Riverhead: 224 pages, $29
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Helen Oyeyemi\u2019s books are getting weirder \u2014 and I mean that in the best way.<\/p>\n
\u201cA New New Me,\u201d her eighth novel, follows Kinga, a 40-year-old Polish woman who, on the Monday we meet her, becomes a Czech passport holder after having recently attained citizenship. She spends her morning crunching instant coffee granules, repeating Snoop Dogg\u2019s daily affirmations<\/a>, which she\u2019s translated into Czech, and trying on outfits.<\/p>\n After her appointment to pick up her passport \u2014 during which she has an odd encounter with a woman named Milica who insists on becoming her friend \u2014 Kinga goes to work. She\u2019s a matchmaker employed by a big bank that founded her department in response to Czechia\u2019s Fidelity Awards<\/a>, given to couples who\u2019ve been together for 50 years or more (in reality, these were floated by the Czech senate but never came to be). At work, Kinga and her work wife Eva compare their personalized news alerts: Eva receives updates about the winner of three gold medals at the European rabbit jumping championships<\/a> while Kinga\u2019s phone tells her about the Luxury Enamel Posse, a group that invades people\u2019s homes and folds residents into a suitcase along with loose teeth and blank checks.<\/p>\n So much whimsy barely 20 pages into a book could be overwhelming, but Oyeyemi is such a confident writer, her details always specific and alive, that you know you\u2019re in good hands even if you\u2019re not entirely sure what material those hands are made of, where they\u2019re taking you, or how much they\u2019ll jiggle and jostle you along the way.<\/p>\n In addition to getting weirder, Helen Oyeyemi\u2019s novels have been getting funnier over the years, and her new-newest follows that trend. <\/p>\n (Kate\u0159ina Jani\u0161ov\u00e1)<\/p>\n After the first chapter, we never meet that particular Kinga who opens the book again. This is because there are seven \u2014 or potentially eight, depending on how you count \u2014 Kingas inhabiting a single mind and body: Kinga-Alojzia is in charge of Mondays, Kinga-Bla\u017eena of Tuesdays, Kinga-Casimira of Wednesdays and so on until Kinga-Genov\u00e9va, whose realm is Sunday, before the cycle starts all over again.<\/p>\n In a sense, \u201cA New New Me\u201d is the closest the British author has gotten to writing a thriller, because on Monday evening, Kinga-A finds a man tied up in her pantry and she has no idea how or why or who put him there. He does look somewhat familiar to her \u2014 and to some of the other Kingas as well \u2014 but she can\u2019t pin him down. Kinga-A\u2019s suspicion is that one of the other Kingas is plotting to get rid of the rest of them, and that this man is playing a part in that. Is he connected to the Luxury Enamel Posse? To Milica? Is he a secret lover? A friend? A stranger conning them all? These possibilities and more are explored over the course of the week, as each Kinga writes or records her day\u2019s diary entry.<\/p>\n But how reliable are they? Kinga-A gives an overview of the others on Monday, but Kinga-B immediately refutes her summaries on Tuesday, and the other Kingas try to make peace, claim indifference, or express their own frustrations in turn, so that by the time we get to Sunday, we\u2019ve read conflicting versions of some key moments in the Kingas\u2019 life, and learned that some of them might be deliberately lying to the others. None of them are able to access the others\u2019 days, but they were all, it seems, more or less present when they were part of their shared OG Kinga \u2014 before, that is, she asked Kingas A through G to take over and live her life full time.<\/p>\n Kinga, in other words, seems to have dissociative identity disorder<\/a> (or DID, previously known as multiple personality disorder), a serious mental illness that begins in childhood and is linked to severe trauma<\/a>. It\u2019s also a disorder that has gained a lot of attention<\/a> in recent years<\/a> due to social media making people who live with it more visible.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n