THIS IMPOSSIBLE LIFE

A pair of separated Nigerian siblings struggle for freedom and a new life.

Alohan and Ivie are a brother and sister raised in Lagos, and as Okparanta’s sweeping third novel opens, orphans. In 1993, when they were 11 and 4, their parents were killed; their father, a rainmaker, had failed to fulfill his promise to repel a downpour at a wedding. The siblings are taken in by an uncle who quickly deposits them with a man named S.O.G. (aka Samuel Oga God), who puts Alohan to work as a groundskeeper in a wealthy Lagos community. This is tolerable enough until Alohan reaches his teens and S.O.G.’s wife, Madam S.O.G., attempts to seduce him; when Ivie tries to intervene, Madam S.O.G. poisons her, leading to the siblings’ separation and Alohan’s belief that Ivie’s been killed. In braided sections, Okparanta skillfully follows the two from calamity to calamity—Alohan toils as a beggar, thief, and teacher at a pedagogically dubious Nigerian school, while Ivie is taken in by an abusive family that she escapes to attend college in New York City. As both of their fates go sideways, they find themselves in Italy, part of the migration of thousands from Africa to Europe, and prone to the degradations and dangers of human trafficking. The story is sober but at times melodramatic, and Okparanta writes gracefully about a host of themes, including siblinghood, folk tradition, racial politics, and the asylum system. And of course displacement—the death of a rainmaker signals a theme of the near impossibility of changing one’s environment. But though Okparanta is concerned with “the ways that life conspired to overturn something as simple as hope,” she also delivers a pair of powerful studies in tenacity.

An impressive, melancholy tale that builds an epic around two ordinary characters.