Helen Oyeyemi is one of those novelists whose new publication always feels like an Event with a capital “E.” Her legions of devoted fans won’t need my recommendation to convince them to pick up her self-assured latest. But if you’re a reader who loves playfully experimental fiction and haven’t yet encountered Oyeyemi’s oeuvre, might I suggest a trip to Prague by the pages of PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE?

Prague becomes a character in the novel, as well as its setting and even a narrator. In the humorous opening section, the city is dismayed by encountering a WhatsApp group devoted to complaints about it. Oyeyemi, who has lived in Prague for a decade, is clearly having fun here, as the city composes a scathing response to the criticism: “COME ON KIDS, I wrote. Don’t go to the city and then get all scandalized by city life. I’m not even one of the grander metropolises! If I was I could have just eaten you and yours alive!”

"Reading PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE can feel disorienting and is best enjoyed by a reader who can let go of any expectations and just succumb to its oddities. Oyeyemi is a storyteller like no other, and her latest masterpiece is an ode to the literal magic of story."

Among those who travel to the city (whether or not they wind up leaving a complaint is an open question) is Hero Tojosoa, an author who has accepted a last-minute invitation to a bachelorette party for an old friend, Sofie Cibulkova. In between activities on a sweltering summer weekend, she picks up the “Prague book” her teenage son gave her to read on the trip, entitled Paradoxical Undressing, by an author named Merlin Mwenda.

Readers are introduced to this fictional novel-within-a-novel, which on first reading is about a love triangle between a nobleman and two physicians. That in and of itself would not be that unusual, but the farther that readers travel into the pages of PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE, the more strange and unmoored Paradoxical Undressing, the characters and the city itself appear to be. Mwenda’s novel is different depending on who’s reading it and when. For example, on Hero’s second opening of the book, the first chapter is entirely different. Even Mwenda’s bio does not stay the same from one reading to the next.

Things get even more bizarre when the narrative switches to the perspective of Dorothea Gilmartin, another party guest whose name happens to be the same as Hero’s pen name (and she’s not happy about it). Thea also picks up Paradoxical Undressing and --- surprise, surprise --- it’s an entirely different story in her hands. Each of these nested stories is dense, compelling and fully realized. Oyeyemi has packed enough narrative for several novels into her relatively slim book. As the novel-within-a-novel proceeds, characters, situations and language start to spill out of Mwenda’s pages and into the streets of contemporary Prague.

Reading PARASOL AGAINST THE AXE can feel disorienting and is best enjoyed by a reader who can let go of any expectations and just succumb to its oddities. Oyeyemi is a storyteller like no other, and her latest masterpiece is an ode to the literal magic of story.