This is part of an ongoing series where I write about a different author for each letter of the alphabet. You can see them all here.
How has it been 2.5 years since I last added to this series? Time – and this is a thought I’d just come up with myself – flies. Anyway, as a reminder, I am very, very slowly going through the alphabet in my shelves, picking out an author I like an talking a bit more about my collection of their books. Some take up a lot of space (Leacock, Milne, Nichols having been a prolific run) – others are in rather shorter supply.
How many books do I have by Helen Oyeyemi?
As things currently stand, I have seven books by Oyeyemi – looking at my shelves, they are Peaces, Mr Fox, The Icarus Girl, The Opposite House, White is for Witching, Boy, Snow, Bird and Gingerbread. Which just goes to show that I might alphabetise my shelves, but I’m not very good at putting books in publication order.
How many of these have I read?
VERY out of character, but I’ve read them all! I’ve even read a seventh book by Oyeyemi – her short story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, but decided not to hold onto that one.
How did I start reading Helen Oyeyemi?
While The Icarus Girl came out in 2005, a couple of years before I started book blogging, I was pretty sure I was sent it as a review copy… maybe I got The Opposite House (2007) and asked for her first novel to be added too? Since then, she has been one of the rare living novelists that I’m a completist for – though have yet to get or buy her latest.
General impressions…
…having said the above, I’m not really sure where I stand on Oyeyemi now. I LOVE Boy, Snow, Bird and it is the book that comes to mind most often when people ask me to recommend a book to read – why that one is top of mind, I don’t know. I think Mr Fox and The Icarus Girl are brilliant. And all the others… I find a bit too confusing. Oyeyemi, for me is always hovering between interestingly experimental and totally baffling. To be honest, I thought I’d given Peaces and Gingerbread away, and I might do that now… I simply had no idea what was going on for most of the time I was reading those. In fact, this will be the first entry in this alphabet series where I end up with fewer books than when I started. Someone cleverer than me will enjoy those two books, and they’re heading now to my charity shop pile. I’ll keep the Oyeyemi books I love or like, and have some chance of re-reading.
Ah. Maybe I was unlucky to have read Gingerbread first. My ‘review’ was basically a plea for anyone who’d read it to help me towards understanding what was going on in it.
I can relate to the sense of surprise at the time that’s passed since a certain literary project got some love/attention. With Oyeyemi, I think I read one more after Boy, Snow, Bird (which I too really enjoyed) and left it there. At first this was a deliberate choice because I longed for more of a narrative thread, but since then, some of my frustration with that has melted away but other writers have claimed my attention instead. You know how it is!
I read Boy, Snow, Bird years ago and always meant to read something else by Oyeyami, but haven’t. Bad me.
Not read anything by this author. And can you replace the charity shop donated books with incomings in addition to Project 24???
Yeah, I wish I liked Oyeyemi more. I read The Icarus Girl when it first came out and was really impressed by it. Since then, Boy, Snow, Bird and Gingerbread have produced immediate “meh” reactions. Parasol Against the Axe (that new one) actually sounds like it has bags of potential—I’m imagining it as Calvino-esque—but I’m not about to take a punt on buying it new…