This loose, multiracial, polymorphously perverse, generation-spanning cast lives mostly in present-day England, but they have roots elsewhere. Most of the rest of the stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are linked, with major characters in one story later turning up as minor characters in another. “Her greatest material treasure was an egregiously shiny bit of tin she’d won at a fairground coconut shy this fact can’t be denied.” “Her taste lacked refinement,” she remarks of the foundling, now grown into a laundress named Montserrat. Then there’s the utter confidence of Oyeyemi’s voice and the way it dips into a conversational mode every now and then to make you feel as if you’ve been waved into a gossipy circle to get the real lowdown. Oyeyemi’s new short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, contains nine tales, the first of which begins, “Once upon a time in Catalonia a baby was found in a chapel.” Hardly innovative, those familiar four words followed by that mysterious foundling, but there’s a reason why old wives have been using such devices for centuries: They work. The most gifted writers-and the precocious British author Helen Oyeyemi, barely into her 30s with five novels and two plays to her name, is one of them-have their tricks for conquering this inertia, and some of the best tricks are old ones.
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