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.
Difficult marvel of a novel ... Readers of Parasol...are constantly being hoodwinked in obvious and uncomfortable ways ... Captivating precisely because it is not believable ... Oyeyemi’s independent-minded novel has also been pursuing its own pleasures, staging its own seduction, one that Casanova may have found unduly perverse. In this story the chase is everything, and satisfaction is an illusion the reader can do without.
A story about stories; a tale that unpicks and exposes the threads that tie tales together ... Oyeyemi’s 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.
More compelling than it initially sounds ... Characteristic of her boundless, inventive fiction, Oyeyemi’s novel has a prominent book-within-a-book structure that complicates any supposed straightforwardness ... Far from a stagnant, historical object: it is a book that changes depending on when it is read and who is reading it ... A pamphlet-book that is at once deeply tangible, irrefutably there, and yet also highly subjective, more than just a bit tricky.
Parasol Against the Axe shares a literary language with those folk stories ... Oyeyemi’s plot is layered and sometimes baffling, taking many seemingly nonsensical turns ... Throughout the novel, there is little clarity or definition to be found, just an overwhelming sense of immersion in a completely bizarre, completely enthralling world.
The pleasure of Parasol Against the Axe lies in figuring out what is real and what is imagined—and if, in Oyeyemi’s world, the difference even matters.
Readers of literary fiction, those who love stories whose protagonists are entire cities, and the many fans of the award-winning Oyeyemi will fall in love with the novel’s constantly shifting perspectives every bit as much as the author has clearly fallen in love with Prague.
