Helen Oyeyemi, Peaces, and Ali Smith, Hotel World: Unleashed Observation

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Helen Oyeyemi, Peaces, and Ali Smith, Hotel World: Unleashed Observation

Somehow this week I’m back in one of Helen Oyeyemi’s worlds. Like her other readers, I love her dazzling inventiveness, her brio, her fierceness and playfulness combined. Today I’m looking at Oyeyemi and Ali Smith, the wild movement of unleashed imaginations, leaping from phrase to thought to next idea in an exhilarating freefall. The “action” in both passages below comes from one character (alive or dead) observing others in a key moment. But because of the voices of the books, the passages are anything but passive observation.

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Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You, and Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread: Life after Disaster

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Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You, and Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread: Life after Disaster

When I asked my younger sister, who has been through quite a lot and is miraculously still alive, how she was doing, she said, “Well. I am well. I live with my family in my happy home where we are all safe and nothing bad is happening to us.” Before I can question that, because in fact there is quite a lot going on with the multiple generations of that household (and their dog, cat, and gecko), she said, “But I have an internet connection.”

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Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox, and Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”: Muse and Bride

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Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox, and Angela Carter, “The Bloody Chamber”: Muse and Bride

Mr. Fox

Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, full of twists and discoveries, offers a set of variations and reversals on the old English folktale of Mr. Fox and Lady Mary. Though it has a number of differences from the Bluebeard tale, it has a mysterious, powerful, murderous husband. In Oyeyemi’s version, there’s Mr. Fox, a writer, Daphne, his wife, and then Mary, his muse who comes to life and upbraids him for all the women he kills in his books. The stories within stories in this novel display multiple configurations of triangles, alterations in the power structure, and new versions of old relationships.

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