Nigerian novelist and short story writer EC Osondu won the Caine Prize in 2009 for his story "Waiting". Since then he has released a short story collection, Voice of America and now his debut novel, This House is not For Sale, which focuses on a family house and its many idiosyncratic inhabitants. He talks about the novel and more in this interview. Enjoy!---Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
Even though This House is not for Sale is a novel, it has the qualities of loosely connected short stories. What was the idea behind that?
Osondu: There is a sense in which the word novel implies newness, strangeness-if you will. In Ars Poetica, Czeslaw Milosz says that he has always aspired to a more spacious form. That more spacious form is what I aspire to. Read together they make sense, read alone they cohere. It is funny that people are more concerned with the shape than the content but then again, one is reminded that many of these comments are from people who have not read much. And one must forgive them their severe limitations. How many of them have heard of or read Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch a work that can be read according to two different sequences of chapters and comes with ninety-nine expendable chapters and a suggestion by the author to read the book from chapter to chapter or to hopscotch through it.
I have always been fascinated by the history of unoccupied houses be it the house just before the Third Mainland Bridge on the way to the Island or the one called Zik's House in Ikeja.
For the most part I think African writers have been writing the received standard version of the novel. And any attempt to stray is met by howls of bewilderment especially by our new breed of failed writers turned critics.
Cont: https://moonchild09.wordpress.com/2015/08/28/749/
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives.
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