Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, A New New Me, is set in Prague, the city she has called home since 2013.
- Title: A New New Me
- Author: Helen Oyeyemi
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Riverhead Books
- Pages: 224
Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, A New New Me, takes place in Prague. On one level, this makes prosaic sense: Oyeyemi has called the Eastern European city home since 2013 and set a previous novel, 2024’s Parasol Against the Axe, there.
That book was a shape-shifting matrix of stories-within-stories centring on a volume called Paradoxical Undressing that tells a different story for each reader (and even for the same reader on subsequent encounters). In so doing, it forms a kind of polyvalent imaginative map of the city’s history. The stories embedded in Oyeyemi’s novel prove slippery and protean, calling into question the nature of subjectivity and the mutability of truth and understanding.
In A New New Me, Oyeyemi goes one better. In this novel, instability is located not in a city but in the novel’s very protagonist. Or, more accurately, protagonists. Though even this apparently basic proposition is, typically for Oyeyemi, open to interpretation.
Beginning on a Monday in late February, 2024, the novel unfolds over the course of one week. Each day is devoted to a different iteration of the same woman, Kinga Sikora – “the original Kinga” or the “OG Kinga.”
Some 10 years prior to the events of the novel, the OG Kinga split into seven discrete personalities – known in the novel as Kingas A through G – each one of whom is responsible for living out a single day of the week. (Kinga A gets Monday, Kinga B Tuesday, and so on.) The various iterations of Kingas communicate through a communal diary they share among them.
The conceit is laid out, in an extended passage of awkward but necessary exposition, by Kinga A, who also introduces us to the peripheral characters who will reappear in the other Kingas’ narrations. These include a co-worker named Eva, a woman named Milica whom Kinga A encounters when she goes to pick up her new Czech passport, a therapist called Dr. Holy (or, in the novel’s alphabetical schema, Dr. H), and a man called Jarda (who is known by other names, all of them beginning – we’re now catching on – with J).
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Kinga A discovers this character in an armchair in her apartment, his hands and feet bound with zip ties. Who this man is, and how he came to be tied up in the Kingas’ home, forms what scant through line there is in the book.
Not that Oyeyemi seems at all concerned with the typical scaffolding of a well-made novel. Earlier works – The Icarus Girl; Mr. Fox; Boy, Snow, Bird – incorporated aspects of fairy tales, but she has also been increasingly interested in deconstructing the nature of fiction itself, probing and prodding at the ways a narrative can be manipulated to interrogate the uncertainty and changeability of life itself.
A New New Me extends this practice into the area of human consciousness, implying in its very construction the different selves we adopt and the degree to which complete understanding of events and people is withheld from us.
This is manifest in the novel even to the extent that OG Kinga’s split into seven different personas is never entirely explained. It involves, we discover, a tarot reading she was given by a friend during which she pulled the Eight of Pentacles. This leads to the observation that “there are at least eight of everybody” – i.e. Kingas A through G plus OG Kinga.
This means that each version’s reality will necessarily be partial (thus the necessity for the diary knitting each Kinga’s experience together – itself a kind of urtext that hovers over Oyeyemi’s own narrative) and that each individual is finally inconceivable even to themselves.
“It happens,” considers Kinga D, “the semantic processing is so hasty that the finer particles (the ones that make up your ‘I’) are exchanged in an instant.”
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The idea of “semantic processing” explicitly connects the notion of self with language, something Kinga A alludes to early in the novel: “they couldn’t agree on what made a story a story, where to locate glee in a sentence, or which tunnels words travel along when written in earnest.”
What makes a story a story is a subject that clearly fascinates Oyeyemi, and, in one sense, her novels can be read as attempts to address this question. The trappings of modernist stream of consciousness are insufficient: Clarissa Dalloway may float freely within her own mind, but there is nevertheless a single abiding consciousness at the heart of Virginia Woolf’s novel. Not so with Oyeyemi: “You aren’t me,” Kinga F asserts in her diary entry. “None of you are.”
This attempt to grasp a fictional mode for the mysteries of human consciousness also makes Prague a useful setting, as it recalls the city’s most famous literary figure. Though comparisons between Oyeyemi and Franz Kafka should be made cautiously. Her last novel, after all, had a title that suggested opposition to the 20th-century writer’s bromide about fiction as the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Yet there is still reason for comparison with the author of The Penal Colony, and Oyeyemi seems to recognize this when she has one Kinga note that they must “mark our first week as a Czech citizen with an in-depth tour of the prison system.”
Or perhaps this is simply another sly joke on the part of an inveterately playful writer. Another of the novel’s allusions is to the Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler, itself the story of a man who adopted different identities to embezzle money from lonely women online.
Perhaps, indeed, it is impossible to find a suitable comparison for the kind of fiction Oyeyemi produces. Perhaps, in the end, her novels are like the seven Kingas: each comparable only to itself.
