The Opposite House

by: Helen Oyeyemi

Published by: Anchor Books

Reviewed by Beth Cummings

(Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing and in the U.S. by Nan A. Talese in 2007.)

Helen Oyeyemi is a young woman of Nigerian descent who has lived in London since 1988, when she was four years old. Being a black immigrant in Great Britain seems to have had a direct influence on this book, The Opposite House.

This is an unusual book and not a story that is easy to get into. Oyeyemi writes in a sumptuous poetic style that is filled with metaphors and color. An example of that style comes from page 51 of this edition, “Cars thread past the traffic lights like an outpour of lost buttons.” This descriptive style is both rich and confusing in that the metaphors frequently took me away from the flow of the story.

The novel is mainly about Maja, an Afro-Cuban girl who emigrated from Cuba to England when her father began to feel that Castro’s government was not going to let him live the life they desired. Like Oyeyemi, Maja was four when she arrived in London and as the plot unfolds she has only a few confused memories of Cuba. In school this is an issue because she is the descendent of slaves brought to Cuba–so her heritage is African, but she has never been there at all. This causes her to struggle with her identity and confuses her ideas of where her life should be going. Her best friend is from Trinidad and her boyfriend is a white Ghanaian.

Adding to this somewhat convoluted racial plot is a subplot of magical realism – a somewherehouse with doors to London and Lagos. There are characters there that seem to reflect some aspect of Maja’s feelings. These sections are reminiscent of the works of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Toni Morrison.

This is a book that is definitely not light reading, but could make for an interesting discussion piece in the right class or book group.

Armchair Interviews agrees.