Helen Oyeyemi

Mr. Fox

Alexa M

"She looked into his eyes - they were like a famine. Seeing them sent hurt and light through her. His eyes kept asking, asking, and she knew that a person could die trying to love him."

i have no idea what the fuck was going on but i had a really great time ! this was just a really whimsical and fun ride and Helen Oyeyemi's writing is  amazing.  the audiobook narrator was also super good and i feel like really made the story for me.

Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding, and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, the celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently.

Emmett

Falling in love with Oyeyemi's Mr Fox is a little like John Green's way of falling asleep: 'slowly, and then all at once' (The Fault in Our Stars). It starts off ordinarily enough, so ordinary, like a plain length of street, that, at first, the blurb that has so attracted its reader also leaves them with confused expectations. Her prose might be witty, but it doesn't display itself with enough of the fantastical to assure oneself that, yes, you have come to the right place, this is an amusing romantically-tinged magical realist novel as advertised on the back and the cover. Mr Fox does not welcome, invite or compel - it just is. Entering this novel is a bit like the pure fact of finding a door and just stepping inside. Go in, find a nice chair, sit down. After a moment, some vaguely interesting people pass by, talking, thinking, moving. You watch them with mild interest. The furniture starts seeming a little strange after a while, and even the people, why, they are hardly the substantial beings you expected them to be. They recur across what could be an anthology of different stories, a story about writing stories and living within stories, repeating their existences, connecting seemingly incongruous and far apart events and situations by the mere presence of their names. The unreal finds the hand of the real and clasps it tight. Your interest grows a little. You continue to sit there, and read, or watch, pausing with a held breath at turns when the writer's prose turns sparkling, languid, Jazz Age novel-esque, like this:

"She sniffled. 'Yes. I was pressing my divorce dress.'
Daphne had bought a divorce dress with my money. Even more interesting. I'd had her down as a starry-eyed idealist who didn't notice my flaws. I'd have to keep an eye on her."

Or reaches for the images of dreams, like this:

"When I looked out of the window sleep came down over it, steadily building black, softening my neck so my head lolled, gathering me up in its vapour so that I drifted above the cramped angle of my seat."

"He touched my wrist. Lightly, with just one finger, but I shivered. It wasn't that his hand was especially cold. I think it was a subtlety. If I hadn't been looking, I wouldn't even have noticed what he'd done. He took my pulse, I thought. Stole it."

Yet the sense of the ordinary never feels like it is competing with the magical/imaginary elements, both are perfectly woven into one exquisite garment, a dreamlike, sparkling garb for a cocktail party, realised, complete with tiny accidents, in which "[t]hey'd started out sipping genteelly from glasses, but as they got drunker the drinking grew more lavish, and was done straight from bottles. They played charades, very badly, and were unable to establish who had won."

Liv Rockwell

Mind-bendingly lovely. Oyeyemi blends time and characters together in a way which doesn't make you ask questions about why. Instead, you are asking "how". This novel shows how one individual's mental reality shapes other people in his lives, meaning that the people in his head begin to take on roles in others too. 

A rather brilliant way of exploring muses and realities. Enjoyed the read.

Mr. Fox

Reviews