Parasol Against the Axe
A Novel
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
ONE OF BIBLIOLIFESTYLE’S “BEST LITERARY FICTION OF 2024”
"A shape-shifting novel about the power of stories…Helen Oyeyemi is a literary pied piper — her voice is the kind that readers gamely follow into the most bewildering and unnerving of situations." – The New York Times
“A metatextual masterpiece.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
“Oyeyemi writes here as an heir to Calvino or Borges…A dizzying, dazzling romp.” —Kirkus Reviews
The prize-winning, bestselling author of Peaces and Gingerbread returns with a novel about competitive friendship, the elastic boundaries of storytelling, and the meddling influence of a city called Prague
In Helen Oyeyemi’s joyous new novel, the Czech capital is a living thing—one that can let you in or spit you out.
For reasons of her own, Hero Tojosoa accepts an invitation she was half expected to decline, and finds herself in Prague on a bachelorette weekend hosted by her estranged friend Sofie. Little does she know she’s arrived in a city with a penchant for playing tricks on the unsuspecting. A book Hero has brought with her seems to be warping her mind: the text changes depending on when it’s being read and who’s doing the reading, revealing startling new stories of fictional Praguers past and present. Uninvited companions appear at bachelorette activities and at city landmarks, offering opinions, humor, and even a taste of treachery. 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.
An adventurous, kaleidoscopic novel, Parasol Against the Axe considers the lines between illusion and delusion, fact and interpretation, and weighs the risks of attaching too firmly to the stories of a place, or a person, or a shared history. How much is a tale influenced by its reader, or vice versa? And finally, in a battle between friends, is it better to be the parasol or the axe?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This magical novel is an absolute joy to read—and equally hard to describe. After years of estrangement, Hero Tojosoa only got invited to her friend Sofie’s bachelorette weekend in Prague out of politeness. During her travels around the city, Hero keeps trying to read the book she brought for her trip, a novel set in Prague called Paradoxical Undressing, but every time she opens it, the first chapter and the author’s bio are entirely different. And if that isn’t strange enough, our narrator for all of this is literally the city of Prague. British novelist Helen Oyeyemi has concocted a very funny and surprisingly relatable story about female friendship in all its complexities that’s also a dreamlike love letter to Prague itself. Compulsively readable—just open it and sink in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The bold, lucid, and experimental latest from Oyeyemi (Peaces) portrays Prague as a city of dreams and mysteries. The writer Hero Tojosoa, who publishes under the pen name Dorothea Gilman, accepts a last-minute invitation to a bachelorette party in Czechia hosted by two frenemies. She brings with her a copy of Paradoxical Undressing, a novel by mysterious Australian author Merlin Mwenda, which provides a different narrative each time it's opened (Hero's copy shifts overnight from a story of a love triangle in the court of King Rudolf III to one of a dyspeptic judge hoping to frame his own son for crimes against the Communist Party). Also in Prague is the real Dorothea Gilman, who has an axe to grind with Hero for using her name. Dorothea winds up with her own copy of Paradoxical Undressing, one that's set in 1943 and concerns the perilous adventures of a dancer hoping to subvert the Nazi Protectorate from within. By the time Dorothea loses her copy of the Mwenda and tracks down a new one in a bookshop, the novel has changed into a madcap farce about rogue hairdresser Ataraxia "the Uglifier" Pham, who terrorized 2016 Prague by giving clients terrible hairdos. Bizarre doublings and subplots abound as Oyeyemi delightfully channels a Borgesian literary lunacy, revealing the connections between Hero and Dorothea and introducing the real Merlin Mwenda (now working as, of all things, an ersatz ice cream vendor). This is a metatextual masterpiece.
