Think about a metropolis of staggering, generally menacing magnificence. Its historical past is bloody, but it surely carries on, turning into extra mesmerizingly unusual with every period.
Now think about that town is sentient. It has company and consciousness; it decides who will get to remain and who wants to go away. It’s each a bodily place and an ambient spirit that continuously inhabits totally different types; it might seduce a customer and twist time backwards. A speaking, typing model of that metropolis one way or the other results in a WhatsApp group for individuals who have had a horrible time visiting it, the place it responds to the inflow of complaints: “COME ON, KIDS,” it writes at one level. “Don’t go to town after which get all scandalized by metropolis life.”
In her new novel, Parasol Towards the Axe, Helen Oyeyemi turns Prague, the place the British author has lived since 2014, into such a spot. The novel is organized across the chaos that’s unleashed when a trio of alienated buddies—Hero, Thea, and Sofie—reunite within the metropolis for Sofie’s bachelorette social gathering. The small print of their friendship and its dissolution, stored hidden from the reader for a lot of the novel, have an unmistakable aura of fantasy. All that the reader is aware of for sure is that the three ladies used to share a home in Dublin, and that they as soon as had a really shut, bordering on obsessive, friendship. Since then, they haven’t been talking.
By Helen Oyeyemi
A lot of Oyeyemi’s novels are diversifications of fairy tales: Snow White, in Boy, Snow, Chook; the English story of Mr. Fox, in Mr. Fox; Hansel and Gretel, in Gingerbread. Parasol Towards the Axe shares a literary language with these folks tales. It options not less than one prince charming, silkworms who feed on human hair, and clocks that function confidants. The novel appears to be arguing that the tales individuals inform about themselves and others kind not simply the concepts that form the world, however generally the world itself. A metropolis, as an example, consists not simply of buildings, roads, and our bodies, but additionally of the impressions and observations of those that understand it. That is what makes the individuals, locations, and relationships that populate the guide so entrancing, but additionally inevitably fragile. Tales could be made and simply as simply unmade.
Oyeyemi’s plot is layered and generally baffling, taking many seemingly nonsensical turns. In one of many novel’s prolonged conceits, town of Prague assumes the type of a guide known as Paradoxical Undressing, which seems to be a set of quick tales set all through town’s historical past. The guide’s contents change relying on when it’s opened, and by whom. It additionally, disconcertingly, makes frequent, private calls for of its readers.
Hero and Thea each spend a lot of the novel studying Paradoxical Undressing and pondering the messages it offers them. (These prolonged, unusual, joyful passages are a spotlight of Parasol Towards the Axe; I may fortunately learn dozens extra.) As a car of town’s impish, often tyrannical character, Paradoxical Undressing doesn’t cease at telling Prague’s tales: It orchestrates them, too. As an example, town appears decided to banish Thea, who was born there and left as a baby. “That’s all you’re getting: now begone,” one chapter she reads concludes. “Begone, I stated.”
Paradoxical Undressing additionally means that Prague exists solely as a result of individuals see it, understand it, and inform tales about it—that if thousands and thousands of eyes didn’t see it in thousands and thousands of various methods, it’d detach itself from the bottom on which it was constructed and take off looking for somebody who would. In a single temporary and telling chapter that includes Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor is approaching Prague when he’s requested by a metropolis astronomer to explain his environment. When he fails to supply an ample reply, your complete metropolis sails away.
The impact of that is mind-bending. Parasol Towards the Axe is a guide a couple of bodily place, the tales that make up that place, and the disembodied aircraft on which these tales and that place meet—say, a wierd church the place Hero encounters a cohort of worshipful mice, a Latin-speaking lady accompanied in all places by two goats, and a few ambulatory statues. The extent to which the church and its inhabitants are actual, versus a type of lucid dream induced by town, is fully unclear. Actually, all through the novel, there may be little readability or definition to be discovered, simply an awesome sense of immersion in a very weird, fully enthralling world—one during which the bonds that maintain collectively issues like cities or friendships are dangerously tenuous.
That’s the place the relationships amongst Hero, Thea, and Sofie are available in. The three ladies don’t appear to have ever had a lot in widespread. That’s, other than their extreme, inexplicable starvation to merge with each other, adopting the qualities they most admire within the others as their very own: Hero, the portrait of reserved energy; Thea, the enigma; Sofie, the paragon of girlishness. Over time, their intimacy dissolved the boundaries amongst them, making a codependent relationship as mesmerizing because it was violent.
For a lot of Parasol Towards the Axe, the main points of that unique mixing stay maddeningly out of attain. Early within the novel, Oyeyemi writes that their friendship started to interrupt aside when Sofie “didn’t dare to dwell underneath the title they’d chosen—the title they’d voted on, a single first title for all three of them.” It’s a deeply unusual sentence that arrives out of the blue, and the historical past it touches, which includes a interval within the ladies’s lives once they engaged in some shared endeavors that had been at greatest unethical and at worst fraudulent, received’t be illuminated for a very long time to come back—after which solely partially, as a result of every member of the trio has totally different concepts as to why their friendship fell aside. However what’s clear is that their overbearing drive to manage each other stays so intense that it appears nearly like a want to obliterate—an “If I can’t have you ever, nobody can” type of obsession.
Prague shares one thing of that drive, searching for an energetic hand in nearly the whole lot that takes place inside its boundaries. It’s generally depicted as a spirit that lives inside its residents, who’re in flip anticipated to function one thing like ambassadors for town. Their main goal is to inform town’s tales. An instance: One evening, Jitka, a cheerful younger resident, bullies Hero into paying for a experience again to her resort in a wheelbarrow, throughout which Jitka tells her concerning the unusual actions happening behind seemingly each door they cross. (At one deal with, a historical past professor fascinated by King Wenceslas makes customized chain-mail vests, “attractive in addition to stabproof.”) Jitka is exacting about tales: Studying them, relaying them, and above all understanding them. After witnessing a brutal run-in between Hero and Thea, during which Hero is left with a grotesque wound, Jitka is irritated by Hero’s lack of ability to clarify precisely why the 2 are so related, and so harmful, to one another. “Do you your self know the fucking story of you and that lady?” she calls for.
How unusual to observe Hero, Thea, and Sofie, three broken individuals, attempt to discover a strategy to resolve the anguished love that pulls them collectively. How unhappy it’s to come across the reality that no two (or three) individuals ever have the identical story to inform. And but, how thrilling Parasol Towards the Axe makes that reality appear: not a sorrowful outdated noticed, reminding readers to consider carefully about perspective and take any heartfelt narrative with a grain of salt, however a immediate to be extra interested in life. If no two individuals have the identical story, nicely, how great—that simply means extra tales.
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