![]() ![]() “Her greatest material treasure was an egregiously shiny bit of tin she’d won at a fairground coconut shy this fact can’t be denied.” “Her taste lacked refinement,” she remarks of the foundling, now grown into a laundress named Montserrat. Then there’s the utter confidence of Oyeyemi’s voice and the way it dips into a conversational mode every now and then to make you feel as if you’ve been waved into a gossipy circle to get the real lowdown. Oyeyemi’s new short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, contains nine tales, the first of which begins, “Once upon a time in Catalonia a baby was found in a chapel.” Hardly innovative, those familiar four words followed by that mysterious foundling, but there’s a reason why old wives have been using such devices for centuries: They work. The most gifted writers-and the precocious British author Helen Oyeyemi, barely into her 30s with five novels and two plays to her name, is one of them-have their tricks for conquering this inertia, and some of the best tricks are old ones. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |