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Loading... The Opposite Houseby Helen Oyeyemi
None. Very prettily written, but the secondary storyline is rather confusing and a bit superfluous. (  ) Melanti | Mar 30, 2013 |  A wonderful novel about an Afro-Cuban family and friends accompanied by magical characters and the deities of Santania. I loved this novel, but hardly know how to write about it. It is full of experimental writing and magical realism that works for me even though I can’t explain why in linear language. First there is the varied cast of human characters. The story centers on Maja, a young pregnant Afro-Cuban woman. Her parents are intellectuals and her mother a devotee of Santania. They brought her to London when she was a child and her brother was born there. Her lover is a Jewish Ghanaian studying medicine and her best friend from childhood is a lesbian Cypriot. Their interactions involve family loyalty and tension, migration and identity. Interwoven but never intersecting are the stories of the magical inhabitants of the “somewherehouse” with doors opening into both London and Lagos. And then there are the Santeria deities. Oyeyemi writes beautifully. I could quote sentence after sentence of her gem-filled prose. Given the fascinating characters and the perceptive descriptions, it hardly matters that the plot is minimal. mdbrady | Aug 25, 2012 | Oyeyemi writes like she's transcribing a dream. Is anything happening? Are the characters learning anything or doing anything? Who cares? Her fantastic prose style will drag you in and keep you interested. (  ) Heather_S | Sep 25, 2007 | no reviews | add a review
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In a dazzling follow-up to The Icarus Girl, Helen Oyeyemi explores the thin wall between myth and reality through the alternating tales of two young women and their search for the truth about faith and identity.
Maja was five years old when her black Cuban family emigrated from the Caribbean to London. Now, almost twenty years later, Maja is a singer, in love with Aaron, pregnant, and haunted by what she calls “her Cuba.” Growing up in London, she has struggled to negotiate her history and the sense that speaking Spanish or English made her less of a black girl. But she is unable to find herself in the Ewe, Igbo, or Akum of her roots. It seems all that’s left is silence.
Meanwhile distance from Cuba has only deepened Maja’s mother faith in Santeria —the fusion of Catholicism and Western African Yoruba religion—but it also divides the family as her father rails against his wife’s superstitions and the lost dreams of the Castro revolution.
On the other side of the reality wall, Yemaya Saramagua, a Santeria emissary, lives in a somewherehouse with two doors: one opening to London, the other to Lagos. Yemaya is troubled by the ease with which her fellow emissaries have disguised themselves behind the personas of saints and by her inability to recognize them.
Lyrical and intensely moving, The Opposite House is about the disquiet that follows us across places and languages, a feeling passed down from mother and father to son and daughter.
(retrieved from Amazon Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:17:49 -0500)
Chronicles the alternating stories of two young women--Maja Carmen Carrerra, the daughter of a black Cuban couple who longs for a connection to her African roots, and Yemaya Saramgua, a Yoruba goddess in the Somewherehouse in search of the meaning of faith and identity.… (more)
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