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In BreakupThe successful apple TV Show, workers from a mysterious office have divided personalities. Their “outings” benefit from time far from the unconscious work of the daily milling, while their “innies” are trapped at their perpetuity.
The MacGuffin is that Lumon, the dark company behind the starting process, has developed a cerebral chip that allows workers to be switched between their alter ego.
In A new new selfThe last of Helen Oyeyi novelWe meet Kinga Sikora, a 40 -year -old man living in Prague and dealing with an unusual situation. It also has a divided personality (or, more precisely, a dissociative identity disorder), but hers is divided into seven alternate: A to G, one for each day of the week.
This leads, as you can imagine, to a good amount of confusion – especially when Kinga -A (Monday) discovers a man attached in his apartment. How did it get there? Is this the work of Kinga-G (Sunday)? And what does that mean?
The story that followed extends over seven days, on which we meet the alternate in turn in turn by their newspaper entries, written to put the other members of “the squad” at speed on the salient details of each day.
Of course, in literary terms, what we have is a series of unreliable narrators, each promoting their program and each jealous or suspicious of the intention of others. “I thought there was security in number, security in the fact that there were six of us and one of them,” said Kinga-A. “I am no longer convinced that we have a significant advantage over it.”
Did Kinga-G find God? Does she try to take control of others? Or have they been taken in an extremely eccentric program by a criminal gang called the Luxury Email Posse, which separates from the houses and stuffed the occupants in suitcases as well as virgin teeth and checks? It's a bit of a mystery.
Oyeyemi is no stranger to the combination of the ordinary and strange effect with the disorienting effect. Its beginnings in 2005, The Icari girlSoftened doppelgängers; Laughing folk myths and folk tales The opposite house (2007), Mr. Fox (2011) and Boy, snow, bird (2014); While last year Parasol against the ax is as much on the way friends on a hen make Prague negotiate their shared past because it is the city as a living entity.
In A new new selfThe concept of divided personality is fascinating. Clinically, this can be an answer to an extreme infant trauma – something that Oyeyemi does not really touch – but as a romantic appearance, it offers a potentially fruitful way of examining a multitude of themes. The book marries ideas of identity, nationality (Kinga is to become a Czech citizen) to work – the members of “the team” are variously a professional contribution and the muse of a perfumer put on the distillation of his essence – and explores how a part of oneself can easily sabotage another.
Oyeyemi also suggests the tension between the online and offline characters as well as the impact of the AI and the algorithms, who get to know the versions of us and serves advertisements and the content that he supposes that we will appreciate. All this raises the question: what is intrinsic and what is created or nourished? What self is the most authentic?
As she dictates her thoughts to a transcription application late at night (“It is difficult to imagine a keener listener that AI”), Kinga-A looks “the words rushing along the screen, crashing into each other, separating, trembling for the eyes of an eye while the letters are substituted. The vowels turn like wheels while the program waits for me to end up pronouncing a word. ”
It is a beautiful image; The multiverse of meaning and possible words crossing the screen as a visual metaphor of experience with multiple facets of human being. But these moments are rare; Instead, the emphasis is on a Madcap, nineteen at the dozen of the dozen people through each character.
Oyeyemi captures the interior turmoil of its protagonists by accumulating on the language. “Friends! Coppies! Countrywomen!” Starts Kinga-C entrance for Wednesday. “I ignored my soothing alarm on the song of birds this morning, but the curtains were open, so the sky threw buckets of garlands on my head until there is no more stay under the covers.”
Kinga is disadvantaged, overstimulated – and overstimulant; The extremely competitive parts of his character released on the full inclination page can be exhausting. Consequently, any serious or thoughtful exploration of identity and the idea of self is cut, lost in the surrealist noise of the novel.
A new new self By Helen Oyyemi FABER 16.99 £, 256 pages. Posted in the United States in August by Riverhead $ 29
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