The other day, I finished Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi. I really enjoyed the book and definitely think it's worth reading. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I've read one other book by her, a short story collection (What is not Yours is not Yours) and I thought it was good, but not great. One of the big problems I had was that Oyeyemi's very strange settings/characters/plots feel, at least to me, very condensed when in short story form. There didn't seem to be enough time to really feel out the characters and the setting before the story ended, so to me some of the stories just felt strange and not much else.
On the other hand, the full novel that is Mr. Fox did not suffer from the same problem. I found the characters a lot more compelling and motivated when I could see them in more situations. I found that I go more acquainted with the flow of the story as I got in to it and by the time I was half way through, I was really excited to keep reading.
I didn't give a summary because it's sort of hard to, but here's my best shot: The story follows a few different characters, mainly Mr. Fox and Mary Foxe, as they bounce between our reality and another more surreal reality that is roughly in the mind of Mr. Fox. Since the novel is a bit sporadic (in a good way), it's really hard to give a concise summary of the book. To me it definitely had a similar flavor to Murakami books I've read. It mostly reminded me of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the Universe, but maybe a tiny bit of Kafka on the Shore. I think I'd recommend this book a read, it's pretty fun and a quicker read. It's also at Snell, so that's cool.
No comments:
Post a Comment