Czech mate

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This article was published 23/03/2024 (584 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Readers sometimes respond to a review they disagree with by saying, “It’s like the critic read a different book.” In this experimental anti-narrative, award-winning British novelist Helen Oyeyemi takes up that notion with literary — and literal — gusto.

Exhilarating, playful, risky and occasionally frustrating, Parasol Against the Axe is a story about stories that change according to the reader’s viewpoint.

Diving into the malleability of fiction, the narrative ostensibly concerns a trio of estranged friends converging for a crazy weekend in Prague, Oyeyemi’s adopted hometown. The city itself acts as setting, character and even, at times, narrator. (“Me and my rubbish memory,” Prague says to us, “Leaving me stranded with contusions that softly, so softly, glow.”)

But while the three women, Hero, Sofie and Thea, are getting up to all sorts of emotional, professional and sexual hijinkery, Parasol is pivoting around a novel-within-a-novel called Paradoxical Undressing, a book that changes every time someone picks it up.

This slippy little volume, by equally slippy author Merlin Mwenda, is — depending on who is reading — the story of a Jewish taxi-dancer during Prague’s Nazi occupation, the moral tragedy of a cynical Soviet-era judge, a kinky romantic triangle at the court of Rudolf II, a deadly Cold War espionage thriller, a doomed 14th-century romance or a breezy account of the rivalry between two Czech “yé-yé” pop stars in the ‘60s.

These narratives, shifting and unstable and abruptly truncated, are conveyed through Oyeyemi’s propulsive prose, which can be highly poetic, slightly theoretical and frankly and suddenly vernacular. (At one point we learn everybody is “losing their s–t” at the Hapsburg court.)

Oyeyemi has always worked with metafiction, with previous books, including White is for Witching, Mr. Fox and Gingerbread, referencing fairy tales, Nigerian folklore and the horror genre. Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch gets a specific mention here, and there are implicit and explicit nods to Jorge Luis Borges, Jane Austen, Italo Calvino and George Eliot.

The plot of Parasol is pretty much indescribable. Hero is supposedly in Prague to be part of Sofie’s wedding party but is actually outrunning a crisis at home in London. Thea, meanwhile, has arrived uninvited on some kind of vaguely threatening mission, which could connect to the women’s shared youth. It’s hard to pinpoint what’s happening, especially when each character can be either hero or villain, victim or victimizer, parasol or axe, depending on where you’re standing.

Characters, places, times — they all get repeatedly shaken up, into kaleidoscopic views of the city, its inhabitants and visitors, and their layered, often traumatic pasts. As Merlin himself suggests, “Could this Prague be… a break? A snapping of the world’s wire?

“Isn’t this why any faction that has occupied this city has known deep down — must have known, unless they were complete idiots — that the more they seemed to get their way the less they were in actual control of anything at all around here?”

As Oyeyemi breaks the usual laws of narrative, there’s a feeling that everything is possible. There are walking statues, biting clocks, talking cities, mysterious marriage certificates that show up out of nowhere, a giant cartoon mole.

All these multiple, morphing, moving possibilities might provoke a mood of madcap liberation. Alternatively, they could lead to a paralyzing sense of literary overload.

Ultimately, that will depend on the reader, as Oyeyemi — and this critic — will happily admit.

Alison Gillmor writes on culture for the Free Press.