The Opposite House - Rilegato

Oyeyemi, Helen

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0385513844 ISBN 13: 9780385513845

Casa editrice: Nan a Talese, 2007

Riassunto

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.

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Recensione

"Helen Oyeyemi is a startling literary prodigy. She wrote her first mature novel, The Icarus Girl, at age 18. That book displayed Oyeyemi's gift as a fantasist. She has the ability to shift between realism and expressionism without surrendering to self-indulgence. She brings that special sensibility to The Opposite House, her new novel of lives split between the multicultural West and 'the opposite house'—dreams, longings and sensibilities rooted elsewhere....Oyeyemi has fashioned a narrative that is at turns comic, lovely, and grotesque. She has an original voice and a rich gift for conjuring the fantastic. At age 22, she is already an innovator. Look what she's done to the contemporary novel of the cultural bouillabaisse. She's added a magical dimension that recalls the visionary worlds of Emily Dickinson, Neruda, and even Rimbaud."
—The Washington Post Book World

"I read The Opposite House with rare happiness. The voice in it is so sure, the risk it takes is so good and the intelligence in it is a sheer relief."
—Ali Smith, author of The Accidental

"Remember her name: Helen Oyeyemi. The novelist, 22, pulls off an amazing feat of imagination...and leaves you obsessed with her characters and in awe of her talent."
—Glamour

"The Opposite House is a wonderful, slippery kind of work...[Oyeyemi's] voice is certainly her own...and there's an intellectual sharpness about the author's writing which is a pleasure to read."
—Financial Times

"The young Nigerian-born English author Oyeyemi follows her acclaimed debut, The Icarus Girl, with another dazzlingly imaginative novel."
—Library Journal (starred review)

"The novel's lyrical and stylistic experimentation speaks to Oyeyemi's depth of talent."
—Publishers Weekly

L'autore

HELEN OYEYEMI was born in Nigeria in 1984 and has lived in London since the age of four. She wrote her widely acclaimed first novel, The Icarus Girl, before her nineteenth birthday and graduated from Cambridge University in 2006.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Nan a Talese
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0385513844
• ISBN 13: 9780385513845
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 257