"Parasol Against the Axe" by Helen Oyeyemi

An audio book.

Prague. Bags of imagination. Rambling. Gave up after an hour or so.

Other reviews

• Sarah Crown (the story of a parched summer weekend in which two women, Hero Tojosoa and Dorothea Gilmartin, converge on Prague for a hen weekend ... the novel takes on a life of its own, gleefully jettisoning convention, and playing fast and loose with both its characters’, and its readers’, expectations ... brilliant, baffling, beguiling)
• Hannah Kofmann (The frame story of Parasol Against the Axe has a simple articulation: Prague-as-narrator relays the time that our antihero, named Hero, came to the city for the bachelorette party of an old friend, Sofie, on an invitation she was certainly expected to decline. The third member of the old friendship trio, Dorothea, has declined the invitation but nonetheless mysteriously arrives in Prague on revenge business ... there comes a point where, regardless of Oyeyemi’s talent, the liveliness of her prose and imagination, one wants to blurt out, “No more! No more stories!” The perils of endless digression materialize in the fact that, by the end of the novel, the final sewing-up of the primary plot does not mean that much)

"Gingerbread" by Helen Oyeyemi

An audio book, read by the author. There are 3 generations of women - Perdita (teenage schoolgirl), Harriet (her mother, on the school's parents association), and Margot. Margot's alias on Perdita's phone is "Nightlife Tsar". Harriet's is "Minister of Health, Education and Welfare". The family's gingerbeard recipe has included bad rye in the past. This time it's hospitalised Perdita. Gluten allergy, but a serious attack - suicide attempt? While she's unconscious, things happen.

The language is lively, the dialogue believable, and there are many side-plots which may become dead-ends or significant threads. There's a country, Druhástrana, that may or may not exist. Harriet was brought up there (her friend Gretel lives there), Perdita goes there in a dream (or her supposed death), and it has a Wikipedia entry.

Oyeyemi has throwaway ideas that other authors would build a story around. She can riff off anything. "a Jack-in-the-box with a pegged on smile and eyes that popped out on springs and bounced every which way. Its wind-up handle's broken but that doesn't stop him jumping out and squawking Ha Ha Ha just as you were trying to tiptoe past, carrying breakable goods. Maybe he was solar powered". The action moves to Druhástrana, back when Harriet was 14 and became a Gingerbread Girl, moving to the big city, working for a company. The book sags here for quite a while, becoming rather YA. Harriet's boy friend Gabriel goes to Oxford University. Does he love her as much as she loves him?

Harriet got pregnant by Gabriel at 17. There was pressure on her to have an abortion. Perdita has met Gabriel's family (they live in Whitby), though she knew them as Hansel and Gretel (actually Ambrose and Tama, her grandparents?), and a private detective (actually Reme, a friend of Gabriel). She wants Gretel and her mother to meet up again. They offer her a powder that will transport her to Druhástrana.

Harriet talks to Gabriel on Skype. He says he didn't like gingerbread until she made him eat it. She goes back to the gingerbread factory. Jonathon Baker haunts it. Is he real? Why introduce him now? Why introduce Sago and Bonnie? The 2nd house they visit is in Western Bohemia. The 3rd (perhaps haunted) house is a gingerbread house that drifts out to sea. Only special rings will unlock its door. At the end the action returns back to the parents association. Salomea appears, her place more a lab than a toyshop. Gretel's a changling. Harriet wonders if Perdita is really Gretel.

Wisdom spouts from many mouths -

• half of the hatred that springs up between people is rooted in the belief that there is any human relationship more sacred than friendship
• a good meal to have when the darkness of the night begins to seem as if it's aspiring towards the eternal
• of course being is an unnecessary thing, a kind of mistake I didn't think I'd find forgiveness for.

Too much rambling and free-wheeling for my liking.

Other reviews

• Erica Wagner (the reader is curious not only about Perdita’s birth but about her more profound origins, too: her family history, her mother’s story, and her mother’s lost friendship with a woman named – you guessed it – Gretel. It’s an intriguing premise, stitched together with fine and surprising imagery, and yet the novel as a whole never quite hangs together. [] There is no boundary, in Oyeyemi’s work, between the magical and the real: and no such boundary exists in the human imagination. When blending the two there is always the risk of whimsy, and Gingerbread falls on the whimsical side of the scale.)
• Katharine Coldiron (the book’s influences are a glorious jumble. Oyeyemi has written a novel that calls to fairy tales both ancient and contemporary, and its characters have an odd fixation on 19th century French literature (Zola, Balzac) – yet there’s a whole subplot about the ridiculous parents’ association at Perdita’s school, a mini-Where’d You Go, Bernadette in the middle of this entirely different novel, and the situation with Margot’s family recalls Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. The language of the novel ranges similarly, from slightly baroque to nearly minimalist. However, it never fails to compel)
• Anita Felicelli (If we read procedurals to enjoy a sense of order restored, everything put it in its place, we read Oyeyemi for the opposite reason, yet she is no less suspenseful. Later, we learn she wasn’t exactly in a coma; she took a trip to Druhástrana, where Harriet grew up. Druhástrana here appears to be a reference to death, and perhaps also to dreaming, to loss of consciousness, to what’s not here. When Perdita eats the gingerbread, she seems to have killed herself. She loses consciousness. And yet, when she awakens, she’s been somewhere, the specific place her mother is from. She was searching for Harriet’s childhood friend Gretel Kercheval on the other side. In Gingerbread, the loosening of reality and referents from language may be at its most extreme yet. It’s a novel that’s difficult to follow both at a sentence level and narratively, but its challenging stories come to an incredibly satisfying conclusion.)

"What is not yours is not yours" by Helen Oyeyemi (Picador, 2016)

Stories from White Review, Granta, Ploughshares, etc. It's a hardcover book without a spine. There's little description, but many stolen keys. Some characters are ghosts or puppets who I couldn't care about. Some characters are human and I couldn't care about them either. There's more to literature than the manufacture of empathy, but I found it hard to concentrate while reading these pieces, interesting though they were in bursts. "a brief history of the homely wench society" is especially tedious. "presence" is better - Jill and Jacob had both been fostered. Now they were married, both psychologists. But Jill thinks he wants to break up with her. He asks if she'd help with his project about how bereaved people sense the departed. The project involves the two of them living separately in prepared, controlled housing conducive to the conditions that seem to encourage sensations of absent people. In such conditions she experiences an imagined future, and thinks he does too.

Here are some examples of the book style -

• From where Lucy sat beside her gambler she had a view through a casement window, a view of a long street that led to the foot of a mountain. And what Lucy liked best about her casement-window view was that as night time turned into dawn, the mountain seemed to travel down the street. It advanced on tiptoe, fully prepared to be shooed away. Insofar as a purely transient construction of flesh and blood can remember (or foretell) what it is to be stone, Lucy understood the mountain's wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free floating hope and desolation. Her wish for the mountain was that it would one day shrink to a pebble, crash in through the glass and roll into a corner to happily absorb tavern life (p.12)

• one evening at the pub down the road from her house she found a ring at the bottom of a pint of lager she was drinking. The ring was heavier than it looked, and she recognized it without remembering exactly where she'd seen it before. Since no one at the pub seemed to know anything about the ring, she took it to the police station, only to return there to collect it at the end of the month: there had been no enquiries related to the item, so it was hers. And when she wore it she felt that a love existed. For her ... her, of all people. (p.54)

  "A writer of sentences so elegant that they glean" says Ali Smith on the back cover, but I find "one evening at the pub down the road from her house she found a ring at the bottom of a pint of lager she was drinking" rather casual. How about "one evening at her local she found a ring in her pint of Carlsberg".

• If she isn't growing something (she is the reason Noor finds toadstools in his shoes) or brewing something (she's the reason it's best not to leave any cup or drinking glass unattended when she's at home) she'll pass by singing and swishing her tail around (she put her sewing machine to work making a set of tails that she attaches to her dresses: a fox's tail, a dragon's tail, a tiger's tail, a peacock's. On a special occasion she'll wear all of them at once (p.55)

• Hamlet with his pudding-bowl haircut, Chagati, who was both assassin and merman (he kills sailors with his sexy falsetto!), Brunhild the shipbuilder, and an astronaut named Petrushka who answered any question put to him in exhaustive detail (p.99)

• The problem with Wayland is that he's a puppet built to human scale. Masterless and entirely alive. No matter how soft his skin appears to be, he is entirely wooden, and it is not known exactly what animates him - no clock ticks in his chest. Rowan is male to me, since he moves and speaks with a grace that reminds me of the boys and men of my Venetian youth. He's female to Myna. (p.105)

• Since neither of us need sleep we take night buses, sharing earphones and listening to knitting podcasts. If anyone else on the bus notices anything about us they assume it's because they're drunk. (p.106)

• Ed was working on a piece about hierarchies of knowledge for female love interests in the early issues of her favourite comic books; how very odd it must be to operate within a story where you're capable, courageous, droll, at the top of your field professionally and yet somehow still not permitted the brains to perceive that the man you see or work with every day is exactly the same person as the superhero who saves your life at night. 'Seems like someone behind the scenes clinging to the idea that the woman whose attention you can't get just can't see "the real you", no?' (p.195)

• Well, Dornicka met a wolf on Mount Radhost. Actually, let's try to speak of things as they are: it was not a wolf she met but something that had recently consumed a wolf and was playing about with the remnants. The muzzle, tail and paws appeared in the wrong order. (p.210)

Other reviews

• Kate Clanchy (“Is Your Blood as Red as This?”, takes Oyeyemi’s radical disregard for physical description to the point of perversity ... Only a few of the tales, in fact, settle at all easily into the confines of the short story. ... Hers is a rare talent, and it is frustrating not to see it at full stretch in this collection.)
• LAURA VAN DEN BERG
• Stuart Evers ("presence" is the kind of story you immediately want to press upon people.)
• Rebecca Adams (Just as the stories seem in danger of spiralling off into the fantastical abyss, Oyeyemi pinions her characters and situations with a deft phrase that renders them entirely credible.)
• Michael Shaub (Oyeyemi seems to be incapable of writing anything that's not wholly original)
• Good reads

"Mr Fox" by Helen Oyeyemi (Picador, 2011)

Mary Foxe is suspected by Daphne Fox of having an affair with her husband St John Fox. But is Mary merely a figment of St John Fox's writerly imagination? "Her name's Mary. You'd like her, I think. She's kind of direct. No-nonsense. I made her up during the war" (p.73). These 3 characters each have first-person chapters. At the end Mary suggests to Daphne that she should write. The novelist writes about women being killed. Throughout the book there are allusions to Bluebeard and Reynardine (fables I was unaware of, though I sensed the influence of Angela Carter). Within the love triangle, Mary's existence is questioned, but the existence of any woman mentioned in a relationship is precarious. That theme is only part of the fun though. There are many chapters that are self-contained stories, related only partially to the main plot. Maybe Mary wrote them. They describe further love triangles and unsymmetrical relationships, but also stories like "my daughter the racist" where the connection's harder to discern. The stories are rich in detail - there's never a dull moment - "All around them people were speaking a language Brown didn't understand; it was like silence with sharp edges in it" (p.80); "It was a long way up - the lift kept stopping, and other people entered it and left - I couldn't see them, only felt them, like clouds drifting around us", (p.119). The sustained invention is impressive. "the training at madame de silentio's" is the weakest part.

I much preferred this to previous books of hers that I've read. I'd need to read it again to come to any further conclusions. The clues are in the text for those who've read more widely than I have - "You're not Bluebeard? Or Reynardine? (p.227). The nature of storytelling and the role of muses are sub-themes. In interviews she's said

• "I read Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and instructed myself to write a linear suspense story based on Bluebeard, complete with locked doors and a brooding, irresistible wife-killer. My instructions to myself were completely ignored and I ended up going on a jaunt through a Bluebeard kaleidoscope"
• "The tone and style switches a few times in the different stories that make up the book. In part, it's a story about the power of stories; Mary wants to broaden Mr Fox's perspective on love and his attitude towards the stories he tells, and part of that process is destabilising him and interfering with almost everything he's previously believed about the way a story goes. To that end, I had to find ways to tell each story as if it stood alone, as if it were a separate world that was unaware of the others that were connected to it."

The book's been heavily reviewed. Below are the main online reviews I found, but there are more.

Other reviews

• Anita Sethi (Observer)
• Aimee Bender (New York Times)
• Boyd Tomkin (The Independent)
• Kylee Stoor (Bookslut)
• Joseph Sutton (Huffington Post)
• Lucy Daniel (The Telegraph) (Mr Fox is full of luminous moments, but they are obscured by the haziness of the structure)
• Tessa Mellas (the Short Review) (It’s a novel interspersed with short stories ... Oyeyemi picks up where Angela Carter left off in The Bloody Chamber, taking on the bloodthirsty Bluebeard figure and his alternate egos, but pushing the story further, spinning it over and over again.)
• Liz Colville (NPR books) (Mr. Fox is named for the wife-killer in the English folk tale "Mr. Fox," a variant of the Bluebeard story)
• Larissa Kyzer (the Second Pass)
• Justin Jordan (Guardian) (Where Angela Carter exposed the hidden logic of fairy tale, Oyeyemi delights in turning that logic on its head)
• Abby O'Reilly (Independent)
• J.C. Sutcliffe (The Globe and Mail) (Mr. Fox is Oyeyemi’s first book without a child or young adult as a principal protagonist, and this is a welcome departure. ... Mr. Fox should convince a whole new audience that Oyeyemi is the real thing.)
• Erin Suzuki (California Literary Review)
• Andy Sawyer (Strange Horizons) (Mr Fox is not an easy book to get a handle on. Some of its sections are given titles, as stories in their own right. Others flow on from previous scenes. Some have an attributable narrative voice - St John, Mary, Daphne - others not. Some, such as "my daughter the racist," set in Middle Eastern country afflicted by Western occupation, are standalone stories in their own right, others refer to characters or themes which will be clarified later)

"The Icarus Girl" by Helen Oyeyemi (Bloomsbury, 2005)

Like "26a", it's partly set in Nigeria. The main character, Jess, is 8 when we meet her. She's suffering from a haiku obsession which soon passes. The first-person-privileged PoV and Jess's sporadic precosity mean that language registers are fluid.

• It was Nigeria. That was the problem. Nigeria felt ugly. Nye. Jeer. Reee. Ah. (p.9)

• "sleepy as she was, Jess somehow understood that this woman, ... was not smiling at her in particular, but at a child, at the idea of a child. Because she was an air hostess. Smiling at a child. " (p.10)

Some of the phrasing seems a little careless to me. E.g.

• "she allowed herself to stare openly and seriously at her grandfather, and he did the same" (p.20)

By the end of part 1 I'm beginning to think that's it's a book written for older children.