The Story of the Impossible Island

To read a Helen Oyeyemi novel is to willingly enter a tangled wood, where the paths wander and circle, and the way out isn’t always clear, but the scenery is full of an alarming and brilliant beauty. A one-time prodigy (the British daughter of Nigerian immigrants, she published her first novel, The Icarus Girl, in her teens), Oyeyemi has always been interested in how people, especially women, arrive at their identities, a journey shaped by relationships that define and, more often than not, confine them. The fairy tale is the native language of this theme: Its princesses, stepmothers, witches, and yes, even its princes and shoemakers, are facets of a single questing psyche. But while fairy tales have a sequestered inward-looking quality, Oyeyemi’s novels are wide-ranging. She browses the globe in search of motifs and milieus; her fiction has drawn on Yoruba legends, Emily Dickinson, Cuban folklore, American race relations, and ghost stories. She currently lives in Prague, and her splendid, witty new novel, Gingerbread, has a distinctive flavor of Mitteleuropa. Continue reading at 'Slate'

[ Slate | 2019-03-06 00:00:00 UTC ]

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