WHAT IS NOT YOURS IS NOT YOURS
By Helen Oyeyemi
Riverhead, 325 pp., $27
As fairy tales go, this one is set in a putrid place indeed: a land ruled by a tyrant given to drowning people who displease him. Not one to fuss about hygiene, he leaves their corpses to rot in a marsh.
This is Grimm-level gruesomeness, yet sardonic humor, a firm sense of justice, and a great generosity of spirit course through “Drownings’’ and the eight other stories in “What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours,’’ a potent and playful collection of gently linked tales by the Nigerian-born British writer Helen Oyeyemi.
“Among those the tyrant hadn’t drowned yet there was a great eagerness to be rid of him,’’ as you might imagine, so one of the tyrant’s subjects, a poverty-stricken man named Arkady, hatches a plan.
Oyeyemi gives this stellar story a kind of “Princess Bride’’ flavor — but without the damsel in need of rescuing — and a dash of what feels like commedia dell’arte in the form of Arkady’s friends, an innocent named Giacomo and a tricksy dog named Leporello.
Locks, keys, and hidden realms play a part in Arkady’s fortunes, as they do in all of these stories. Mythology, strange phenomena, and fairy tale elements figure in most, the way they do in Oyeyemi’s five novels. (’’Boy, Snow, Bird,’’ a “Snow White’’ retelling from 2014, is the most recent.)
Oyeyemi has no trouble following her characters to dark, unsettling destinations, but she doesn’t leave them there unless she has to. Keep that in mind as you read the nervous-making “Presence.’’ One of the finest pieces in the book, it fuses the comic drama of relationship insecurity with a disorienting ghost story, as a woman and her husband try to conjure apparitions of each other.
“Is Your Blood As Red As This?’’ isn’t scary, but there’s no way to describe it without making it sound creepy. It’s narrated partly by an adolescent girl who is studying to become a puppeteer and partly by her haunted puppet, Gepetta, who is a lot of fun — never mind that her puppet friend is human-size and fully animate, with stubby little devil horns.
“Since neither of us need sleep,’’ Gepetta explains, “we take night buses, sharing earphones and listening to knitting podcasts.’’
The deliciously titled “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don’t You Think’’ is a scathing portrait of workplace backbiting that morphs into magical realism, while “Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose’’ is a modern-day twist on “Little Red Riding Hood,’’ complete with Big Bad Wolf.
“But surely you can’t be him,’’ Dornicka says skeptically, meeting him in the woods. “Wasn’t he killed by the woodchopper?’’
“Yes, yes,’’ the wolf replies, “but go back to the beginning and there he is again, ready for action.’’
Oddly enough, the book’s first couple of stories are not as strong as what follows. Both feel, at various points, too schematic, laying out the rules of Oyeyemi’s game and introducing characters who may show up elsewhere.
Another, “A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society,’’ seems strained for a while, too. Yet that story, set among undergraduates at Cambridge University, Oyeyemi’s alma mater, pushes past its own awkwardness and becomes one of the most rewarding pieces in the collection.
At the heart of the story is a campus prank of monumental genius, at once vengeful and egalitarian-minded. At 4 a.m., with only flashlights for illumination, five members of the Homely Wench Society use a stolen key code to sneak into the headquarters of their institutional nemesis, the all-male Bettencourt Society, and swap books.
For each volume they take, the invaders leave one of their own, repopulating the men’s shelves with works by female authors: “two Edith Wharton novels for two Henry James novels, Lucia Berlin’s short stories for John Cheever’s, Elaine Dundy’s ‘The Dud Avocado’ for Dany Laferrière’s ‘I Am a Japanese Writer,’ Dubravka Ugresic’s ‘Lend Me Your Character’ for Gogol’s ‘How the Two Ivans Quarreled and Other Stories,’’’ and on and on.
Then, because they are not simply feminist firebrands but also intellectual adventurers and savorers of fine literature, they go home and read what they’ve grabbed: “The Wenches had their noses in books that were new to them for weeks.’’ The image is indelible, its joy recognizable to anyone with a passion for books, a voracity for knowledge, and a wish to close the authorial gender gap.
There’s nothing numinous about “The Homely Wench Society,’’ and that sets it apart from the other pieces here. Yet it feels in a fundamental way like a glimpse at something else Oyeyemi holds quite dear.
WHAT IS NOT YOURS IS NOT YOURS
By Helen Oyeyemi
Riverhead, 325 pp., $27
Laura Collins-Hughes can be reached at laura.collinshughes@gmail.com.
