Parasol Against The Axe by Helen Oyeyemi

To me, this felt more like a play than a book, and more like Waiting For Godot than Death of a Salesman. It’s set in Prague, with the city functioning as backdrop, cipher and, even, at times, narrator; the main characters slip, slide and transmute, and the bit-part players reappear in different roles and get-ups, like actors in a travelling theatre. Time in this city warps and winds backwards, contributing to the sense of the novel, and Prague itself, as a switchback ride: a “non-stop paternoster lift” that carries its passengers in circles rather than launching them along straight lines. The themes are love, history, identity, and – most fundamentally of all – the essential subjectivity of the act of reading; the notion that, when one reads a book, one brings everything about them to that book--culture, trauma, history, hopes and dreams, expectations and fears--and inevitably each one discovers something different inside. The story opens on a parched summer weekend in which two women, Hero Tojosoa and Dorothea Gilmartin, converge on Prague for a hen weekend. Hero and Thea were once as thick as thieves; these days they’re not speaking, and their motives for attending the bride-to-be Sofie’s celebration are wildly different and so is their experience. I am 100% sure I did not get this book, but maybe you will, and in any case it is a pleasant ride.