By Christy Clark and Natalia Alvarez
Not to be Overlooked introduces a variety of wonderful but lesser-known books to assist readers in finding their next great reads. This week’s column covers a review of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi and Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
Review by Christy Clark
“Open me carefully,” Helen Oyeyemi’s 2016 novel What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours begins, the words written on an envelope of a letter from Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert. As a typical third-year university student, I was not apt to open the book carefully, nor in the frame of mind to spend time mulling over each of the nine short stories, something Oyeyemi’s exquisite attention to detail certainly merits. Yet, on rereading several of the stories in a different order, the novel’s profound effect left an impact on me.
Helen Oyeyemi is a Black British writer who has eight published novels; What Is Not Yours, which was published by Picador, serves as her first short story collection. There is little superficially linking the nine stories, except the motif of a key and the deft prose Oyeyemi employs, intertwining the queerly fantastical with the painstakingly real, the whimsically metaphorical with the socially literal and the fairy tale with the social commentary.
In "Sorry" Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea, Oyeyemi writes about sexual abuse and parasocial relationships, as a teenage girl discovers her hero’s abusive behaviour. This story confronts our tendency to make excuses for the people we idolise, by placing them alongside our sympathies and social principles as readers. There seems to be significance in every echelon of Oyeyemi’s fabricated world, the title of which encourages the release of our expectations that everything must mean something: if something isn’t ours, we should waive the right to know it - a poignant message in celebrity culture.
By far the most captivating of the short stories is A Brief History of The Homely Wench Society, where Oyeyemi adroitly narrates the perpetual struggles of a group of women who directly challenge Cambridge University’s misogyny and entrenched prejudices. When one of the group, Day, falls for a member of the rival society, she must decide between her social values and the allure of young love.
Oyeyemi writes with a spirited honesty, demanding that we take note of the world around us, the people we interact with, and the many forms diversity and oppression have taken and continue to take. At the same time, What Is Not Yours excels with elegant, melodic prose that showcases Oyeyemi’s skill as an author, as well as the transformative power of the short story. Whether you choose to view this as a novel, or to just sit back and take each story independently, What Is Not Yours is an outstanding work of contemporary fiction that deserves a great deal more attention than it has thus had. Above all, as the foreword encourages, it is to be opened carefully and read with the attention to detail such an opening elicits.
Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk (translated by Heather Cleary)
Review by Natalia Alvarez
Published originally in Spanish by Argentinian author Marina Yuszczuk, Thirst was translated in May 2024 by Heather Cleary for English speakers to enjoy. This gothic novel focuses on two women from both the past and the present. Their stories initially appear at odds; however, readers learn that the women share a great deal in common as both are dealing with the independent life experiences that have led them to their current moment in time.
The novel opens in the past, one woman, a vampire, having just abandoned her home in Europe for a new life in Buenos Aires. Her previous life was cut short after her family was hunted down and she has seen much violence and betrayal. We learn the circumstances which have brought her to this moment, and we see her as she adapts to the changing world around her and struggles not only with her thirst for blood, but with her desire for intimacy and companionship. Still, she feels life has nothing to offer her at the present and makes the decision to lock herself in a coffin in a graveyard to live out the rest of her life in solitary, perpetually thirsty.
She stays in this new area for centuries until we get to the modern day and the narration switches to a modern-day woman. In the present, we see her struggling with the realities of her situation, caring for her mother, who suffers from a degenerative disease and raising her son. Both of these greatly impact her point of view, causing her to feel death all around her. As she moves about her life, we see the distance she places on her emotions and the people she allows near her. She soon discovers a strange key that has been passed down in her family for generations, enabling the two women to potentially meet.
This was such a fascinating take on the gothic genre and the portrayal of women across centuries was interesting to consider. This novel is sure to entice, and I would greatly recommend it.