Lapvona is the tale of village. It's location in time and place is unimportant, but going off mentioned fauna and crops, we can confidently assume it's somewhere in at least 16th century northeast Europe. (The potato didn't get to Europe until the late 1500s and elk and bison are mentioned. Elk originally referred to the European equivalent of the American moose, and bison referred to the European equivalent of the American Buffalo. Both these animals are not found south or west of Poland)

The plot takes place over the course of a year, focused mostly around Marek, a malformed shepherd's son. Throughout the narrative characters true relationships to one another are revealed. In the background there is a struggle between agrarian fertility and the manor that is leeching its resources. Interspersed is a series of deliberately incomplete and inverted biblical allusions, as morphologically twisted as Marek's body.

Marek as a shepherd, and serves a twisted old testament shepherd and Christ figure. To point out some examples:

There's a blending of the biblical stories of Cain and Able with Jacob and Esau. Marek, a shepherd, and Jacob, a hunter, go up a mountain and Marek kills Jacob. Unlike Cain and Able, in this story it is the pastoralist doing the killing rather than being the victim, inverting the vocation that is committing murder. Unlike the biblical Jacob and Esau, the Jacob in Lapvona is the hunter getting his birthright stolen by the shepherd. In Genesis it's Jacob the shepherd tricking red-haired Esau the hunter to inherit Esau's birthright. In Lapvona it's red-haired Marek the shepherd tricking Jacob the hunter up the mountain to find game and killing him. This murder comes to be a theft of the Lapovnian Jacob's birthright. Jacob is the Lord Villiam's heir, and after going to confess this murder, Marek is made Villiams heir, resulting in a theft of birthright.

At a certain point Villiam and the priest jokingly equate sacrement with excrement. Marek is then made to rub a grape on his ass and feed it to Lispeth. This is an inversion of the eurachrist, but it's also incomplete as there's no bread involved. Perhaps this is because Marek's body is already deficient, broken, and twisted.

There's a few other biblical references as well. A father takes his son up a mountain and thinks of killing him, which is a reference to Abraham and Isaac. Villiam rides Marek up a hill and Marek is likened to a donkey. This is an inversion of Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey. In all cases though, something about the biblical reference is inverted or twisted, and the closer the connection to the manor the less fecund it is.

When Marek is taken to the manor, a drought sets upon the land. Villiam hoards what water there is in his estate. The villagers starve and resort to cannibalism. The rains returning coincides with Marek returning to the village temporarily, but they also coincide with Ina being fed the decaying corpse of Klim. Ina has already been set up as representing divinity and fertility. She lives in the woods, constantly stated to be a source of sustenance. She was a wet-nurse to most of the village. Her relationship with Marek was oddly maternal and sexual. She even makes note of Mary Magdalene and Jesus' mother having the same name. Ina is representative of some sort of feminine trinity. During the drought she too is about to die, but she nurses on the thumb of a dead man, which restores her vitality. In case this needs to be spelled out. The dead man is Klim, and "Klim" is simply "milk" spelled backwards.

Symbols in line with this new feminine divine are perhaps some of the most orthomorphic symbols. For instance, the day before the twisted wedding of Villiam and Agata, a church is being decorated with a garland of flowers from the castle. This is diagetically explained to symbolize the chain of anscestors that preceded Villiam. Villiam is even described early on as snake-like and a trickster. The garland is serpentine. Grigor steps on the garland by accident. A reference to Genesis 3:15. "And I will make enemies of you and the woman, And of your offspring and her Descendant; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise Him on the heel." At this point Grigor struggling with a reconciliation with Ina. He fulfills the Christ like role on behalf of the female divinity, Ina, in stepping on the serpent.

Overall, there's a rejection of the hierarchical, patriarchal political structures of Christianity in favor of a system that incorporates feminine fertility. There's a few things I just can't make any sense of though. I have no idea what's going on with Ina's horse eyes and what that's supposed to symbolize. Ina made a prophecy to Jude about a bad north wind killing Jude, a baby, and one of Jude's relatives. I'm not sure this was fully played out. At the end of the narrative, it's implied that Marek could be yeeting a baby off the cliff, but the story ends there. (The wind that killed the priest was a south, flowery wind)

The more I think about and write about this the more I appreciate it. Moshfegh has a clear, almost laconic prose that is deceptively rich in symbolism. Any character traits and growth are secondary and in service to the morphology of the symbolism. Definitely adding this to a list to be reread sometime in the future.