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A review by joecam79
Nudibranch by Irenosen Okojie
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.