South Africa, simply ‘lost’ the money set aside for the average citizen.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona is disturbing. Its scenes of assault and violence are shocking. But these are not just textually shocking. They are worse because they do not reflect a vacuous village: much of what makes Lapvona so terrifying is its mirror towards our world. 

---

Book details:

Interested in more book reviews? Consider reading:

• The Dullness of Writing Back: On A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass
• A Traveller Sits by his Fire and Writes about his Times: On Place: South African Literary Journeys by Justin Fox