Customer Reviews

White Is for Witching

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

_White Is for Witching_ blends gothic horror, racial politics, and the older, bloodier sort of fairy tales into a deeply unsettling novel. The story opens with a passage intentionally reminiscent of "Snow White," describing the mysterious imprisonment? disappearance? death? of the heroine, Miranda Silver. From there, we move backward in time, to the point when the events leading to Miranda's fate began.

The story is told from several points of view, all of them seeing events from different perspectives, all of them possibly unreliable narrators. Miranda herself, her brother Eliot, her lover Ore, and her ancestral home all have their own versions to tell as the plot unfolds.

The house looms as the center of Miranda's tale. Menacing and xenophobic, it desires control over the people it considers its own, and means harm toward those it sees as foreign. The house and its ghosts want to make Miranda a vessel for their hatred. Miranda struggles against the house's domination, a battle that threatens to destroy her mental health and possibly her life.

Oyeyemi's prose is haunting and poetic. I hesitate to use the word "beautiful," as that might give a false impression of "pleasantness." Oyeyemi depicts nightmares, not pretty dreams. She has a knack for describing ordinary things in a way that makes them suddenly horrific, and when she describes horrific things, she does it in a subtle, oblique way that feels like you're looking at something so unspeakable that you can only look with your peripheral vision.

_White Is for Witching_ works as a novel of the supernatural, and it also works as an allegory. I hesitate to even mention the A-word, for fear of driving away readers who've been burned by preachy authors. Oyeyemi doesn't preach, however. There's a message, but it never overshadows the plot and characters. It's just that you can see an extra dimension to the story if you look through the lens of allegory.

A gifted young writer, Oyeyemi is a master of imagery. This novel is no exception, overflowing with startling images that range from the lush to the disturbing. A small family moves to Dover, where the father fulfills his dream: a bed and breakfast. It is Lily Silver's ancestral home, one animated by its own dark history; Luc Dufresne, Lily's husband, is enchanted all the same. The couple's young twins, Eliot and Miranda, quickly adapt to their new environment, enchanted by the woods and the many-storied house. The particular magic of their twin world is fully realized, the reflection of self in the other, an extraordinary beauty times two. If Luc remains outside the magic circle of wife and children, he does not complain. He cooks marvelous meals while Lily travels, capturing the souls of strangers with her camera.

One terrible night when the twins are sixteen, Eliot urges Miranda to remember Lily's every detail, not to fall asleep. That night Lily is killed in Port-Au-Prince. Miranda is bereft. Everything changes, a perfect world distorted by Lily's death. Afflicted with pica, a condition that compels sufferers to ingest the inedible- in her case, chalk- Miranda's disorder accelerates, the girl half in this world, half in another. Eliot bears his own grief and guilt, but as Miri drifts into a dark place that grows larger as her body diminishes, the bindings of twinship unravel. He cannot save Miranda.

Oyeyemi's characters are as colorful as the house (charmed or malicious, you decide):Ore, the Nigerian student Miri meets at Cambridge, the girls drawn into an obsessive relationship that shimmers with passion and threat; Sade, the African housekeeper who realizes her juju is insufficient to ward off the spirits in this house; and the hapless Luc, who so desperately wants to save his sad daughter, tempting her with magical concoctions as though food will heal her damaged psyche.

For all the elegiac beauty of the author's language, there darkness dwells at the heart of this novel, a relentless, powerful entity, either Miri's Goodlady or Ore's soucouyant, a mythical old woman who eats souls: "Her only interest in other people is consumption". Like a great, greedy goblin, this house, insatiable, savors its secrets: the twins' unsettling gray eyes, Miri's sheaf of black hair and white skin, malevolent whispers that leak from rooms at night, a sunlight-starved netherworld. At the heart of the novel is a scream against the cruelty of fate, any other existence preferable to the loss of Lily, even one that shimmers with malice. For all the magic of Oyeyemi's writing, I am overwhelmed finally by the sadness, the weight of darkness that thrives by extinguishing Miri's light as she slides from transcendent beauty to soulless specter, from fairy tale princess to succubus. Luan Gaines/2009.

I chose this book for the January Task of the 2012 Versatile Reading Challenge, which was to read a book by a Nigerian author. It won the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award.

This is quite possibly the oddest book that I have ever read!

The central character to the story is Miranda, an 18 year-old girl whose mother has recently passed away. She is a strange girl who is afflicted with pica, which her mother and grandmother suffered from as well.

The book has multiple narrators: Miranda, Eliot (Miranda's twin brother), Ore (Miranda's girlfriend whom she meets in college), and "the house." I found the multiple narrations very confusing. There is no indication whatsoever when the book is switching narrators. Oftentimes, I thought Miranda would be narrating and then Miranda was mentioned in the third-person, so I knew that I was wrong and had to flip back into the story to figure out where the narration left off with Miranda and to try to figure out who now was speaking! I was really thrown when I realized that it was "the house" that was narrating parts of the book, because I thought that it couldn't possibly be the house that was speaking!

I eventually figured out that the odd style of overlapping phrases was one visual cue to the change in narrators. This is an example of how it looks in the book:

"It looked so fine on

the mannequin

proved very useful for me when Miranda, Luc and Eliot left for the airport."

Strange, isn't it?

I have read such high praise for Oyeyemi, and my expectations were high for this book. Unfortunately, the book fell flat for me. I kept reading, hoping that the plot would go somewhere, but it didn't. With the genre labels of "horror" or "paranormal," I was hoping for a scary or creepy story but this book did not deliver.

MY RATING: 1 star! I didn't enjoy it at all. It wasn't for me.

Miranda has pica, a disorder which makes her consume non-edibles; her mother's death and strangely sinister family home encourage her ongoing mental deterioration--but however accurate, such a summary does little to introduce this story of a narrating home, unhealthy family, and fragile mental health. White is for Witching is a short, strange, wonderful little book--and that combination is not without fault. The narrative is stylized and apparently fragmented, which makes for an intriguing but difficult beginning; it takes some time to adapt to the narrative and for the story to gain momentum. Much of the book's joy lies in subtle characterization and carefully crafted atmosphere, and these aspects also take time to reach fruition. As a result, it isn't until its midpoint that the book really gets going, and that's a drawback in such a short volume. The first half doesn't feel wasted, but it does feel underutilized--and White is the sort of deceptively simple book whose apparent lightness and sparsity belies poetic complexity; it begs for the best possible use of every page.

But in that second half, once things are truly underway, is mesmerizing. Just as apparent sparsity belies complexity, the fragmented narrative belies surprisingly cogent plot and themes. White is a marriage of style and substance: an unusual, sometimes-challenging, shifting voice, original (if occasionally tortured) formatting, and light, haunted, poetic prose; nuanced and compelling characters and interactions, the sort of mysterious, multifaceted plot which forms a solid whole but still begs immediate reread in order to identify those final few aspects, and beautiful themes which straddle mythology and allegory to explore family, alienation, and xenophobia. The book didn't hit me as hard as it did some readers--while haunting, I found some aspects of the book a little too unrealistic to be precisely menacing, and the deadened horror somewhat deadened the overall impact. But White is for Witching has stuck in my thoughts, and the more I read and write about it the more I want to revisit the text, dig in deeper and explore its mysteries a second time. This strange little book has flaws, but it is both intriguing and intelligent, a book to captivating and to inspire thought and dread. I recommend it to those with a taste for horror and the postmodern, and hope that I may reread it myself some day.

If you are the sort of person who likes your stories to be straightforward, making perfect sense from beginning to end and capable of being read without the need to really engage the brain, then Helen Oyeyemi's "White is for Witching" is most definitely not for you. If you like chilling but essentially conventional tales of haunted houses and souls possessed, then you are also probably better off looking somewhere else, despite what it says on the cover. If, however, you are looking for writing to challenge your complacency about the way you think the world operates, about what is and what is not; if you are happy to be jolted every now and then, forced to forget about constructing a rational and coherent picture of what is going on, and be made instead to feel your way blindly through events told from multiple perspectives (none of them clear but blurred and distorted, as though through smoky or faceted glass) and if you don't object to an uncomfortable and discomforting ride into new and unfamiliar literary territory, then this book may be just the ticket.

Neither Helen Oyeyemi's story-line nor her prose style will be to all tastes, but for those who are prepared to sense their way through her words and their flow, rather than try to follow them exactly, will find themselves falling gradually under their spell. This talented young author weaves an intricate web of the incredible around the prosaic and mundane events of contemporary "civilised" life, blending the surreal and the supernatural almost effortlessly with the everyday, to produce a thoroughly modern Gothic novel of loss, denial, betrayal, deceit, madness, love, desire, possessiveness... and much, much more. None of it is comfortable and at times it can be confusing and disorienting, but who said life -- or literature -- was meant to be easy?

The book is not without its flaws: stylistically, some parts come across as experimental and while many of these work and work well, others are less successful. Structurally, there are times too when one feels that the author has simply tried to cram a few too many ideas and issues into too small a framework; there are a couple of plot elements in particular which are left to fizzle out, rather than be resolved or even fully contextualised and which consequently impede and distract from the story rather than contributing to it. These really should have been pruned out by her editors.

The book evokes strong resonances of African-based cultures and could probably only have come this effectively from a black author; not that this means that "White is for Witching" is written solely for a black audience -- far from it, in fact; Helen Oyeyemi conjures a rich trans-cultural stew in her cauldron, blending her ingredients with great skill.

If you are looking for something out of the ordinary, "White is for Witching" comes highly recommended, although you would be well advised to sample before you buy.

I really enjoyed this book, the style is so lush and yet simultaneously minimal. The character's felt real and the world so surreal and familiar at the same time. I think that this author will have a long and fabulous career, and I will definitely be exploring her other books.

Overall a sad, surreal story, that takes elements from fairytales, ghost stories, and drama's about families torn apart by mental illness and death, and wove them all together.

Lovely and worth the time.

Helen Oyeyemi is amazing. I don't usually get into spooky stuff, but after reading the Opposite House, I was willing to go wherever she wanted to take me. Her style of writing is poetic without being pretentious or obnoxious. She doesn't take cheap shots at freaking out readers. Instead, this story builds its suspense gradually and gracefully and ends with full force. I'm not very good at writing myself and am afraid I can't do this book justice with this review. It's very good and you should read it.

...all by the author of The Icarus Girl? Count me in. White is for Witching is the story of a family, and a house, distorted by the loss of a mother and a hidden history of trauma, xenophobia, and insanity. Miranda Silver blames herself for her mother's death, and struggles with pica, a disorder that compels her to eat chalk and plastic. (I thought it might well be a pun on the "consumptive" heroine, in addition to hinting at Miri's eventual realization of even worse appetites, and reflecting the novel's motifs of misdirected desire and destruction from the inside out.) Her twin brother Eliot and bottled-up father Luc are too paralyzed by their own obsessions and griefs to do more than watch Miri on her slow course to destruction. In short, every character is an emotional closed circuit, furiously retracing the same neuroses without outlet or resolution. This includes, of course, the possessive and apparently sentient house, which has born witness to several generations of tortured Silver women.

I read the first half of the book with mostly detached fascination. Everyone is so icily clever and dysfunctional that I couldn't really care about them, and as in The Icarus Girl, Oyeyemi's prose sometimes verges on mannered. Paragraphs drift into prose-poetic fragments, and overlapping phrases signal transitions between narrating characters; I found the latter a particularly heavy-handed stylistic device. Similarly, many of the haunted-house tableaux - Miri's waking dreams of streets lined with "pale people," for example - are presented with an arranged, glassy nightmarishness, an alienating hyper-aestheticization. What saved the book for me from feeling (if you'll forgive the pun) too lifeless was Oyeyemi's dense, playful layering of Gothic and folkloric tropes.

The novel's second half had me more engaged, as the pacing loosens up and gains momentum. Miri leaves home for Cambridge, and in this new context her terrifying isolation and vulnerability come clear. At this point Oyeyemi also ratchets up the suspense - something she's exceedingly good at. The house reaches out to reclaim Miri, the last of the Silver women, and so the narrative is increasingly punctuated by jags of surreal horror: gesturing mannequins and poisoned apples, the apparition of a woman with one hand held over her face...

Miri also embarks on a headlong, clearly ill-fated affair with a fellow student, an adopted Nigerian girl named Ore. I'm still not sure how I felt about this literal playing out of the black-and-white visual theme and undercurrents of racial and ethnic tension, but Ore stood by herself as a believable enough character that I was willing to go along with it.

By the end of the book, Miri's nightmare darkness has touched everyone; everyone is left with questions and terrible regrets. Yet there's something tentatively hopeful about the ending's uncertainty: the darkness may not be absolute or final, it seems to suggest. So for all its archness, White is for Witching left me thoughtful and troubled, and I've returned it to it numerous times since to reconsider its images and themes. Fans of Shirley Jackson, Caitlin Kiernan, and other authors of densely psychological horror/dark fantasy may find this well worth the read.

Miranda Silver is a smart young woman about to start her first year at university. She also suffers from pica, an eating disorder which gives her an appetite for chalk, and has a variable relationship with her father, her twin brother Eliot and her mother Lily. When Lily is killed on a visit to Haiti, Miranda finds herself caught up in unusual events at the family home in Dover.

White is for Witching is an unusual novel, a haunted house story with a difference. The book moves between several different points of view - Eliot, Miranda's best friend Ore and, oddly, the house itself - and an omniscient viewpoint focused on Miranda herself, the shifts sometimes occurring mid-chapter. Each shift in viewpoint is accompanied by a shift in prose and narrative style, moving from Eliot's straightforward narration to Ore's more relaxed and offbeat style to the twisted, surreal viewpoint of the house, whilst the narration surrounding Miranda's sections of the book takes on a dreamy, surreal hue.

The result is a book that should by rights be a mess, but is instead a very accomplished and thought-provoking work. The author alternates between the prose styles and viewpoints according to a certain rhythm, giving the whole book an almost poetic cadence as the story proceeds inexorably around in a large circle, eventually coming back to where it begins (to the point that re-reading the first few chapters immediately after completing the book can be very rewarding). The result is a clever, fascinating work that stands up to repeated readings.

The book has a few flaws. The shifts in narrative style mean that getting a handle on what is going on feels slightly more complex than it should be, whilst the behaviour of some of the secondary characters (Miranda's father, most notably) is a bit odd and possibly unrealistic given the weird events that are going on, and of course the constantly shifting pattern of the story means it's a book that demands some effort and attention from the reader.

White is for Witching (****) is an accomplished, confusing, poetical, melancholy and highly accomplished novel. It is available now in the UK and USA.

I really tried to like this book...but I just could not get into it. It was disjointed and hard to follow. The narrators switched without warning which was confusing. It read more like poetry than a novel. I didn't enjoy it at all.