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joecam79's review against another edition
3.0
There’s speculative fiction. There’s weird fiction. And then there’s the fiction of Irenosen Okojie, where the term “weird” is taken not just to another level, but another dimension. The fifteen stories in “Nudibranch” are mostly (but not always) set in recognisable places: the streets of London and Berlin, a monastery (somewhere in England?), an international airport. Yet, what happens in them is almost so bizarre as to be incomprehensible. One story, for instance, features time-travelling monks carrying out bloody acts under the watchful eye of a team of saints. Another involves a woman who turns into liquorice.
These flights of fancy are certainly intriguing. However, getting through this collection was, admittedly, particularly difficult. Okojie not only presents the reader with surreal scenarios, but conveys them in a dense, metaphor-laden language which straddles the worlds of prose and poetry and makes the strangeness stranger. Whether one enjoys this depends, I suspect, not just on one’s taste but also on one’s mood at a given point in time. I must admit that there were times when I just couldn’t get into the stories. And there are some of the pieces which I just didn’t understand despite my best efforts. Recommended if you like your fiction different and challenging.
These flights of fancy are certainly intriguing. However, getting through this collection was, admittedly, particularly difficult. Okojie not only presents the reader with surreal scenarios, but conveys them in a dense, metaphor-laden language which straddles the worlds of prose and poetry and makes the strangeness stranger. Whether one enjoys this depends, I suspect, not just on one’s taste but also on one’s mood at a given point in time. I must admit that there were times when I just couldn’t get into the stories. And there are some of the pieces which I just didn’t understand despite my best efforts. Recommended if you like your fiction different and challenging.
barrynorton's review against another edition
4.0
A mixed bag. I really got into some of these stories, others were more difficult to get a handle on. They're all certainly clever and push magical realism to the limits of narrative, but this demands a lot from the reader.
bukola's review against another edition
3.0
Butterfly Fish was the first work by Irenosen Okojie that I read, and the writing blew me away. She writes so beautifully, so elegantly, her prose reads almost like poetry. Her writing in Nudibranch is no different. The stories in this collection are only different from Butterfly Fish in the sense that they are more 'daring;' almost testing the limits of your imagination. But once you surrender to the magic of Okojie's pen, you're in for a wonderful ride.
arifel's review against another edition
4.0
This collection is one where the situation and format in which I read it made a huge difference to my interpretation and enjoyment. Having originally picked this up as an ARC, I'd been fitting in stories here and there around my commute, but I was bouncing off most of them as my exhausted Tuesday-brain struggled to put together the weirdness and to switch from one story to the next (the formatting, which didn't have page breaks after each story, really didn't help with this) . Frustrated but not totally put off, I found the physical book in a bookshop, bought it, opened it back up at the beginning, and read it in one sitting at a coffee shop - with very different results. Of course, that's not to say that Nudibranch - a collection which takes its name from the group of vibrantly coloured, delightfully bizarre sea slugs - is not a weird book. From the adopted-son-turned-farmhand-turned-government-weapon of "Saudade Minus One (S ̶ 1 =)" to the eponymous backwards time traveller of "Daishuku" to the transdimensional tongue-protecting monks of "Filamo", Nudibranch is, by turns disjointed, disorienting and completely at home from everything to mundane slice-of-life flashes to high-concept time travel. While it starts with the very high concept flash piece "Logarithm" (which, alas, did nothing for me), and is quite definitely a literary fiction collection in its sensibilities, there's also a lot for fans of speculative fiction and shortform worldbuilding to enjoy here, with some lush writing to boot.
Two things seem to link Okojie's diverse set of protagonists. First, quite a few of them find themselves shifting from high concept slipstream weirdness into utterly mundane scenes of London life (I mean, who can't relate to turning into a giant human liquorice and then popping over to the Horniman Museum?) Second, and more interestingly, the characters of Nudibranch almost all come undone at the ends of their stories. Some of the moments are ambiguously metaphorical, like the protagonist at the end of "Cornotopia", who goes into an experimental treatment for post-trauma depression and ends, once the treatment apparently begins to work, by shrivelling up "like a carcass that had finally stopped tricking people into thinking it could breathe"; or a horror-like cutaway like "Point and Trill", a story which begins as the mundane tale of a struggling couple going on a night-time paintballing retreat, and then takes some very dark turns. Then there's the quite literal falling apart of the liquorice protagonist at the end of "Kookaburra Sweet" and the bizarre yet fitting sacrifice of the big-dreaming protagonist of "Mangata". Regardless of how it happens, what runs through this collection is the sense that these are people who, once their varied circumstances play out, then effectively come apart, exciting the stage in a variety of morbidly fascinating literary flourishes. It may sound a bit much, but I still managed to finish the collection in one sitting without feeling overwhelmed by morbidity, so its not nearly as grim as all that. In the end, I'm glad I persevered (and spent money on!) Nudibranch, a collection whose strongest images I suspect are going to stay with me for quite some time.
Two things seem to link Okojie's diverse set of protagonists. First, quite a few of them find themselves shifting from high concept slipstream weirdness into utterly mundane scenes of London life (I mean, who can't relate to turning into a giant human liquorice and then popping over to the Horniman Museum?) Second, and more interestingly, the characters of Nudibranch almost all come undone at the ends of their stories. Some of the moments are ambiguously metaphorical, like the protagonist at the end of "Cornotopia", who goes into an experimental treatment for post-trauma depression and ends, once the treatment apparently begins to work, by shrivelling up "like a carcass that had finally stopped tricking people into thinking it could breathe"; or a horror-like cutaway like "Point and Trill", a story which begins as the mundane tale of a struggling couple going on a night-time paintballing retreat, and then takes some very dark turns. Then there's the quite literal falling apart of the liquorice protagonist at the end of "Kookaburra Sweet" and the bizarre yet fitting sacrifice of the big-dreaming protagonist of "Mangata". Regardless of how it happens, what runs through this collection is the sense that these are people who, once their varied circumstances play out, then effectively come apart, exciting the stage in a variety of morbidly fascinating literary flourishes. It may sound a bit much, but I still managed to finish the collection in one sitting without feeling overwhelmed by morbidity, so its not nearly as grim as all that. In the end, I'm glad I persevered (and spent money on!) Nudibranch, a collection whose strongest images I suspect are going to stay with me for quite some time.
abbie_'s review against another edition
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
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