By Rustum Kozain for the Sunday Times
This House is Not for Sale
EC Osondu (Granta)
****
This House is Not for Sale is 2009 Caine Prize winner EC Osondu‘s second book. It is a strange but delectable beast.
Billed as a novel, it reads more like a collection of stories about a series of characters, and is unified mainly by the fact that the characters all live in the same house and are family to the narrator.
The house, family legend has it, was built when an ancestor with strong juju demanded a home and a crown from the sitting king. After some travails, including enslavement and persecution by the king, a settlement is reached and the king provides the juju man with land and shelter. This happens in a vague, distant past and the story soon switches to more recent events, the house now ruled by Grandpa.
The overwhelming tone of the book is one of strangeness – it reminded me at times of Amos Tutuola’s classic, The Palm-Wine Drinkard (Osundu is also from Nigeria); at other times, Kafka’s Amerika and Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude. It’s tempting to describe the stories as “magical realism”, but that label has become cheapened. Besides, This House is shot through with an ordinariness made strange not by the miraculous events of magical realism, but by the matter-of-fact telling of tales that include public shaming, bribing and murder. Its economic folktale style allows it to flatten out such dramatic events, not to the story’s detriment, but paradoxically casting over it a veneer of other-worldliness.
The story about Gramophone (an uncle with a phobia for radios) contains a similar switchback early on in the chapter: “[Gramophone] sought refuge in the Family House many years ago, having killed a man or, as we were told, he had not actually killed the man but the man died from their encounter …” The author’s skill is typical here, turning the sentence so sharply from the narrator’s reportage to the character’s version. This quality of the storytelling is remarked upon later by Ibe, the narrator’s cousin: “You imagine a lot of things, not as they were, but as you want them to be.”
There is plenty of wry comedy in the book, starting with some of the characters’ idiosyncratic names: Uncle Currency, Gramophone (also known as Cash), Ibegbunemkaotitojialimchi (the cousin, Ibe), whose name means “O save me from my enemies so I can live to the evening of my days on this good earth”. But delightful as these stories are, many end on a sudden, deflated note, with little tying them together. They shimmer, but float off beyond our grasp. Recommended, nevertheless.
Follow Rustum Kozain on Twitter @Grondwerk
Book details
- This House is Not for Sale by EC Osondu
EAN: 9781847081827
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