Reflecting on Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh

This past week I read Otessa Moshfegh's Lapvona (link opens to bookshop.org), a surrealist novel set in the titular petty, pre-modern, European fiefdom of Lapvona. It's a quick, horrifying, beautiful and deeply affecting read that I would only recommend to someone with a strong stomach. Historically, feudalism is a family of modes of production, cultural and religious practices, and legal and political systems. Specifically, the manor system in western Europe organized society into peasants farming land that was owned by the lord of the manor. Farmers were taxed on their agricultural output to generate wealth for the lord who then provided some form of military protection to the farmer populations. This schema for organizing society basically goes back to the Bronze Age as it's the clearest way to facilitate urbanization, and the manor system itself even dates back to the iron age in republican Rome. Like all social configurations that take this form, this is a raw deal for working…