What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi

Ched is returning to his home country, which may or may not be Iran, to do two years of mandatory military service, and he's giving the nameless male narrator, who works at a weight-loss clinic where clients are put to sleep and starved for days at a time alongside a possible witch named Tyche, instructions for feeding the fish. In fact, Chedorlaomer turns out to be an internationally famous singer who borrows his melodies from 'voices without form,' Boudicca is his fish, and they live in a spooky Suffolk mansion called the House of Locks whose peculiarities would take too long to explain. The story ' 'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea' opens with a directive that's already at odds with itself: ''Be good to Boudicca and Boudicca will be good to you,' Chedorlaomer said.' If the tough-guy chiasmus sounds like something out of a gangster film, the names invoked are those of a Celtic warrior queen and an Old Testament king. Summarizing Oyeyemi is like trying to tell a dream, but I'll try. Oyeyemi's tendency to nest stories together, her willingness to let anecdotes and digressions swell until they take over the story, hearkens back to older story structures in which the hierarchies of narrative are less important than their ongoingness - think 'One Thousand and One Nights' or 'The Decameron.' The anatomy of a typical Oyeyemi story is one of deliberate imbalance she inevitably opens more parentheses than she closes. Casual and accessible at the sentence level, they are not so much experimental as deeply comfortable with the pre-narrative and proto-narrative impulses at the heart of storytelling. Thank goodness, because the nine stories in this collection feel idiosyncratic in a way that is hard to imagine surviving a workshop setting.

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi