A NEW NEW ME

A young woman with an identity for each day of the week must decide if her coping mechanism allows her to lead the life she desires.

For a little more than a decade, Kinga Sikora has taken it one day of the week at a time. The Kinga who manages Mondays, Kinga-A, is the designated “squad leader,” capable, efficient, and a little bossy. Kinga-B is a shrewd pessimist who resents Kinga-A's condescension. Kinga-C, an adventurous risk-taker. In total, there are eight Kingas, including the original, currently in retreat. We meet each woman in the pages of their collective diary, where they record memories for the benefit of other iterations—everything from appointments with their psychotherapist to details about their jobs, crushes, and preferences. Kinga-A frets that one identity is secretly plotting to take over for good on the occasion of their name day, forcing each successive Kinga to come clean about what they've really been up to with their time—and what they really want. This is Oyeyemi's second novel set in Prague, and the city seems to have encouraged her trickster storytelling instincts. The book is a surrealist romp, filled with money-laundering strip clubs, temperamental perfumers, handsome men hogtied in the pantry, and other oddities. Meanwhile, the truth about why Kinga has chosen her segmented life flits in and out of the periphery, never quite coming fully into view. Ultimately, it seems, the original Kinga wanted the freedom to change her story, but she couldn't accept that transformation felt forever out of reach. Oyeyemi offers us an existential farce that wrestles with what it means to reconcile all the pieces of yourself, especially when they're in constant disagreement about how best to live a life.

There are more questions than answers in this dreamlike novel of dissociation—but that's also part of its thrill.