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3.76 AVERAGE
3.76 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Sometimes you open a book and such magic and wonder floods out of the pages, sweeping you up in a current as it washes you from your daily life to blissfully drown in its words. Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is one of those books and reading it is quite possibly one of the best things to happen to me in 2020. A delicious ointment on the soul, Oyeyemi cleverly crafts nine stories loosely connected through recurring characters and thematic aspects such as locks, keys and their symbolic applications. These enigmatic stories breathe with the life of a fairy tale--seemingly grounded in reality but operating just adjacent to it with fantastical flourishes-across narratives that meander in unexpected ways. There is a near sinister feel that is just delightful in stories of puppeteers, locked diaries, tyrant kings, vengeful spirits and more that make each story a constant and welcomed surprise. Through non-traditional narratives fueled with fairy tale theory played out by a diverse set of characters in a wide range of setting, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is
‘A real writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It’s where we live.’
The first thing about Helen Oyeyemi is that her prose is unbelievably good, as if her talents were the lofty sort spoken about in fairy tales. For the uninitiated, Oyeyemi--her first novel, [b:The Icarus Girl|139724|The Icarus Girl|Helen Oyeyemi|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320554010l/139724._SY75_.jpg|1010571], came out when she was 18--approaches storytelling in a wholly unique way where the path is uncertain and often plot threads vanish, characters appear and disappear from the narrative with no fanfare, and many stories slip away from the clutches of resolution. These are non-traditional narratives--many based in structures of oral tradition or early fairy tale theories--and the elusiveness informs upon the themes of the book: some things are not yours and we often keep much of ourselves hidden away. It is, in effect, the antithesis of [a:Edgar Allan Poe|4624490|Edgar Allan Poe|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1454522972p2/4624490.jpg]’s short story theory of the ‘single effect’, and wonderfully so. What is always remarkable about Oyeyemi is the way her stories unfold in detail as if it were an image being constructed from a jigsaw puzzle where you’ve never seen the box photo informing you what it will be. Impressions of a character will build only to have your entire perception shifted by a small detail arriving a few pages later or, as in the opening story books and rose, the narrative will center on a character only to have them decentered and overridden by a totally different thread for the remainder of the tale. It may be ‘a consequence of snatching images out of the air,’ but we are better for it.
In his essay The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale, fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes discusses how a literary fairy tale centers on the notion of wonder and how the dedication of the narrative towards tone and awe is what sets it apart from moral tales or legends; the latter builds to a specific message whereas the former is more about the journey than the destination. He writes:
This narrative practice is alive in Oyeyemi’s oeuvre--these stories are very much microcosms of her longer fiction that follows similar narrative tropes, though the collective themes and shared characters do tease the collection as a larger working entity than simply an assortment of stories and make this more of an experimental extension of her longer fiction--especially as each story is in itself a key that unlocks an aspect of identity of her characters. Like real life, threads don’t have to go somewhere for them to be meaningful and not everything is geared towards a tidy conclusion but the purpose is fulfilled all the same. ‘Anyway life is something that you need to digest,’ wrote South Korean poet [a:Chun Yang Hee|14054403|Chun Yang Hee|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] in a poem that epigraphs the story sorry doesn’t sweeten her tea, and these are stories that will stick in your mind.
‘ Time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered.’
Another of the desirable aspects of Oyeyemi’s tales is their ability to seem unstuck from time regardless of setting. Even when modern technology is invited into the narrative, there is a sense of timelessness akin to fairy tales where present day London registers the same as an unspecified rural monarchy where a tyrant King drowns his subjects if they speak ill of their ruler or the pastoral setting in her playfully comedic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Oyeyemi helps ground the mythological aspects by drawing on recognizable characters from myth and legend, such as Punchinello and Hecate.
The stories have a bemusing yet agreeable magical aspect at play that manages to subvert expectations that you must suspend your disbelief by making the fanciful departures from the otherwise grounded reality feel very much at home in the narrative. This is something few others can do and while [a:Haruki Murakami|3354|Haruki Murakami|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615497402p2/3354.jpg] doesn’t immediately seem a good comparison, there is still a sense of kindredness to reading both their works. Zipes also comments on this aspect of the wonder tale where ‘we are to wonder about the workings of the universe where anything can happen at any time, and these happy or fortuitous events are never to be explained. Nor do the characters demand an explanation.’ We are just along for the ride and explanations are beside the point. Just accept it and let the waves of wonder wash over you.
‘A library at night is full of sounds: The unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.’
The individual stories are all very charming, though a few do stand out in particular. if a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for you don’t you think earns the lengthiness of its title through an office drama of the popular clique harassing a new, oddball employee. The nearly silent woman is exposed for having an affair with a married man but the real shock comes when her diary is opened--the key motif coming into play--in an abrupt conclusion that demonstrates how a traumatic childhood can be buried away but still reach its tentacles upward to assault an adult personality. Some things, it would seem, are best left alone and the collection’s title is reaffirmed. presence, which brushes close to the sci-fi genre, begins as an awkward comedy of a wife going to great lengths to avoid an important chat with a husband she fears is going to leave her turns into a surreal nightmare when an experiment designed to explore the fantasies those stricken with grief shelter within in order to cope. The story demonstrates distance between even people who are very close together and the ways we always keep part of ourselves behind closed doors. ‘I’m leaving,’ one character says to another, ‘but everything that is between us will stay.’ Enigmatic instances such as this provide a window into human nature of connectivity and Oyeyemi rides a wave of emotionally charged language from one moment to the next that reflects the unexpected ways life tosses us and our relationships around like driftwood on choppy seas.
Oyeyemi’s use of character relations are a focal point of purpose behind this collection. This is most apparent through the use of recurring characters that are seen across several stories in different periods of their life. Radha meets Myrna in the first section of the exquisite story is your blood as red as this? and the deeply relatable teenage yearnings of a smitten Rahda altering the course of her life to appeal to the older Myrna (honestly one of my favorite segments of the collection) is juxtaposed with the second half where the distance between them is cooly observed from a detached perspective. It is briefly mentioned that Myrna has published an award-winning novel ‘written to make her girlfriend laugh’ in a brief history of the homely wench society who is, presumably, an adult Rahda as the two are revealed to be living together through a small name dropping in presence.
This is less a [a:David Mitchell|6538289|David Mitchell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1409248688p2/6538289.jpg]-like easter egg hunt--though just as fun--and more a way to observe that relationship dynamics change over time though, not being present for the shifts, we can only draw our own conclusions. Other’s lives are not ours, and Oyeyemi reminds us of the elusiveness to other’s beings by revisiting familiar faces in different iterations of their lives. The strongest recurring character is Tychee, a character who’s entire existence is as enigmatic as the stories she appears in. Tychee also has a tattoo which seems to change every time you see her. The backstory for this tattoo occurs in a later story, blood as red as this?, where we see Tychee as a vulnerable child taken under Myrna’s oppressive tutelage. Tychee intersects the lives of Day and Aisha, both of whom we meet as young teens and then later in their respective college years in different stories, each time establishing her a witch-like entity.
If one were to only read two stories, tea and blood would be my recommendations. The latter is an elaborate puzzle of shifting narratives all revolving around a school for puppeteers and ghosts that can possess the puppets.
Rowan, a gender-fluid puppet who appears to others as whichever gender you most desire, is one of the more exciting enigmas in the book and his story-within-the story creates a fantastic nested narrative to examine one of the principal characters anew by dramatically shifting the readers perspective in order to realign their perception. The story is brilliant both mechanically and emotionally.
sorry doesn’t sweeten her tea is worth the price of the book alone and contains Oyeyemi’s most blatant social commentary. Beginning with a fanciful examination of a House of Locks the narrator is asked to watch over for a pop-star friend while he serves in the armed forces of their shared African nation, the story abruptly shifts into a bitting critique of rape culture, social media, celebrity and the himpathetic (to borrow a term from feminist philosopher [a:Kate Manne|16600238|Kate Manne|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1506476357p2/16600238.jpg]) attitudes such as victim shaming that enable poor behavior. Pop-singer Matyas Füst (the reference to [b:Faust|406373|Faust|Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1650680804l/406373._SY75_.jpg|24158213] is notable here, though Oyeyemi often throws a few obvious nods to balance out the more cryptic ones), who in many ways serves as a mirror image of the aforementioned friend, has been accused of assaulting a sex worker after an argument with his ballerina girlfriend and the public response is juxtaposed with the reactions from the narrator’s boyfriend’s teenage daughters: Aisha and Day. The teenage girls are devastated that their musical icon is an abuser but are more disturbed by the victim blaming that they see in the comments section on the internet. Their father and his partner experience an emotional crisis when they realize they cannot shelter the girls from the ugliness of the world and that their inability to help signifies their downfall as perfect figures in the girl’s lives.
I honestly want to write an entire essay on this story alone it is so nuanced and intellectually stimulating with its social commentary. It makes a point about how many of those most loudly supporting Füst as the ‘real’ victim of accusations are young women. A decade ago I heard a study on NPR after it was revealed singer Rihanna had been violently assaulted by her husband Chris Brown that a large percentage of the young women supporting Brown--many claiming Rihanna deserved it--were also of the demographic for those most likely to be victims of domestic abuse. This creates a cycle of unchecked abuse and enables bad behavior. Further, this story centers around the idea of apologies and their framing. In recent years we’ve seen abusers fail time and time again in public apologies, often practically erasing their victims from the framing of their apology. Here Füst not only delivers a bad apology, but a series of them. He even releases a song about how he is the real victim. The story follows the two girls as they try to make sense of it all.
Aisha and Day return in later stories, both of which also explore toxic relationships. In freddy barrandov checks….in? we see a college aged Aisha from the POV of a young man who has a crush on her, though his feelings for her are mostly possessive feelings of lust and his actions are shaped towards sleeping with her and not in a supportive partnership. Day appears in the comically delightful brief history of the homely wench society which is basically a feminist rom-com between rival university groups. It is the most light hearted of the stories, but also one of my favorites.
Helen Oyeyemi displays pure perfection across these stories. Each is individually beautiful, but their shared connection amplifies the brilliance. A must-read.
5/5
‘A real writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It’s where we live.’
The first thing about Helen Oyeyemi is that her prose is unbelievably good, as if her talents were the lofty sort spoken about in fairy tales. For the uninitiated, Oyeyemi--her first novel, [b:The Icarus Girl|139724|The Icarus Girl|Helen Oyeyemi|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320554010l/139724._SY75_.jpg|1010571], came out when she was 18--approaches storytelling in a wholly unique way where the path is uncertain and often plot threads vanish, characters appear and disappear from the narrative with no fanfare, and many stories slip away from the clutches of resolution. These are non-traditional narratives--many based in structures of oral tradition or early fairy tale theories--and the elusiveness informs upon the themes of the book: some things are not yours and we often keep much of ourselves hidden away. It is, in effect, the antithesis of [a:Edgar Allan Poe|4624490|Edgar Allan Poe|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1454522972p2/4624490.jpg]’s short story theory of the ‘single effect’, and wonderfully so. What is always remarkable about Oyeyemi is the way her stories unfold in detail as if it were an image being constructed from a jigsaw puzzle where you’ve never seen the box photo informing you what it will be. Impressions of a character will build only to have your entire perception shifted by a small detail arriving a few pages later or, as in the opening story books and rose, the narrative will center on a character only to have them decentered and overridden by a totally different thread for the remainder of the tale. It may be ‘a consequence of snatching images out of the air,’ but we are better for it.
In his essay The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale, fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes discusses how a literary fairy tale centers on the notion of wonder and how the dedication of the narrative towards tone and awe is what sets it apart from moral tales or legends; the latter builds to a specific message whereas the former is more about the journey than the destination. He writes:
’Tales are marks that leave traces of the human struggle for immortality. Tales are human marks invested with desire. They are formed like musical compositions except that the letters constitute words and are chosen individually to enunciate the speaker/writer's position in the world, including his or her dreams, needs, wishes, and experience. The speaker/ writer posits the self against language to establish identity and to test the self with and against language, and each word marks a way toward a future different from what may have already been decreed, certainly different from what is being experienced in the present: the words that are selected in the process of creating the tale allow the speaker/writer freedom to play with options that no one has ever glimpsed.’
This narrative practice is alive in Oyeyemi’s oeuvre--these stories are very much microcosms of her longer fiction that follows similar narrative tropes, though the collective themes and shared characters do tease the collection as a larger working entity than simply an assortment of stories and make this more of an experimental extension of her longer fiction--especially as each story is in itself a key that unlocks an aspect of identity of her characters. Like real life, threads don’t have to go somewhere for them to be meaningful and not everything is geared towards a tidy conclusion but the purpose is fulfilled all the same. ‘Anyway life is something that you need to digest,’ wrote South Korean poet [a:Chun Yang Hee|14054403|Chun Yang Hee|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] in a poem that epigraphs the story sorry doesn’t sweeten her tea, and these are stories that will stick in your mind.
‘ Time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered.’
Another of the desirable aspects of Oyeyemi’s tales is their ability to seem unstuck from time regardless of setting. Even when modern technology is invited into the narrative, there is a sense of timelessness akin to fairy tales where present day London registers the same as an unspecified rural monarchy where a tyrant King drowns his subjects if they speak ill of their ruler or the pastoral setting in her playfully comedic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Oyeyemi helps ground the mythological aspects by drawing on recognizable characters from myth and legend, such as Punchinello and Hecate.
The stories have a bemusing yet agreeable magical aspect at play that manages to subvert expectations that you must suspend your disbelief by making the fanciful departures from the otherwise grounded reality feel very much at home in the narrative. This is something few others can do and while [a:Haruki Murakami|3354|Haruki Murakami|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1615497402p2/3354.jpg] doesn’t immediately seem a good comparison, there is still a sense of kindredness to reading both their works. Zipes also comments on this aspect of the wonder tale where ‘we are to wonder about the workings of the universe where anything can happen at any time, and these happy or fortuitous events are never to be explained. Nor do the characters demand an explanation.’ We are just along for the ride and explanations are beside the point. Just accept it and let the waves of wonder wash over you.
‘A library at night is full of sounds: The unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.’
The individual stories are all very charming, though a few do stand out in particular. if a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for you don’t you think earns the lengthiness of its title through an office drama of the popular clique harassing a new, oddball employee. The nearly silent woman is exposed for having an affair with a married man but the real shock comes when her diary is opened--the key motif coming into play--in an abrupt conclusion that demonstrates how a traumatic childhood can be buried away but still reach its tentacles upward to assault an adult personality. Some things, it would seem, are best left alone and the collection’s title is reaffirmed. presence, which brushes close to the sci-fi genre, begins as an awkward comedy of a wife going to great lengths to avoid an important chat with a husband she fears is going to leave her turns into a surreal nightmare when an experiment designed to explore the fantasies those stricken with grief shelter within in order to cope. The story demonstrates distance between even people who are very close together and the ways we always keep part of ourselves behind closed doors. ‘I’m leaving,’ one character says to another, ‘but everything that is between us will stay.’ Enigmatic instances such as this provide a window into human nature of connectivity and Oyeyemi rides a wave of emotionally charged language from one moment to the next that reflects the unexpected ways life tosses us and our relationships around like driftwood on choppy seas.
Oyeyemi’s use of character relations are a focal point of purpose behind this collection. This is most apparent through the use of recurring characters that are seen across several stories in different periods of their life. Radha meets Myrna in the first section of the exquisite story is your blood as red as this? and the deeply relatable teenage yearnings of a smitten Rahda altering the course of her life to appeal to the older Myrna (honestly one of my favorite segments of the collection) is juxtaposed with the second half where the distance between them is cooly observed from a detached perspective. It is briefly mentioned that Myrna has published an award-winning novel ‘written to make her girlfriend laugh’ in a brief history of the homely wench society who is, presumably, an adult Rahda as the two are revealed to be living together through a small name dropping in presence.
This is less a [a:David Mitchell|6538289|David Mitchell|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1409248688p2/6538289.jpg]-like easter egg hunt--though just as fun--and more a way to observe that relationship dynamics change over time though, not being present for the shifts, we can only draw our own conclusions. Other’s lives are not ours, and Oyeyemi reminds us of the elusiveness to other’s beings by revisiting familiar faces in different iterations of their lives. The strongest recurring character is Tychee, a character who’s entire existence is as enigmatic as the stories she appears in. Tychee also has a tattoo which seems to change every time you see her. The backstory for this tattoo occurs in a later story, blood as red as this?, where we see Tychee as a vulnerable child taken under Myrna’s oppressive tutelage. Tychee intersects the lives of Day and Aisha, both of whom we meet as young teens and then later in their respective college years in different stories, each time establishing her a witch-like entity.
If one were to only read two stories, tea and blood would be my recommendations. The latter is an elaborate puzzle of shifting narratives all revolving around a school for puppeteers and ghosts that can possess the puppets.
’His puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you'd understand what I meant by that. Sometimes his puppets won't perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they'd decide to keep their mouths shut forever.’
Rowan, a gender-fluid puppet who appears to others as whichever gender you most desire, is one of the more exciting enigmas in the book and his story-within-the story creates a fantastic nested narrative to examine one of the principal characters anew by dramatically shifting the readers perspective in order to realign their perception. The story is brilliant both mechanically and emotionally.
sorry doesn’t sweeten her tea is worth the price of the book alone and contains Oyeyemi’s most blatant social commentary. Beginning with a fanciful examination of a House of Locks the narrator is asked to watch over for a pop-star friend while he serves in the armed forces of their shared African nation, the story abruptly shifts into a bitting critique of rape culture, social media, celebrity and the himpathetic (to borrow a term from feminist philosopher [a:Kate Manne|16600238|Kate Manne|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1506476357p2/16600238.jpg]) attitudes such as victim shaming that enable poor behavior. Pop-singer Matyas Füst (the reference to [b:Faust|406373|Faust|Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1650680804l/406373._SY75_.jpg|24158213] is notable here, though Oyeyemi often throws a few obvious nods to balance out the more cryptic ones), who in many ways serves as a mirror image of the aforementioned friend, has been accused of assaulting a sex worker after an argument with his ballerina girlfriend and the public response is juxtaposed with the reactions from the narrator’s boyfriend’s teenage daughters: Aisha and Day. The teenage girls are devastated that their musical icon is an abuser but are more disturbed by the victim blaming that they see in the comments section on the internet. Their father and his partner experience an emotional crisis when they realize they cannot shelter the girls from the ugliness of the world and that their inability to help signifies their downfall as perfect figures in the girl’s lives.
I honestly want to write an entire essay on this story alone it is so nuanced and intellectually stimulating with its social commentary. It makes a point about how many of those most loudly supporting Füst as the ‘real’ victim of accusations are young women. A decade ago I heard a study on NPR after it was revealed singer Rihanna had been violently assaulted by her husband Chris Brown that a large percentage of the young women supporting Brown--many claiming Rihanna deserved it--were also of the demographic for those most likely to be victims of domestic abuse. This creates a cycle of unchecked abuse and enables bad behavior. Further, this story centers around the idea of apologies and their framing. In recent years we’ve seen abusers fail time and time again in public apologies, often practically erasing their victims from the framing of their apology. Here Füst not only delivers a bad apology, but a series of them. He even releases a song about how he is the real victim. The story follows the two girls as they try to make sense of it all.
Aisha and Day return in later stories, both of which also explore toxic relationships. In freddy barrandov checks….in? we see a college aged Aisha from the POV of a young man who has a crush on her, though his feelings for her are mostly possessive feelings of lust and his actions are shaped towards sleeping with her and not in a supportive partnership. Day appears in the comically delightful brief history of the homely wench society which is basically a feminist rom-com between rival university groups. It is the most light hearted of the stories, but also one of my favorites.
Helen Oyeyemi displays pure perfection across these stories. Each is individually beautiful, but their shared connection amplifies the brilliance. A must-read.
5/5
Oyeyemi is certainly an inventive writer and many people will love this collection I'm sure. I'm not huge on magic realism at the best of times and these stories confused me and left me stranded. The first story (books and roses) was the strongest I thought but even then it didn't capture me completely. Such a shame because I loved Boy, Snow, Bird. I am not super in the mood for short story collections at the moment – after reading A Manual for Cleaning Women I only want to read short stories by Berlin because my god that woman is the master. All this to say, don't take my word for it. While this collection was not for me the writing was inventive and fresh and beautiful.
Another excellent book from Helen Oyeyemi. I liked this one even more than Mr Fox.
The writing is beautiful but the stories were too high on the magic realism scale for my tastes.
The first two stories were great... But I felt like every following tale couldn't live up to those.
There were some gems in here, but most of these stories dragged. I’m giving it a 3 because I liked the second story so much and didn’t hate some of the others. Most of them drraaaagggged. Not for me.
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
interconnected set of short stories focused on puppets/masters, keys/locks and secrets.
at first I thought the stories were mostly unconnected but as the book goes on i found myself flipping back to check events and character references.
definitely worth a reread now that i know what to look out for in later chapters, but still enjoyable/captivating as stand alone stories for the most part
at first I thought the stories were mostly unconnected but as the book goes on i found myself flipping back to check events and character references.
definitely worth a reread now that i know what to look out for in later chapters, but still enjoyable/captivating as stand alone stories for the most part