Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (best books to read for self improvement .txt) 📕

Raúl listened to the interview tapes with me and gave all these sensitive and patient suggestions … Every time I came to him he thought of questions I should be asking and allusions I should be picking up on … The conductor and I started talking, really talking with each other … The project started to flow … and in among the e-mails from my new debut author friends and the e-mails from the editor at Krakamiche, one came in from Raúl, saying he couldn’t be with me anymore. He didn’t say why. I’d got around to telling him I couldn’t marry him, but I don’t think that was it. I replied to Raúl’s e-mail—several times, actually—apologizing for neglecting him, trying to explain myself, promising to improve, asking if we could meet in person to talk things over. He didn’t write back. It was only when friends asked me what had happened with my wedding date that I realised they all thought I had invited him to Tom and Thahan’s wedding. None of our friends knew Raúl, or had run into him before that day.

Maybe Raúl—“Raúl,” I guess—had observed the desperation I was feeling over Thahan and thought to recycle it. Or upcycle it … alchemise it, even. He thought he could take the commonplace lead of that heartache I felt was killing me and turn it into …

Well. There I hit my limit. Whatever it was he had in mind, he very quickly realised I’m a miracle-free zone, and he cut his losses just as quickly.

If so, what was part two about? In September of that same year, 2015, I tried to turn my very bad novel into a goodish novel by subjecting it to a change of scene … I took it to my local library and worked on it there. That’s where I met a librarian named Tolay Gul. He was also short and dark—I suppose that was my type at the time, guys you could mistake for Thahan from behind—but Tolay was scruffier, goofier, with a classic jolie laide grin and a big, booming laugh. I couldn’t quite predict what would amuse him … sometimes I couldn’t even predict where in the house he’d be when I woke up in the morning. I went from a couple of months of sleeping and waking all entangled with Raúl to waking up in an empty bed and opening cupboard doors cautiously in case Tolay was hiding in there. The cupboard under the sink seemed to be his favourite—open the door and out Tolay would roll with an ear-splitting cry: Ciiiiiiiiaoooooooo bambini!

Raúl only seemed to read newspapers, English and South American classic novels, and writing manuals … He was the guy who’d set me up with a ghostwriting gig and enjoyed quietly discussing practicalities in some corner of a gastropub. Tolay, on the other hand, had read every avant-garde text going, made spot-on book recommendations, and was generally very circus circus and cocktail bars. His favourite one had the severed limbs of Barbie dolls dangling from the ceiling. We lounged about with drinks, showing each other YouTube clips on our phones. And in the heavens tiny fists slapped tiny knees and set thighs aquiver with yearning, distress, mirth …

In spite of all the differences between Raúl and Tolay, from tastes and interests to manner to body language to expression of libido to way of speaking (could it have been that they were too different?) I found myself addressing Tolay as Raúl. I did that without wanting to or meaning to; it just happened. Tolay neither corrected me, nor seemed surprised or offended. A couple of times over at Tolay’s place, I started to explain who Raúl is, or who he had been to me, anyway, but each time Tolay put some music on, turned his speakers up extra loud, and started doing star jumps.

I scrapped the novel I’d been working on while I met him and started a new one—a narrative so far from my everyday thoughts and interests that it felt inspired—indeed, some nights I dreamt that Tolay dictated whole passages of it. In the morning I found those nighttime scenes saved in the same document as the other chapters. The tale concerned a priest who tries to build a new type of instrument. A silent harpsichord that assigns a shade of colour to each note on the musical scale and displays those colours when a piece of music is played. He experiments with rapidly whirling rainbow ribbons and with stained glass. But the people will not allow the instrument to exist. Not even as an idea. A squad of philosophers attack it on a theoretical level, and musicians and music lovers decry it as neither entertaining nor gratifying to the senses. Over the course of his lifetime, the priest has witnessed people defend and condone concepts ten times as wicked and twenty times as dull as his ocular harpsichord. He’s stunned by the resistance to the thought he’s attempting to finish, and he enters a crisis of faith that he’s never really able to leave.

Zainab Rashid would instantly have recognized what I wrote as the novella Karel Stojaspal wrote. Not the same story in a different style, but the same story in the same style, word for word, except that I came up with an ending. I can’t even feel proud of that; it’s highly unlikely that the ending I thought I’d come up with was actually my own. I didn’t find any of this out until I’d engaged a literary agent and that literary agent had sold the book to a publisher … quite a prominent one. (I get into a cold sweat when I think what would have happened if I’d showed “my” harpsichord book to someone at Krakamiche Press.) Then Tolay Gul brought me a library copy of Karel’s book and asked, laughingly, if I’d read it. I hadn’t, but I’d plagiarised it all the same. To say I was humbled unto dust, to