Mr. Fox in Reading with Style

Feb 07, 2012 Megan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: radiating-affinities, fiction

Exactly my cup of tea, but I did not know that when I started reading. The term "experimental fiction" tends to make me flee, and yes, this is a novel constructed of short stories and its filled with allegory and magical realism and ground shifting underneath your feet, BUT I found it immensely accessible, because of its vivid characters, beautiful prose, and complicated thoughts and emotions. This book is a mosaical look at the Bluebeard fairy tale and its variants (I hadn't even thought of Jan Exactly my cup of tea, but I did not know that when I started reading. The term "experimental fiction" tends to make me flee, and yes, this is a novel constructed of short stories and its filled with allegory and magical realism and ground shifting underneath your feet, BUT I found it immensely accessible, because of its vivid characters, beautiful prose, and complicated thoughts and emotions. This book is a mosaical look at the Bluebeard fairy tale and its variants (I hadn't even thought of Jane Eyre as Bluebeardesque until the name St. John was used in this book, and I went, OH), but there are so many layers that it's hard to both describe the book or explain, succinctly, how well it succeeded (at least for me).

I had the impression that this was a book of playful silliness: a muse comes to life protesting the violence her creator wreaks upon the women of his books! Certainly, there was playfulness not solely in the beginning of the book but throughout, but in addition, there was a lot of powerful poignancy as well, and a lot of meditation on women as objects of violence, on men as perpetrators of violence, on the the "invisible" strings that lock these roles and practices into place, on love and its dimensions and its aspects and its forms and its masks, on love across all sorts of boundaries and gaps, on societal constructions, on storytelling and sanity, on storytelling as something we do and storytelling as something done to us. Realness.

Examining how stories intersect with violence against women, though, was probably the part that made me pay the most attention. Oyeyemi examines this in various ways, both in the more allegorical stories, in the more realistic stories, and in the exchanges between Mary and St. John, like this one:

"What you're doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, 'Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,' and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You're explaining things that can't be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre--but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day's scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it made dramatic sense; it was because 'nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman'; it was because of this, it was because of that. It's obscene to make such things reasonable."

He shrugged. "These are our circumstances. I'm just trying to make sense of them," he said.

Mary was silent.

"Everyone dies." He smiled crookedly. "I doubt it's ever a pleasant experience. So does it really matter how it happens?"

"Yes!" She put a hand on his arm, trying to pass her shock through his skin. "Yes."

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Nov 17, 2020 Tien rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: magical-realism

I had thought that since I love fantasy, I could probably deal with magical-realism. I have read more than a handful so I think it's time to accept that I never could understand whatever message/s author/s are trying to get across and give up reading this particular writing. I really liked the title & the cover of this book which is why I gave it a try but I should've known from the description that it's not the book for me.

I try to avoid books with hints of affairs and/or love triangles and Mr. ...more

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Sep 13, 2020 Ann rated it it was ok

I wanted to like this one, very much, but I think you have to be in a very scholarly mood for it. Or, stop trying to figure out WTF and look at it as a few short stories.
I adored White is for Witching but I hated Boy, Snow, Bird, and unfortunately this has more in common with the latter.
Oyeyemi is an interesting writer. She writes beautifully, very visually, but without clear plots. I get very sleepy when I read her, because the text is like a dream. It kind of makes sense, but only in a dream- ...more

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Sep 24, 2020 Joanna rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, 2020-read, audio-hoopla, rws-2020-fall

This never quite came together for me. Perhaps it was the audio format rather than reading the words. There were beautifully crafted sentences, and entertaining moments, but it never congealed into a pleasurable experience or into a plot that was going somewhere. I generally love fairy tales and am not put off by some amount of metafiction. And the idea here is clever. But but but...I had to force myself to finish this. I kept thinking longingly of other books I could listen to instead.

Everyone ...more

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Dec 28, 2019 Bucket rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fairy-tales, reviewed, magical-realism, literary, love, experimental, identity, favorites

Oyeyemi twists and wrings the wet towel of Bluebeard to get every jewel (and dirt speck) of meaning out of it. Then she swirls and sifts these bits in her hands and smoothly lays them out – what results feels both carefully constructed and haphazard at once. And it was a real joy to read.

Like drawing. You add a shade here, a line there, never altering what came before, really, but altering the whole all the same. It’s not a puzzle coming together – not exactly – it’s a creature being built. It c ...more

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Jan 13, 2012 Juniper rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: 2016-books

2½-stars, really.

this is a very meta book - from weaving in bluebeard, fairy tales, greek mythology and the bible, as well as casting one of the main characters as a writer who sees his muse come to life. so. much. meta. oyeyemi is clever, experimental, and writes beautifully. unfortunately, the book just didn't work well for me. i had no issues with the non-linear path (mentioned as i have noticed in GR reviews that many people struggled with this aspect of the book); i just found it all a bit ...more

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