What are girl friends for? Shenanigans, mostly. Sex, sometimes. Someone to talk about how much you hate to work, someone to avoid work with, someone to help you dream up gigs and also to help wriggle out of them. Someone to talk about other friends with. Someone to talk about with other friends. Who gets to be the main character, and who is telling the story?
Helen Oyeyemi’s newest novel, Parasol Against the Axe, is about female friendship, though none of the women in the novel are friends anymore. It is about not knowing a person or a place, even if the person or place in question is one with whom you have an entangled past. It is about the many stories that could be told, but are not, but you see them out of the corner of your eye — not as a proliferating multiverse, but in the way that no one person can read every book in a capacious library. Only a city itself holds omniscience.
In this case, the city is Prague. Parasol takes place over the course of a bachelorette weekend, the lesbian bride Sofie triangulating the estranged relationship between our two main characters, Hero and Thea.
Thea renamed herself Dorothea Gilmartin after defecting from Prague as a girl with her father. They left behind her mother, who wrote a series of socialist-realist Progress Girl adventure books with catch phrases including “Don’t thank me — thank Progress! It’s UNSTOPPABLE,” and who killed herself in the Spring of 1989, when Thea was 12. Thea doesn’t know why she did it — if her mother was a true believer heartbroken by the loss of her ideals or if the failure of state socialism broke her heart — but she thinks the truth is that there is never one true cause of death. As Hero puts it, “the reason why someone couldn’t manage to keep living for one more minute is an impenetrable secret.”
An Oyeyemi novel is a playful thing: a reimagined fairy tale
Hero Tojosoa is a forty-year-old “ex-journalist” with an impassive face and legs for days. She is from Madagascar and lives in Dublin. She has an ex-husband, a son who gave her a book to read (Paradoxical Undressing, more on that later), and a Bulgarian man who won’t stop sending her letters she refuses to open. Hero published a book about the lives of real people, including the Bulgarian man, under the pen name Dorothea Gilmartin. Yes, this is confusing. Stay with me. Thea chose her English name before meeting Hero, and before Hero published the book. Thea’s “true work,” the narrator tells us, is to be “the (vengeful) change she wanted to see in the world.”
They are both in Prague one summer weekend for their old friend Sofie’s hen party. But Hero is really there to escape the letters from the Bulgarian, and Thea is there to deal with her unfinished business with Sofie and Hero. Quite literally: The three used to scam men for money together.
We could pause here and say that the path of this unfinished business is the main plot of Parasol Against the Axe. The plot, however, is not the point of Parasol. An Oyeyemi novel is a playful thing: a reimagined fairy tale (Mr. Fox’s Bluebeard, Boy, Snow, Bird’s Snow White, Gingerbread’s Hansel and Gretel) or haunted queer love stories (White Is for Witching, Peaces). Parasol is more in the tradition of postmodern metatextual masters like Calvino and Borges — books about books, in other words, and yes, Oyeyemi references both.
There is a novel within Oyeyemi’s novel, Paradoxical Undressing, which changes plot every time it is picked up, and is different for everyone who reads it. The title refers to the phenomenon wherein freezing people take off their clothes, thinking they’re burning up — a dangerously distorted sense of one’s own surroundings, in other words. There is no true plot of Paradoxical Undressing, and none of the minor characters who have read the book notice its mutable quality. For both the novel and the novel-within-the-novel, it is not the completion of the story that matters to Oyeyemi. Both contain a multitude of origin stories that break off without explanation, with an ellipsis…
…like Hero’s parents, who were brother and sister. Her father became a priest to ward away his sinful thoughts, but he brought his sister to the Vatican anyway. Is that why Hero has an Italian passport but doesn’t speak Italian? I pieced these details together but don’t know what to do with them. What novel did I read? It’s perhaps not the job of the author to judge their characters, but the reader thinks something. Reading is a kind of thinking, and people are transformed by reading. So too are the books themselves.
Parasol is an anti-multiverse: there is one observable universe, but of course, that universe is observed differently by each person. It is only the novel within the universe that is different every time someone opens it. In other words, fiction has the possibility for infinity, but people only have one life.
My favorite versions of Paradoxical Undressing include
the Jewess taxi dancer in Nazi Protectorate Prague whose co-worker steals away a locked box from her German John (Johann?) that turns out to have a school teacher’s undelivered report cards of her brilliantly feral pupils along with a 1943 calendar, blank except for a date to visit a dressmaker in Prague in April and the Cubist Ball in July, which the dancers haven’t heard of, and anyway, the date was already in the past, so they climb up the Astronomical Clock to see what it’s like to touch the passing of time with their hands;
the Vietnamese immigrant daughter who saves all her money, convinced she will one day meet the right artist who will know what to do with it — and then she does, and he needs rather expensive silk worms for his project, so of course she needs to go around Prague cutting off bits of people’s hair to feed the silk worms.
Any of these stories could branch off into a whole life, yet inevitably fall short of telling their whole world. But the characters in Parasol Against the Axe do not follow the same rules as the characters in Paradoxical Undressing. They do not respawn; they keep going. We do not see their whole world, but we understand no alternatives are available. Progress is, after all, UNSTOPPABLE.
Which brings us back to Thea, Hero, and Sophie’s unfinished business. Thea is in Prague so she can help a woman who was married to a man Sofie and Thea conned. She turns up in a spa where the hens are getting their hair done and confronts them with a FaceTime call. It appears that they excelled at making Sofie appear “virginal”: “the marvels we achieved with pink & blue fairy lights & daisy-marigold garlands!”
I thought here of the two Marias in Věra Chytilová’s 1966 Czech New Wave film, Daisies, about two girls who decide to act spoiled in response to a spoiled world. Girls just wanna have fun and not work and get into hijinks and attempt suicide and have a food fight and drain every last penny from men who tell them that “the only ‘kinda Western’ women who still know how to fully appreciate a man are the ones from the East of Europe,” as Sofie tells Hero. Except that Parasol is more like what would happen if the Marias broke apart, turned 40, and got back together to hash out what they got up to in their twenties.
It seems that Sofie and Hero-as-Sofie pretended to be 12 for one particular man, upon his request. And it would appear that Sofie had hoped that would stop the man from going after an actual 12-year-old, his daughter’s best friend. It didn’t. She attacked the man, and the man cut her with a bottle. The man’s ex-wife also had a scar across her face.
Thea was in Prague to pay this injustice back to Sofie. Hero intercepted the strike of the bottle, knowing that “there were a hundred more exchanges” like that one coming.
But we don’t see them in this novel. Parasol keeps going. It’s not a multiverse. And there is no alternative where that 12-year-old exists, unmolested.
Should I have mentioned that there are spoilers, here? Yes, something spoiled for me after this moment. The women who were drawn together by authorial force are now flung apart from one another. I felt, in this moment, an intrusion of reality, of some artifice cracking open and exposing something raw and real, like the bomb that explodes at the end of Daisies. Stop the whimsy, halt the kaleidoscope. For me, this moment of violence rips the page in half, just as Hero’s face is sliced open.
The back third of the novel dragged for me. There are no rules that state that people or fictional characters must be changed by the consequences of their own actions, but personally, I find it frustrating when they are not. Infinitely proliferating possibilities belong to the imagination, but our lives, even if they feel like a series of sidequests, are finite. Every scene in Oyeyemi’s novel turns like a kaleidoscope, with gems tumbling on their facets — but the characters themselves are too flat. Without the tension that charged their friendship, I wondered what the whole story was for. Every person who reads Parasol, as opposed to Paradoxical Undressing, finds the same words in the same order over the same number of pages. We don’t see Sofie’s gay wedding, but we get Hero’s straight one. (Hero passes a wedding dress back and forth with her new husband, abandons the husband, tries to leave Prague but is forbidden to do so without her copy of Paradoxical Undressing, which she has abandoned, and then in the search for the book, meets the author, and gets ice cream. The novel ends.) I wish I read my own personal version in which Hero and Thea and, hell, why not Sofie too, just fucked it out.
As for the Dorotheas — but why always Dorothea? George Eliot wrote novels about beautiful women who realize too late that they’ve fucked up big, huge. Middlemarch, the novel that lends its heroine’s name to Parasol’s heroines, is about middling lives in a mid-sized town in the English Midlands, and grappling with the consequences of your own actions over the course of hundreds of pages. I longed for a mere fraction of that sort of reflection in Parasol. Maybe the trouble is that Elliot’s omniscient narrator casts its eye all over the town whereas Parasol’s narrator only speaks for two, leaving a frustrating number of questions, unfinished threads, mysteries.
I should mention that Prague is also the narrator of the book. Only a city can be omniscient of all the stories within it, but Prague refuses to be used this way. In my review copy of Parasol, Oyeyemi opens with a letter addressed to the reviewer, wherein she warns that “Prague will not be imagined in any of the contexts assigned her.” And yet, this letter begins with lines of verse: “Remember me / That I lived and that I walked through Prague / That I learned to love her in a way that she was never loved before.” And that’s what Oyeyemi says she wants to write: a letter addressed to “the city I live in, walk through, and love in a way she’s never been loved before.” The Prague of Parasol admits, early on, to wanting Hero, italics hers (Prague uses she/her pronouns).
This is perhaps the key to all Parasol’s mythologies, or at least mysteries: Oyeyemi, writer of so many casually yet openly queer novels, has written a love letter by a woman to a woman about women, except none of these women will admit it. So when I tell people about Parasol Against the Axe, I tell them it’s a book about a love triangle between two girls and a city and everyone they intersect with and bounce off, and the feeling of never knowing your best friend whom you desperately want but also need to abandon again and again, like a frustrating book you throw from the bed only to retrieve, later, when you find you cannot sleep.
Natalie Adler is an editor at Lux. Her first novel, Waiting on a Friend, is forthcoming in 2025.
Photo illustration by Sharanya Durvasula. Panorama of Prague courtesy of Rijks Museum