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.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.
