Oyeyemi

Some more recent reads

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Just clearing some books from my pile to be reviewed – and while the blog post is called ‘some more recent reads’, let’s be SUPER lax with what we mean by ‘recent’. A few of these have been waiting for a while… I also find it hard to write about audiobooks because I can’t go back and add quotes, so shall pop a couple into this round-up.

A Countryman’s Winter Notebook by Adrian Bell

This was a review copy from the lovely Slightly Foxed, which I couldn’t find after it first arrived and I later discovered under a pile of things in the kitchen. Note to self: don’t unpack parcels in the kitchen. It’s a collection of Bell’s articles from the Eastern Daily Press, where he wrote a countryside common between 1950 and 1980. I think this collection, published last year, is the first time they’ve been brought together.

I’m not sure how they’ve been organised, but it’s a fun meander through all manner of countryside topics from across the decades. I enjoyed guessing which era I thought it would be from when I started, discovering how accurate I’d been when I turned the page. He writes gently about gardens, farming, the home – it all blurs into a contented, cosy whole. I particularly liked this line:

I think every village has a double population: those who live in it, and those who remember it fondly for having been reared in it, or having stayed in it, or even passed through it adn said, “Here is a place […] where I should like to live if ever I had the chance.”

Mr Fox (2011) by Helen Oyeyemi

I got my book group to read Oyeyemi’s fourth novel, which I’ve had on my shelves ever since it came out – well, a little before, as it was a review copy. Oops, sorry! Anyway, it’s set in the 1930s and it’s about a writer (St John Fox) and the character he has created (Mary Foxe) and their tussle. The boundaries of reality and fiction aren’t so much porous as totally non-existent – the pair start telling each other stories, and Mr Fox really resembles a short story collection more than a novel. Along the way, St John’s real wife begins to get jealous of this illusory woman with whom he becomes obsessed. The stories the two tell each other often seem barely to connect to the main narrative, and the whole thing is an ambitious and slightly confusing tour de force.

I don’t want to suggest limits on anybody’s imagination, but I have to say I prefer Oyeyemi when she has one foot on the ground. Though that doesn’t happen very often. Considering I’ve read all her books, I only *really* love one of them – Boy, Snow, Bird – but always get something out of them. Even if that’s just admiration.

The Spectator Bird (1976) by Wallace Stegner

A few Stegner novels are among the free audiobooks available with Audible Plus, so I downloaded The Spectator Bird, having previously only read his most famous (?) novel Crossing To Safety. It is about a retired literary agent, Joe Allston, who is coming to terms with increasing inactivity and ill health. Not that he is extremely ill – just all the aches and restrictions of getting a bit older, and you can tell 60-something Stegner was aware of the loss of his youngest days.

The short novel is half set in the present day, where Joe and his wife are in amiable, squabbly, grumpy normal life – and half in the past, mostly told through a diary kept 20 years earlier. The diary is about their time in Denmark, and the friendship they had with a Danish countess. It is a sensitively told story, even despite moments of high drama and shocking plot. As mentioned recently, I’m not sure fine writing is a good fit for an audio experience, for me. Whenever I stopped listening to The Spectator Bird, I seemed to forget everything that had passed – but, having said that, I still thought the book good.

The Memory Illusion (2016) by Dr Julia Shaw

But this book worked much better as an audiobook – a non-fiction book about memory, and largely about how bad memory is. Shaw writes about how faulty memory can be, how easy it is to plant false memories in people, the dangers of relying on memories solely in legal cases, and so on. It is a fascinating read/listen, covering all sorts of academic material about memory in a very accessible way. I felt a bit smug, because at least I *know* my memory is terrible.

Yes, it’s also a bit alarming to learn about false memories – and sections on false sexual abuse memories are quite confronting. But if that is content you can cope with, then I really recommend getting hold of this. Get ready to have a lot of things you thought you knew about yourself and the world blown out of the water.

The Last Interview (2016) by Oliver Sacks

My friend Malie got me this back in 2018, and it is a series of interviews with the late, great Oliver Sacks – ‘The Last Interview’ seems to be a series of books, and the small text ‘and other conversations’ on the front gives away that this covers a wide period. Sacks doesn’t seem to have given interviews all that often, and these are all transcripts – often of interviews given on radio. And it’s interesting largely for seeing the range of people Sacks spoke to. All the information in the interviews will be welcome but familiar territory to those of us who’ve read Sacks’ books, so it’s fun to sit back and interpret how Sacks felt about the interviewers. There is one who interrupts him constantly and blithely misinterprets everything…

Well, there we go, a handful of recent reads – all of them good in their own way.

The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi

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I got sent Helen Oyeyemi’s second novel, The Opposite House, by the publisher in… 2008, the year after it was published. Oops, sorry Bloomsbury. I’ve read four of her other books, and have finally read this one too. Better late than never? And what prompted me to finally read it? It was one of the 20 books I listed for the inaugural BookTube Spin, and its number came up.

My relationship with Oyeyemi’s writing is definitely a bit up and down. I really love Boy, Snow, Bird and often recommend it to people – others of her books I have liked a lot, but some have tipped over the edge of experimentalism into confusion, for me. How will The Opposite House fare?

Maya lives in London, having moved there with her family when she was five. She only dimly remembers her life in Cuba – there is really only one memory: sitting under the table at their farewell party, hearing a woman singing. It is her defining recollection of life in the land of her parents and their Yoruba gods. And speaking of those gods, among them is Yemaya Saramagua, an Orisha, who lives in the somewherehouse. Short sections between chapters show her existing in this mysterious, liminal place which opens out onto two very different worlds:

On the second floor, rooms and rooms and rooms, some so tiny, pale and clean that they are no more than fancies, sugar-cubed afterthoughts stacked behind doorways. Below is a basement pillared with stone. […] The basement’s back wall holds two doors. One door takes Yemaya straight out into London and ragged hum of a city after dark. The other door opens out onto the striped flag and cooking-smell cheer of that tattered jester, Lagos – always, this door leads to a place that is floridly day.

In London, Maya has discovered she is pregnant – though she hasn’t told her boyfriend Aaron, or her family. She is conflicted by the pregnancy but, in typical Oyeyemi style, it is a conflict that seems to swirl between reality and magical realism. There is no searing look at whether or not to have an abortion, but thought processes that look much more at the metaphysical and abstract implications of pregnancy. All of Oyeyemi’s novels seem to exist in a somewherehouse – a world between worlds, where reality, fairy tale, religion, and magical realism co-exist and inform one another. But reality is one of the ingredients. This cocktail doesn’t diminish the impact of real anxieties and burdens:

Slaves had to be Catholic and obedient or they’d be killed, or worse. The Word ‘slave’ is a big deal to Chabella and Papi; neither of them can get out from under it. It is a blackness in Cuba. It is sometimes bittersweet, for such is the song of the morena; it is two fingers place on a wrist when a white Cuban is trying to describe you. Papi tries to systematise it and talk about the destruction of identity and the fragility of personality, but he is scared of the Word. Mami hides inside the Word, finds reverie in it, tries to locate a power that she is owed.

I think quotes like that give a better sense of what reading an Oyeyemi novel is like than any description I can try to give. The Opposite House incorporates interesting and vital questions about, say, race – Maya and her family are black Cubans; Aaron is a white Ghanaian – and about mental health, portrayed through the ‘hysterics’ that live alongside and pursue Maya and her best friend. The prose never settles on conclusions, or even on the sort of imagery that allows the reader to make their own. Instead, everything is filtered through a beautifully written and imagined prose style that is uniquely Oyeyemi’s – so distinct that it is not just a style but a world.

I found the Yemaya elements beautiful and striking and confusing, but was most drawn to the scenes between Maya and Aaron. There is distance and uncertainty in their relationship, but somehow Aaron was, to me, a really lovely and warm character. Oyeyemi is very good at building up nuanced relationships – familial, romantic, or friendly – but I found something particularly special in that between Maya and Aaron, perhaps because he was kind without that kindness being able to solve problems. It was a twist on the sorts of boyfriends you often see in books.

Boy, Snow, Bird remains my favourite of Oyeyemi’s novels, though I have one yet to read – but The Opposite House is up there, a really vivid and intriguing novel that refuses to let you settle as a reader, and makes up its own rules to help penetrate to deeper, if less graspable, truths about relationships and human nature.

Boy, Snow, Bird – Helen Oyeyemi

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One of the nice things about doing Shiny New Books is that I feel I have more of a grasp on what’s happening in publishing at the moment – as you doubtless know by now, modern novels are seldom my go-to.  Having said that, there is a tiny handful of living authors whose careers I follow and whose books I await – and one of those is Helen Oyeyemi (even with a couple of her books unread on my shelf).  Well – and you’ve guessed this by now – I reviewed her latest, Boy, Snow, Bird, for Shiny New Books, and flipping good it was too.  You can read my review here, and (exciting!) the Q&A I did with Helen Oyeyemi too.

White is for Witching

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You may remember that I was feeling all smug and public-service-using the other day, when I got White is for Witching out of the public library – my first public library book for about six years, I’d imagine. I *had* asked for it from Picador, but not heard from them for a few weeks, so off to the library I went… and, when I was halfway through the book, guess what came through the postbox? Thank you, Picador, I now own my very own copy. Sorry, library. But I did go and get another one out – Identity by Milan Kundera. Having decided not to read another Kundera for a while, I realised I was missing his writing, and that he’d written something nice and short…

Anyway. I was very impressed by The Icarus Girl – my first encounter with Helen Oyeyemi – back in August 2008. I was also a little sickened that she wrote it during her A Levels, got another novel out during her time studying at Cambridge, and now seems unstoppable. And then I read Eva’s lovely review of White is for Witching, which (a) was very enthusiastic, and (b) mentioned Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a point of comparison. Yes, the very same novel which is in my 50 Books You Must Read list. I couldn’t not read it, could I?

The novel follows Miranda, from her sixth-form to Cambridge – she has a twin brother [twinlit – check], has pica and thus eats chalk [quirky and original – check], and seems to be in tune with her dead ancestors and her very human house [weird houses – check]. All very Gothic and haunting. I’d love to explain more about the plot, and the characters, but I don’t think I can… despite all those ‘checks’, I was disappointed by White is for Witching. Mostly because I hadn’t got a clue what was going on.

I was a bit confused by the ending of The Icarus Girl, but I liked the ambiguity – the climax of Jessamy battling her double – but this seemed to seep through all of White is for Witching. Was this just me? Was it just because I was reading it while a bit tired, and later when I had a headache? Or did the novel give me a headache?

There are various narrators – Eliot, Miranda’s twin brother; Ore, her friend and sometime-lover at Cambridge; a third-person narrator; the house; maybe her dead mother? But they were never announced. I was usually halfway through a narrative chunk before I’d identified the person who was speaking. It didn’t help that I thought Eliot was a girl and Ore was a boy, when in fact it’s the other way round. What I did like was that narratives would blur into each other, connected over a word that they both use, for example:

‘I can only explain it in comparison to something mundane – my adjustment to Lily’s ghost was sort of like when you’re insanely thirsty, but for some reason you can’t get the cap on your water bottle to open properly so you tussle at it with your teeth and hands until you can get a trickle of water to come through. A little water at a time, and you’re trying to be less thirsty and more patient so that the water can be enough. The thing with having seen Lilly was just like that, a practical inner adjustment to meet a need. At least she is there, I’d thought, even if she is just a ghost and doesn’t speak, at least she is

there

was a bird on the windowsill later in the afternoon. I looked up from Thus Spake Zarathustra and saw it sitting motionless. [etc.]’

But there was a little too much structural experiment for my liking – I love experimental writing, but doing it with the way words are laid out on the page always seems, somehow, like the laziest method.

And there are all sorts of unexplained things – or, at least, things I didn’t find explained. The novel opens with Miranda disappearing completely, and tracks back to find out why – which is deliberately not resolved. But what was the bizarre stabbing incident? Why does she not look like her old photographs? Why does she think she is dead? What was that bit about someone being kept in a walk-in closet for years? SO CONFUSED HEAD EXPLODING EYES POPPING OUT OF MY HEAD. Ahem.

I haven’t read Oyeyemi’s second novel yet, The Opposite House, but I’d be interested to see the progression. For me, White is for Witching took all the elements I really liked in The Icarus Girl, and then went too far with them.

I really wanted to like this novel, and so I’m waiting to be convinced… did I just read it in the wrong frame of mind? Or has Oyeyemi got too experimental for her boots?

Flying Too Close To The Sun

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The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi has been on the peripherals of my mind since someone mentioned it here – in fact, taking a quick trip down blogmory lane, I find it was Nichola aka Lost In Translation, back when I was talking about The Love Child by Edith Olivier, in my 50 Books… but that was only January, and I’m sure I’d heard of it before that. No matter. When Stephanie at Bloomsbury asked what sort of books I’d like her to send me, The Icarus Girl instantly came to mind.

Jessamy Harrison is an introverted, thoughtful and fanciful child, eight years old, with a fiery Nigerian mother and a softly spoken, slightly anxious, white English father. When she visits her mother’s family in Nigeria (Jessamy et al live in England) she also meets Titiola, or TillyTilly, a ragged girl of her own age who seems to be living secretly in the compound. TillyTilly’s friendship means a lot to Jessamy – but then TillyTilly also appears back in England, and grows more and more possessive in their friendship. What seemed to be an exciting but innocent friendship soon becomes a dangerous and terrifying one – both for Jessamy and for the reader.

I don’t think any review of this book has been written without expressing astonishment that Oyeyemi wrote The Icarus Girl whilst she was studying for her A Levels. It is pretty darn amazing, but this book would be extremely impressive whoever had written it. I love narratives which introduce an element of fantasy into an otherwise domestic setting – it’s what I hope to write a dissertation and possibly doctorate on – but Oyeyemi goes a step further than that, because the reader is constantly left uncertain. How much is real, how much is illness, how much is delusion? Jessamy is seeing a psychiatrist, but her sessions deliberately do not reveal much to the reader.

What starts as a novel about loneliness and isolation becomes infused with issues of obsession, possession, power and, most sophisticatedly, doubleness. I know ‘duplicity’ is probably the correct term, but doubleness is more to the point – even from TillyTilly’s first appearance (and her name!) when she simply repeats everything Jessamy says. It seems a little like those pieces of voice-activated-typing software, where they have to listen to your voice for a while, to register and recognise it, before the programme will work. Doubleness and identity become increasingly important through the novel, very cleverly.

Now, I like novels which don’t tell you everything – ambiguity is fine. My Cousin Rachel is an example from my recent reading. But I finished The Icarus Girl without a clue as to what was real, what the almost hallucinatory final chapter signified – but I also felt that the fault was mine. Someone who’s read it – is it clear? Should I have been able to work things out? It doesn’t alter my opinion of the novel, though – it is exceptional, and I look forward to reading more of Oyeyemi’s work.

In less happy news, for those of you who’ve read this far, the Arts & Humanities Research Council decided not to give me any money for my Masters next year… the next step is college funding, and the step after that is bankruptcy! But I’m determined to do the course, and will keep praying.