“That this city might not actually be a city, but . . . a dissociative state of some kind”


It is not uncommon for people considering a move to consult online message boards like Reddit. There, the joys, sorrows, and judgments are laid bare. What if when we gave our warts and all opinions, the city was watching and judging back? In Oyeyemi's story, The City is Prague, and in this story, it is unknowable.

Our protagonist, aptly named Hero, is traveling to Prague for a wedding. To pass the time, she has brought a book famous for talking about the city. She doesn't like the bride and seems to have traveled to get away from her life. However, when she begins her novel, the story isn't what it seems. The story is straightforward when she reads it in her hotel room, but it seems to speak to the reader. When she picks up the story again in a coffee shop, the story is entirely different. When she discusses the books with others in the city, they further describe a completely different books. Coupled with her past beef with the bride-to-be married and her former circle of friends, the stories all get very sideways. Ultimately, the question is who is telling this story, and what is being revealed.

It is a very complex, dense, and creative story that would be ideal for readers who like a challenge or for travelers who enjoy how a city can unveil itself to you, depending on how you look at it. Have you ever read a book and then discussed it with another reader who had a wildly different take? Traveled in a city and had wild experiences, but sharing it with others only brought confusion? The story was a maze with nothing at the end, but I enjoyed the journey through it.

Favorite Passages:

“it read as if they were victims trying to understand if their assailant had a “type.” They were wasting their time; there is no “type.” The city distributes its insults and outrages indiscriminately.”

“The capital is the part of the country that most openly belongs to the world as well as to the nation. It’s a way in for the stranger who can’t or won’t abandon their strangeness. And it’s a last chance for the native who would otherwise rebel . . .”

“Even if hope is your default setting, you do eventually need some sort of promise that a more binding promise will be made at some point down the road, and I don’t offer even that.”

“A life free of coercion, a life in which she sought no power over anybody and nobody sought any over her. That unthreatened and unthreatening position was the one that Hero, Sofie, and Dorothea had banded together to try to obtain for themselves”

“She was thinking about the way an incorrigible wrongdoer cries when you make them give reasons why they shouldn’t have to atone for what they’d done. If you ask Thea, tears should be abolished because whatever meaning or function they have is—well, liquidated by those who otherwise do what they do (or try to) either quite merrily or without much affect at all. It’s only when such people are challenged by someone or something that’s stronger than them that they try to change the rules, expelling water from their eyes. Water that wails: I’m not that bad, I don’t deserve this, when you are, and you damn well do.”

“That this city might not actually be a city, but . . . a dissociative state of some kind”

I think Helen Oyeyemi is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I was THRILLED to see Parasol Against the Axe on NetGalley. This novel had a wavering plot and took some time for me to finish but I genuinely enjoyed it.

Helen Oyeyemi's writing is so beautiful but I found this book painfully slow at times. There are so many moments of brilliance, which kept me turning the pages, but I found myself following some loose threads while reading that never got tied up by the end.

A lot of different ideas that loosely form a narrative. Readers who like books that make them think about meaning or don't mind abrupt changes may like this one. Not for readers who like a more straightforward narrative.

This is a title that I expected to love, but that I never fully engaged with. At times the narrative complexity worked. At others, it didn't. The book was interesting enough that I plan to reread it in the near future. I still feel as if I should love it.

Parasol Against the Axe starts with Hero, an ex-journalist fleeing a haunting case, arriving in Prague for her estranged friend Sofie's bachelorette party. While there, she delves into the enigmatic novel "Paradoxical Undressing", which changes depending on who and where the reader is, revealing different stories from Prague’s past. When a third woman from Hero and Sofie’s past appears unexpectedly, the tensions between the friends’ different accounts of the past reach a new level.

This one required some brain power and I’m not sure I was able to scratch the surface of how everything fit together in Oyeyemi’s puzzle. The writing is very stream of consciousness but was absolutely fascinating. I enjoy books within books and this one contained multiple stories within it, reflecting Prague's post-communist contradictions and mirroring the uniqueness of individual experiences. Having spent a semester exploring different ways people view and are attached to places for a communications class, I found this exploration delightful even though it was a challenging read.

Huge thanks to Riverhead Books for the ARC of this one!

Since I get the feeling a lot of reviews for this book are going to start off with "What did I just read??!" let me skip the suspense and say what it is I just read: every idea Oyeyemi has had of late, slapped together, and varnished hastily with the overarching idea of lies and perception and self-perception and storytelling. Oh, erm, uh, and Prague!! This is not a novel, this is not even the outline of a novel. This is just a bunch of novel ideas sutured together. Some may choose to call this books layered inside books, storytelling about storytelling, but frankly taking that stance excuses the complete lack of effort that went into making anything coherent of this mess. If I were feeling more generous I would say that maybe this was a short story collection that got squashed into the shape of a novel, but very few of the separate stories in here feel finished enough to even warrant "short story" status. Oh, to be sure they all have their pathos, their "ah, another example of what it means to be human in this particular place!" But by the second time you get a story within the story (which itself has another story embedded in it) there is no more chance of this resonating. Because the takeaway of the initial reader of these stories (or of the second reader if you want to embrace the inherent meta of this concept - which I don't) is not to consider what this implies about stories or about people or even about Prague. The takeaway of Hero and Thea is just basically, "Huh! Weird! Guess I'll go out on the street and now let some weird things happen directly to me."

Yeah, people who like quirk about all else are going to adore this one. A LOT of weirdness purely for the sake of being weird. No, sorry. A lot of weirdness purely for the sake of writing ornate, beautifully crafted sentences about weirdness. On that note: there is nothing negative that can be said about this book on the sentence level. It's gorgeous. There are a lot of stunning descriptions. But ultimately it makes the complete lack of effort on every other element so much more galling. This is someone who knew what they were doing - they just didn't want to fully do it.

Because everything here feels a bit like a tangent, an idea Oyeyemi wanted to throw out raw rather than allow to marinate. This is true even, and perhaps especially, in the points the reader might consider central to the story: the parts dealing directly with Hero and Thea. So many asides! None of them adding up to anything! Okay, real quick, here's how Thea feels about being with a woman a lot younger than her and how she would've felt about herself at that age. (No worries, we're not actually going to develop the character of the other woman or anything! Just a sprinkling of detail to make you think there was a person there, rather than just a thinkpiece the author wanted to write.) Okay, real quick, let's do a title drop and allude vaguely to what you might have assumed was going to be the fulcrum of the text: in friendship one person is a parasol and the other is the axe but they're actually each other and the same thing, isn't that wacky? Now onto another story within a story within a story!

I guess there should be points awarded for consistency though, because all this - the tangential detail, all scattershot and adding up to nothing - applies to the main characters too. Well, you know, I say characters. Hero and Thea are mainly just vehicles to fire off asides, with the occasional bit of deeply horrific backstory just...left there. Hero's parents, for example, are brother and sister. Yeah. And her father-uncle is a priest. So, you know. Bit to unpack there. But leave it in the suitcase we shall because that NEVER GETS BROUGHT UP AGAIN. This love story (gag) gets trotted out, left there, and then...poof. Nothing. But you know, that would've taken effort. To actually examine the ramifications of all that.

And this is one example of many. The climactic act of the book is itself centered on some (again, horrific and dark) backstory we only hear about in this one scene and again, poof! Time to have the personifications of Prague waltz in! But what about - no, no, shhh. It's time for more whimsy.

So, yeah, if I was hoping for a look at destructive friendships and the pull between old friends (which I was, because I read the blurb) I really played myself there. Ditto anything meaningfully said about Prague. That's what I honestly stuck it out for: I wanted to feel the city again. I wanted to remember what it was like to live there and love it, but damn. There's nothing here that brought me back to the sensory experience of being here; nothing about the day-to-day living experience of it. Just...nothing. Some mention of the skyline, the pretty buildings, and that's it. The wacky personifications got way more air time than the actual place: but that's this book all over.

I know there'll be people who'll adore this book, people who are probably way more meta-invested than me. That's great. But anyone else - people who like a little there there - should probably save themselves the time and hassle I stupidly put myself through. The sterling sentences are not worth the rest of it, and I would absolutely not recommend it.

Let's be honest: Parasol Against the Axe will not be for everybody, but if it ends up being for you, it will really feel like it's FOR YOU.

This book almost defies description, which is beyond perfect considering the book-inside-the-book that changes with its reader. It's a cyclical stream-of-consciousness piece of postmodern absurdity that examines reality, memory, history, the aftermath of war, and so much more—all while flipping the script and turning the reader into her own unreliable narrator. It's bizarre and perfect and generous with its intertextuality.

I don't know what else to say. If you're one of those people who re-reads Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 every few years just to see what new gems it will reveal (that's not just me, right?), then definitely read Parasol Against the Axe. You won't regret it. Or, if you do, you won't quite be able to articulate why.

I don't know how to begin to describe this book. I will start by saying I have loved everything I read by Helen Oyeyemi, and I was not disappointed with her latest work.
The story follows a character who is invited to a bachelorette party in Prague. She takes along a copy of a book her son recommended, but every time she opens the book, she finds a different story inside. Each of these new stories within a story was so interesting and inventive!
The entire story is told from the point of view of the city itself, which does take some glee in toying with it's inhabitants. The narration is stream of conscious from the cities point of view, and so I think it took me a minute to fully get into the book.
However, I really enjoyed it.

Hero Tojosoa is used to doing things she doesn’t really like. Honestly, it’s a wonder she has relationships at all since Hero gives such an impression that she’d rather be doing anything else than spend time with friends and family doing what they enjoy. In Parasol Against the Axe, Helen Oyeyemi’s latest metafictional exploration, Hero arrives in Prague for a hen weekend with an old friend. She shows up for spa visits and drinking, but she’d rather be in her hotel reading a book her son gave her.

In between scenes from the hen weekend, Hero dives into Paradoxical Undressing, written by Merlin Mwenda. Hero is captivated by the story of a trio of lovers-turned-bandits in Rudolf II‘s Prague but when she returns to the book later, she finds a completely different story. Everyone she talks to about the book recounts a different plot; the only thing the plots have in common is that they are set in Prague at various points in the city’s history. The book—and the events of the increasingly weird hen weekend—take Hero deeper into a city that is so alive it even briefly appears as a narrator.

As I read Parasol Against the Axe, I started to worry that I wasn’t smart enough to pick up what Oyeyemi was putting down. I saw recurring themes of trios, characters so blinded by their own conceptions of what is right that they hurt others, and rules of conduct straight out of folklore. The plots of Paradoxical Undressing, blended with the events of the hen weekend, made it hard to get my bookish feet under me. I was very relieved to read Sarah Crown’s review in The Guardian and find that my impressions of the novel weren’t too far off of Crown’s. (Crown also offered a really interesting explanation of the meaning of the phrase “paradoxical undressing.”)

Parasol Against the Axe is a book for readers who love to hunt meaning. Oyeyemi gives us plenty of fodder for all kinds of arguments about what the symbols, references, and characters add up to. I strongly suspect that this book will support all kinds of interpretations and that there’s no one “right” answer that “solves” this book.

This book defies description. A bachelorette party descends on Prague, old tensions resurface, and a book grips its readers with its ever-changing plot.

Whenever Hero Tojosoa opens up her copy of Paradoxical Undressing, recommended to her by her son, the book tells a completely different tale populated by different people in a unique timeline. When her former friend Thea opens the same book, she too finds it changed. Is the tale influenced by the reader? By their current location, in Prague? I haven't deciphered that, but what I can say is that each alternate story could be a novella on its own. Oyeyemi is marvelously inventive. I lost track of how many different versions of Paradoxical Undressing she had to dream up. How many were left on the cutting room floor?

I quite often lost my way in Oyeyemi's tome of whimsical characters; I'm sure my experience would have been bettered with a second reading. Finish the last page and immediately return to the first. There were quite a few diversions that I couldn't follow, but overall it's darkly funny and perplexing and alive.

Not an easy read, but very rewarding and beautiful at times. I loved the writing. Recommended to fans of weird, surreal stories.

This book is a fever dream in the best way. An incredible queer story that is set against an ever-changing absurdist backdrop. A captivating stream of consciousness novel!