![]() ![]() Along with these magical rides comes the malaise of modern life. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll be lost and confused in Oyeyemi’s vast worlds. There’s Myrna, Arjun, Jyoti, Uncle Mahi the mime, Gustav, Tyche Shaw, and Radha, as well as a host of puppets à la Pinocchio - almost like real boys. The central two-part story has a cast of characters as long as the latest superhero movie. These stories are dense, seemingly trying to trip the reader up with intricacies. The penultimate includes the plot of a short film that “relates the dual destruction of the mental health of a middle-aged brother and sister… it’s a spectral wisp of a film, film more in the sense of a substance coating your pupils that it is a stream of images that moves before you”. The opening story, at more than 40 pages, features a weaving tale within a tale. ![]() Oyeyemi’s imagination runs wild across this collection, the form barely able to contain her ideas.Ĭharacters and tropes cross stories and paths, pondering locked doors and keys, family ties and lineages, and obsessing over books, libraries, and puppets. Here, Oyeyemi, in her first collection of stories, mines folk- and fairytales again, most obviously in ‘dornicka and the st martin’s day goose’, which features the ‘big bad wolf’ and a woman in a red cape. ![]()
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