From Helen Oyeyemi to bell hooks: new books reviewed in short

New Statesman​

22-05-2025

A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi
'Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself': the words of Matthew 12:45 are echoed by Helen Oyeyemi in her latest novel. Kinga Sikora is Polish-born, a recently naturalised Czech: her interest as a protagonist is enhanced by there being seven versions of her.
Each Kinga is allocated a day of the week and has a corresponding double-barrelled name: Kinga-Alojzia, Kinga-Blažena, Kinga-Casimira and so forth. But somewhere, dormant for now, lies the 'OG Kinga'. All the Kingas keep a diary informing each other of what they get up to, as their memory is limited to their days of the week. There are allusions to the occult, the Luxury Enamel Posse and a mysterious man, Jarda, who is hiding in the Kingas' house, all while the preceding Kingas attempt to unravel the mystery of Kinga-Genovéva's odd behaviour.
Any ideas of where the plot might be going will most definitely be derailed by Oyeyemi's dizzyingly funny narrative. But the story's crowning jewel is the author's ability to create seven unique voices belonging to one individual.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Faber & Faber, 256pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso by Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi
At the age of 21, Douglas Cooper inherited £100,000 and set about creating the life he wanted for himself – collector of cubist art, friend of painters, art historian and man of opinions both strongly held and waspishly expressed. He became the most important of all Picasso aficionados and built a peerless cache of pictures which he displayed in his château near Nîmes.
Something of Cooper's formidable personality and vivid life were revealed by his former lover John Richardson in his wonderfully entertaining memoir The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1999). Now the biographer Adrian Clark and the art historian Richard Calvocoressi give him the full biographical treatment, and he fully merits their careful and scholarly attention. While acting as an unwavering proselytiser for Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger, Cooper accrued a distinguished war record as a 'monuments man', barely escaped death when stabbed by a rough-trade pick-up on a French country road, maintained a loathing for Britain and its conservative art establishment, and managed to fall out with Picasso after decades of friendship. Cooper was not always a likeable man, but he was never dull.
By Michael Prodger
Yale University Press, 592pp, £45. Buy the book
Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks
The 18 essays, critiques and interviews in this reissued 1995 collection are a response to the late theorist and cultural critic's despair at the dearth of black artists, and especially black female artists, in progressive cultural criticism. Their topics span hooks' experiences of making art in America's recently desegregated South, the politics of aesthetics, conversations with working artists, and proposals for a more democratic model of cultural production.
In this last area, hooks emphasises a profoundly humanist rather than identitarian approach – which feels particularly interesting to revisit in the contemporary context of identity politics. 'Whether art is overtly political or not, artistic work that emerges from an unfettered imagination affirms the primacy of art as that space… where we can find the deepest, most intimate understanding of what it means to be free,' she writes.
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Art on My Mind is at once a grounded and rigorous engagement with existing structures of power and a visceral, dreamy meditation on creative expression, written with clarity, warmth and ease.
By Sydney Diack
Penguin, 304pp, £10.99. Buy the book
To Have or to Hold by Sophie Pavelle
It is a cliché to assert that humans are part of nature; we do, after all, share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. But in this modern world, full to the brim with technology and overarched by human progress, it is often easy to forget that our entire existence is dependent on a fragile, symbiotic relationship with the natural world.
In her latest book, Sophie Pavelle takes this relationship as her focus, exploring what wildlife and nature can teach us about how to live together. From fungi and shellfish to oak trees, ants and solitary bees, Pavelle offers a bracing tour of the complex web of interconnections which support and give life to the natural world. She also explains how these plants and creatures and their co-dependencies are faring amid an increasing climate and ecological emergency. In Gen Z style, each chapter – which takes as its focus a relationship in nature – is subtitled with a zeitgeist-y descriptor of exactly the form that relationship takes (although the explanation of one connection as a 'throuple' perhaps goes too far). Pavelle's own relationship with nature is clearly an intimate one. Her knowledge is exhaustive and is accompanied by beautiful, lively storytelling.
By Megan Kenyon
Bloomsbury, 336pp, £20. Buy the book
[See also: It's the nuance, stupid]
Related
This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain's Child Poverty Epidemic