My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh

  My Year of Rest and Relaxation features a young female New Yorker in a deep depression that she herself does not recognize as such. The reasons are not that important, instead it's the fact that she can't make herself care about anything and all she wants is just to sleep and be left alone while she heavily medicates herself. Her best friend and serious codependent person can't make herself to let her be.

  I really liked the Ottessa Moshfegh's writing and I was able to like even the protagonist, who should be in fact extremely unsympathetic, but I warmed up to her somehow. Think of Camus' The Stranger or No Longer Human, by Osamu Dazai and you get kind of the same vibe. The main character is not so much a sociopath, as she is deeply depressed. She might have been and could yet turn out to be a normal person with normal feelings, but in the "year of relaxation" she is just ... down. Only being able to access her introspective thoughts makes her likeable.

  Bottom line: great writing, an interesting character, not much of a story. People seem to either hate or love this book. I liked it a lot.