This is not a book for the light of mind, or faint of heart. There is such a haunting, beautiful ... emptiness ... to it all, that I feel I should be giving it more stars than I am. Every body else seems to think it's a good read, and so I must be missing something, right? But the majority of those who say what a good book it really is don't seem to know why.Let me suggest a Poem:I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their namewomen give themselves to him.If I am

4.5/5 He shrugged. "These are our circumstances. I'm just trying to make sense of them," he said.Mary was silent."Everyone dies." He smiled crookedly. "I doubt it's ever a pleasant experience. So does it really matter how it happens?""Yes!" She put a hand on his arm, trying to pass her shock through his skin. "Yes." This starts off cute, then begins to cut. It's metafiction, but in the sense of reality feeding books feeding reality, the recursiveness of ideology as word turns work in the most

I enjoyed this because it is so imaginative and clever but I found it hard to finish and didn't feel like I "got" it. This was one of those books that was so enamored with its conceit that at times it loses the reader. Still, this is an audacious, important book well worth reading.

I am so pleased that I picked up this book, because it has reminded me that life is far too short to persist with books that you don't like. This book is so capital-m Meta that it's probably illegal to write a review of it. Luckily, the novel was so busy interrogating tropes and questioning literary conventions and borrowing from genres that it didn't even notice when I shut it at about page 100 and shelved it.I want a story and characters, which probably makes me more conservative than a Mad Me...

Mr. Fox is about the most enchanting and captivating book I have read in quite some time. Helen Oyeyemi is a highly inventive and multi-faceted storyteller. Her characters are both anchored in reality and in the worlds of fantasy and fairy tales. They can be serious or funny and ironic, they can fall in love beyond bounds or hate with a passion, they can be docile and subdued or vicious and violent. Underneath it all are serious issues being addressed despite the playful manner in which the nove...

This was nothing like I expected and I absolutely loved the whole fascinating, strange, perfectly sensible, crazy thing. Review posted in roundup of books on my blog: https://shouldacouldawouldabooks.com/...

Statutory Warning: If you like your stories served up in the traditional way with a beginning, middle and end, and with characters behaving like rational human beings in conventional settings, then Helen Oyeyemi is definitely not for you.Mr. St John Fox, the writer, has an unusual visitor one day - the beautiful Mary Foxe. What makes her unusual is that she exists only in his head.Mary Foxe took birth in Mr. Fox's head in the trenches of The Great War (actually, World War I - but the novel is se...

Helen Oyeyemi can write voices. Men’s voices, women’s voices, English voices, American voices, Nigerian voices, French voices, human voices, animal voices.I’d trust her to write an authentic voice from any geographical location, any time frame, any political situation, any gender, any species.Because Helen Oyeyemi truly owns the world she lives in.She can write stories that become novels and novels made from stories.She can write in different styles, be it myth or modern. She can play around wit...

2 stars3 stars4 stars4.5 stars5 stars!!Well I liked the opening, but it took me a while to get over the slime of St John, the sleaziness he spread everywhere. There was a voice, a piping, femme-seeming voice struggling with self-confidence that seemed to be Mary's, but nothing was clean, there was this fug of the male gaze. The women were preoccupied with their looks, their attractiveness, craving male attention. But this gender horror is real, rape culture is in us, there is no pure desire, pur...

Fantastical and full of mystery, Mr. Fox offers a series of surreal, enigmatic variations on the titular fairytale, along with “Bluebeard.” Each tale starts simply but takes many unexpected turns and becomes increasingly baroque, and all are framed by an overarching narrative, in which St. John Fox, a famous novelist, is admonished by Mary Fox, a figure of his imagination, to not write sexist novels normalizing violence against women. As the work unfolds characters start to hop across stories an...

I went into this with a slight disadvantage since I don't really know the fairytales/folklore that this book plays with, so I feel like I missed out on a lot of the interesting things that Oyeyemi does here. Also, this is Meta with a capital "M" which I can sometimes enjoy but I think a full novel and pushing and pulling and twisting literary devices got to be a bit wearing for me. However, man can Oyeyemi write a story. If I took this as a short story collection, then man, these are some freaki...

Vulpes - Latin for fox. Old French goupil derives from the Latin, but the popularity of Le Roman De Renart and the bad augur of actually naming the 'verminous' creature meant that renard became used, first as a euphemism, and then as the standard term for fox. Reynard, associated with Reinhard, which comes from old German Regin - counsel and hart - strong, thus someone who is resourceful, quick-witted, clever. The English word fox is similar to the German Fuchs, which apparently corresponds to t...

This is a delightful and quirky play with a variety of myths and tropes. Primarily the Bluebeard myth; which is, as the Guardian review reminds us is “the usual – wooing, seduction, then – the discovery of a chopped-up predecessor". There is a fairy tale element running through; the main antagonist is writer St John Fox (Reynard the Fox runs through fairy tales going back for centuries). The novel is set in the 1930s and St John Fox is a novelist whose novels usually end in the main female chara...

I never liked crime fiction. I read from a variety of genres, I even read lots of trashy books too, but I think there isn't one who-dunnit I can like. There are a few reasons for this (one is that I usually figure out the culprit, but I'll shut up 'cause now I'm sounding like a git) but the most important one is that crime fiction trivialises human life in a way I cannot sympathise with. No one cares about the person who died or the people left behind; we only care about solving a puzzle, satisf...

Question for discussion: is Mr. Fox in fact a meta-romance novel, an attempt by Oyeyemi to make herself the Ursula K. Le Guin of that most beleagured of genres? Or is it in fact a meta-fairy tale with deep feminist implications that happens to use romance as the ground for its conflict, between a writer (Mr. Fox), his fictional muse (Mary Foxe), his concrete wife (Daphne Fox), and the author of Desperate Characters and several beloved children's novels (Paula Fox, who doesn't actually appear in

A dreamy, fairy tale-like novel about love, stories, and foxes. I love Helen Oyeyem's writing. It's like her words are as familiar as the fairy tales you heard as a kid while at the same time as fresh and unique as anything you've ever read. Mr Fox is an author, married to a woman named Daphne and whose muse is an imaginary woman named Mary. Mary goes after Mr Fox for the needless women's deaths in his stories, by telling her own. She becomes real. She meets Daphne, who worries her husband has b...

This novel proved to me the importance of sticking with a book longer than its first few pages. The metafictional whimsy of the first 50+ pages grated on me...and then all at once the book soared. Many times I feel that metafiction becomes cold and pointless, too self-aware for it to have greater purpose than to point back to the author's cleverness, so I tend to be on my guard when I begin a book that uses these elements. Oyeyemi's novel masterfully achieves what the best metafiction can do, th...

Book DescriptionConsidering that I’m still not really sure exactly what was going on, writing this summary shall be a challenge. Let’s see … as best as I can tell, the story is about a writer (Mr. Fox) who is married to a woman named Daphne but is having an affair of sorts with his muse (Mary Foxe), who is slowly taking corporeal form in the real world. But when I tell you that this story is not told in a straightforward way, trust me on thatMy ThoughtsThe story of this love triangle is told in

Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi - the opening at least is very confusing but at the same time hilarious with lots of lovely prose. As I settled into it and recognized the flights of fantasy, I was less confused but still delighted by the fairy tale aspect and the general story-telling.A favorite quote (there are too many to share a complete list!): "All around them people were speaking a language Brown didn't understand; it was like silence with sharp edges in it."So many beautiful sentences, beautiful...

I don't really know what happened here, but I enjoyed every bit of it. This is more of a short story collection with a linking narrative. I really loved some of the short stories. Not sure if this makes me want to read more from Oyeyemi, but I will enjoy rereading this!