![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Feb. 3rd, 2012 03:04 pmEvery other book I've read by Helen Oyeyemi, I walked away from thinking, "Helen Oyeyemi is a genius!"
I walked away from Mr. Fox thinking "Helen Oyeyemi is a genius! . . . I don't know if I'm enough of a genius for Helen Oyeyemi."
I love the concept behind Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox is an author who has made fame and fortune by writing lots and lots and lots of stories in which the heroine dies, usually by being brutally murdered. Mr. Fox has channeled his muse into an imaginary friend; her name is Mary Foxe. The book begins with Mary Foxe showing up to explain that she is getting quite annoyed by this and perhaps it's time that Mr. Fox tried, you know, not killing women in every single story.
Mr. Fox essentially responds to this by going "LOL! What a wacky notion!"
So Mary Foxe proposes that she and Mr. Fox play a game, a story-game, a fairy-tale game. The rules are unclear; the goal is also unclear, although "let's pretend that women have agency" and "let's achieve emotional connection without anybody dying horribly" may well be part of it. (This sometimes does and sometimes does not succeed.)
The game kicks off what's essentially a book of short stories, linked by passages in which Mr. Fox and Mary Foxe and Mr. Fox's increasingly-irritated wife negotiate what may be reality -- a state that imaginary Mary Foxe is coming ever closer to achieving.
The stories are gorgeous, the themes are relevant, the references are rich and complex. Individual bits spoke to me very strongly, and I cannot tie the central metaphors together in my head at all. Not on a casual read, at least, not in any intuitive way, without diagrams and footnotes and references to chart who's being who in what story at any given time. I fully believe that Mr. Fox is a work of staggering genius with a rich palimpsest of textual layers providing a dazzling commentary on the interaction between the imagination and emotional relationships! A week after reading it, I think I may even be putting some of it all together into a framework that makes sense for me -- but maybe I've just forgotten the parts that don't fit.
If someone else reads it and comprehends it all in a brilliant flash of intuition, I hope they come here and tell me about it. I WANT TO UNDERSTAND.
I walked away from Mr. Fox thinking "Helen Oyeyemi is a genius! . . . I don't know if I'm enough of a genius for Helen Oyeyemi."
I love the concept behind Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox is an author who has made fame and fortune by writing lots and lots and lots of stories in which the heroine dies, usually by being brutally murdered. Mr. Fox has channeled his muse into an imaginary friend; her name is Mary Foxe. The book begins with Mary Foxe showing up to explain that she is getting quite annoyed by this and perhaps it's time that Mr. Fox tried, you know, not killing women in every single story.
Mr. Fox essentially responds to this by going "LOL! What a wacky notion!"
So Mary Foxe proposes that she and Mr. Fox play a game, a story-game, a fairy-tale game. The rules are unclear; the goal is also unclear, although "let's pretend that women have agency" and "let's achieve emotional connection without anybody dying horribly" may well be part of it. (This sometimes does and sometimes does not succeed.)
The game kicks off what's essentially a book of short stories, linked by passages in which Mr. Fox and Mary Foxe and Mr. Fox's increasingly-irritated wife negotiate what may be reality -- a state that imaginary Mary Foxe is coming ever closer to achieving.
The stories are gorgeous, the themes are relevant, the references are rich and complex. Individual bits spoke to me very strongly, and I cannot tie the central metaphors together in my head at all. Not on a casual read, at least, not in any intuitive way, without diagrams and footnotes and references to chart who's being who in what story at any given time. I fully believe that Mr. Fox is a work of staggering genius with a rich palimpsest of textual layers providing a dazzling commentary on the interaction between the imagination and emotional relationships! A week after reading it, I think I may even be putting some of it all together into a framework that makes sense for me -- but maybe I've just forgotten the parts that don't fit.
If someone else reads it and comprehends it all in a brilliant flash of intuition, I hope they come here and tell me about it. I WANT TO UNDERSTAND.
