Who narrates let it snow1/30/2024 ![]() ![]() If you've seen "Imitation of Life" you've already guessed what it is, but if not, I promise that the novel is far more enjoyable if you know from the start that Arturo's family are light-skinned African-Americans who came to Flax Hill aiming to pass as white.īoy doesn't find this out, however, until she gives birth to Bird, a daughter who is unquestionably (to use the language of the novel's characters) "colored." Boy's response brings another allusion into play: Snow White. Some reviewers have tried to withhold a mid-book revelation from "Boy, Snow, Bird," but the novel only really coalesces once you know it, and besides, the book's publisher prints the "spoiler" right in the flap copy. She prefers the prowling, bloody imagination of myth. With their rich visual sheen and stylized melodrama, Sirk's films are, almost deliriously, about surfaces, and so is Oyeyemi's novel - except for the deliriously part. The film that "Boy, Snow, Bird" most strongly evokes, however, is the 1959 Douglas Sirk movie, "Imitation of Life," probably the most unsettling Hollywood movie ever made about race before the 1970s. "You feel you've seen a hundred of me," Boy zings Arturo, channeling Ginger Rogers. In time, Boy marries Arturo Whitman, a widowed history professor-turned-jeweler and scion of a prominent family, but only at the end of one of those long jousting courtships perfected in the screwball comedies of the 1930s. Boy's best friend is a brash reporter who could be played by Rosalind Russell. There's even a swank cocktail party, staffed entirely by blondes (including the blasé Boy), held on a yacht. The 1950s Flax Hill that Boy flees to is a glossy, gritless setting populated by snooty society ladies and the boarding-house girls who try to land their sons while making ends meet by working coat check. Fairy tales are often Oyeyemi's primary source, but "Boy, Snow, Bird" also drinks deeply from the well of mid-20th-century Hollywood movies - and really, is there that much difference between the two? Oyeyemi, a Nigerian-British prodigy who published her first novel, "Icarus Girl," at age 18, is the literary heir of the late, great Angela Carter, a writer whose fiction glides from swirling archetype and folklore to the wised-up observations of a thoroughly modern womanhood. When Boy's father's violence verges on the life threatening, she hops a bus for the furthest affordable point north: a town called Flax Hill in some unnamed New England state. She got that way on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she grew up motherless and regularly beaten by her father, an ogre with the strangely storybook profession of rat catcher. The blonde is named Boy Novak, and she may look like Grace Kelly, but her personality is closer to that of the old film noir goddess Veronica Lake - skeptical, street smart and tough. Helen Oyeyemi's new novel, "Boy, Snow, Bird," begins with a cool blonde arriving in a small town. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |