Lapvona

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Parts 4-5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Suffering As Salvation

From the very beginning, Lapvona demonstrates that the villagers equate suffering with salvation. Life in the village is dangerous and violent: In the spring, the villagers are raided by bandits who kill innocents and steal their meager provisions, while in the summer they endure a drought that kills half the population. The villagers cope with this harsh reality by believing that their suffering brings them closer to God.

The villagers’ heavily Christian environment lends some fodder to this idea, as Christianity teaches that Jesus endured torture and death to save humanity from its sins. However, their understanding of their religion is incomplete, as Jude’s reflections on Christmas make clear: “Jude and Marek didn’t know the story of the census, or that Christmas marked the birth of Jesus. Jude had thought that the reason Jesus was so revered was that He had been so brutally punished by soldiers on Christmas” (257). Lapvona’s idea of Christianity is therefore stripped of any consolatory elements and reduced to a mere celebration of suffering. This is probably by design: The corrupt Father Barnabas encourages the equation of hardship and holiness to manipulate and subjugate the villagers, encouraging them to embrace their bleak circumstances.

This equation of suffering with holiness has markedly negative consequences on characters’ personal development. At his core, Marek believes that his suffering makes him special, a belief shared by other Lapvonians, who believe “lameness or strangeness was a mark of grace. If one suffered purgatory on Earth rather than after death, heaven was easier to access” (252-53). Marek even prefers the harshness of winter to the gentleness of spring: “Without that cruel wind, there was no need for protection to be met with a fire in the hearth, there was no prayer to be answered” (23). Marek understands himself as only able to experience God amid pain, which is one reason he (like Jude) self-flagellates as a spiritual practice. Marek even takes a certain pleasure in Jude’s abuse of him, which allows him to feel closer not only to God but also to Jude, his adoptive father. When Marek goes to live at the manor, he struggles with guilt over the new comforts of his life.

Lapvona suggests that this view of suffering inevitably perpetuates it, rationalizing not only the hardship one personally endures but also any pain one inflicts on others. At the end of the novel, Marek steals the baby and brings it to the cliffs with the intention of killing it. He tells the child, “You will never have to walk among the monsters. It’s much better there” (304). For Marek and the other residents of Lapvona, the only end to suffering is death.

The Dichotomy Between Wealth and Poverty

Lapvona explores the sharp dichotomy between wealth and poverty through contrasting sections that detail life in the village versus life in the manor. The village always seems to be suffering some great loss, first dealing with bandits and then with starvation after a months-long drought. Even as they recover in the fall and winter, their prior hardships continue to affect their lives, causing a drop in fertility and the slow regrowth of certain plants. Meanwhile, life at the manor is one of unchanging comfort, with water reservoirs and excesses of food and entertainment.

This dramatic inequality is even less “natural” than it might seem, as Villiam himself is behind both the bandit attacks and the scarcity, stealing from the villagers and hoarding the natural resources:

More cottages were built, with their small croft gardens, but otherwise every last bit of land was growing something to be exported for the lord’s profit—wheat, barley, oats, pulses, fruit, root vegetables, nuts, and rapeseed. The manor on the mountain doubled, then tripled in size (40).

Through the dichotomy between wealth and poverty, Moshfegh explores how systems of power and wealth are inherently exploitative. Villiam is even implied to sexually abuse the villagers’ children, but their condition is so abject that at least some of them tolerate the exploitation: “[M]en of power often enjoyed the company of boys, and there were great gifts to be gleaned from a lord’s affections” (258).

However, Moshfegh also suggests that wealth does not bring happiness. The two wealthiest characters, Villiam and Father Barnabas, experience worsening anxiety the more they climb in class status. Villiam’s worst fears are ultimately realized: He is poisoned by Ivan and dies before he ever becomes father to the new child. Even his corpse is treated without dignity, bloating for weeks before being scavenged by animals. Meanwhile, Father Barnabas wonders if he would have been happier leading a simpler life but proves unable to act on his epiphany. Night terrors and paranoia overtake him, and he dies by suicide in fear of damnation. While the wealthy characters may have more ease of life, the power and wealth are also a source of insecurity: “Poverty had its limitations, but if you had nothing, there was nothing to be stolen” (283). Moshfegh suggests that suffering is part of the human condition, inescapable regardless of one’s class.

The Absurdity of Life

Lapvona is set in a time and place where people have very little understanding of or control over the world around them. Natural forces are omnipresent and uncaring, as in the drought that wipes out half of Lapvona or the sudden arrival of storms. Rank and privilege offer some protection but are no guarantee: Villiam becomes food for wildlife after his death, puncturing any notion that humans exist above or outside of nature. The natural world exists without any seeming logic or reason, unfolding in chaotic patterns.

While the characters try to make sense of their lives and suffering, the structures they impose are frequently as absurd as the forces they are trying to combat. Religion is everywhere in the book, but it is mostly a tool that provides comfort at the cost of wisdom. The characters’ hope of heaven strengthens them to carry forward in their difficult lives. However, Father Barnabas is manipulating the congregation to serve Villiam’s interests rather than truly caring for them, so the faith they practice is a tool for their subjugation and exploitation. When Villiam and Father Barnabas die, the omniscient narrator notes that one could see this as divine intervention or “fate” but also clarifies that there was an entirely rational and mundane reason for the “knocking” that Father Barnabas interpreted as the Devil; it was simply a draft at the door. Ultimately, however, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the villagers’ beliefs are rational: “Right or wrong, you will think what you need to think so that you can get by” (286).

Equally absurd are Lapvona’s societal constructs and how they constrict the villagers’ life. The exploration of the status of women and the narrow gender roles they are subject to particularly illustrates this. Agata is first the captive of Jude, then the nuns, and finally Villiam. Because she cannot communicate verbally, her society values her only for her body and reproductive capacity. Similarly, Dibra is trapped in an unhappy marriage to Villiam until she dies. Only the characters who escape gendered constructs, like Ina and Grigor, find any real wisdom or happiness.

Only Ina’s supernatural abilities present a more positive spin on life’s absurdity. She survives against all odds as a woman with blindness in the woods, miraculously begins producing milk, and then grows younger once she becomes the mother of the Christ Child. Ina defies any logic or natural law, suggesting that if the world of Lapvona is chaotic and incomprehensible, it is mutable in its very lack of logic.