For reasons of her own, Hero Tojosoa accepts an invitation she was half expected to decline, and finds herself in Prague on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie. Little does she know she's arrived in a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting. A book Hero has brought with her seems to be warping her mind: the text changes depending on when it's being read and who's doing the reading, revealing startling new stories of fictional Praguers past and present. Uninvited companions appear at bachelorette activities and at city landmarks, offering opinions, humor, and even a taste of treachery. When a third woman from Hero and Sofie's past appears unexpectedly, the tensions between the friends' different accounts of the past reach a new level.
The urge to dissect Helen Oyeyemi’s mercurial fiction is as irresistible as it is immaterial to the enjoyment of her magical worlds. And never have the desires to scrutinize or get swept away been more intriguingly opposed than with her latest novel, Parasol Against the Axe, an intricate and opulent portrait of her adopted hometown, Prague ... Oyeyemi’s writing teems with intimations at deeper meaning, starting with its allusions to fables, folklore, poetry and other literary genres. These traditional devices are especially grounding when reading Oyeyemi because of the delightful bewilderment that her boundless creativity can induce ... True gems.
There’s something brittle about the central characters — their interactions feel like a hyper-articulate facsimile of real friendship. Both Hero and Thea remain flat collections of attributes rather than convincing humans. Moments in the story suffer from the same flippant quality ... But Oyeyemi isn’t interested in anything as mundane as what a story might mean. Many details in this book seem like they’re there simply because they’re weird or fun, not necessarily because they gesture at some larger significance ... What warmth there is in Parasol comes from the spark that ignites between a person and a book, a person and another person, or even a person and a city.
True to the nature of postmodern metafictions, the nested narratives contain uncanny doublings and unusual echoes. The characters’ identities...are highly mutable. Ms. Oyeyemi, who writes here with jaunty, almost manic enthusiasm, drops in unlikely revelations about them at regular intervals. The pace of her inventions is exciting, though also limiting: Sporadic lunges at serious themes—as in a story that invokes the Holocaust—are written in the same peppy, chatterbox style as everything else. It’s best to approach this teeming book in a spirit of play.
