Namwali Serpell

Doppelgänger
Review of the Amazon Original Kindle eBook edition (June 27, 2019)

I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. - excerpt from "William Wilson" (1839*) by Edgar Allan Poe, used as the epigraph for Will Williams.

I've read some good reviews recently about the Disorder series and realized that I hadn't finished reading all 6 stories myself, although there had been a few good ones and only one dud. So I circled back to catch Will Williams. It was unfortunately another dud. It took Edgar Allan Poe's story of a doppelgänger who haunts their namesake and transplants it from Poe's early 19th century England setting to a gangsta setting in America. It was cringe throughout with multiple uses of the n word and "feel me?" on almost every page. The various setups (various confrontations and fights) and the conclusion are almost identical except for the changed locales.

Will Williams is the 6th of 6 short stories/novellas in the Amazon Original Disorder Series. “Stories that get inside your head. From small-town witch hunts to mass incarceration to exploitations of the flesh, this chilling collection of twisted short stories imagines the horrors of a modern world not unlike our own.”

Trivia and Links
Edgar Allan Poe's William Wilson (1839*) is in the Public Domain and can be read online at various sources. An excellent location is the annotated version at PoeStories.com which you can read here.

Footnote
* For some unexplained reason PoeStories.com lists 1842 as the year of publication for William Wilson. Goodreads has it as January 1839. The story first appeared in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in October 1839 and was then collected in Tales Of The Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).
See cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/GrotesqueAndArabesque.jpg… (plus d'informations)

I must be getting cranky in old age and should cut down my reading of fiction. I generally ask so little of an author: take me to a world I haven’t been before and make me glad I came.

I can’t unequivocally say that about Namwali Serpell’s “The Old Drift.”

There is much to like and admire in Serpell’s saga about a family and the travails of the Zambian nation, but by the end of it there were too many question marks, magical sideshows, and wish fulfillment that I wasn’t entirely glad I came for the ride.

Moreover, the poverty and glumness of the human landscape were awfully trying.

There are certainly portraits of poverty, domestic violence, of philandering men, absconding fathers, and corrupt nations that ought to be read if not in this book, then some others. I acknowledge my need to upgrade my knowledge of Africa.

I’m not going to argue that colonialism wasn’t a plague on many of Africa’s nations, but this story doesn’t help me understand what is its long term meaning for African peoples. The Europeans were brutal to Africans. But Africans can be brutal to Africans and Europeans can be brutal to Europeans. So what else is new?

I found the novel episodic. I never understood the significance of the child with a hair growing disorder, and it took me a while to figure out why her mother’s employers were using her as amusement at decadent parties; and it took me even longer to realize the parties were in Italy and not Africa, where the novel opens.

Some of the sub-plots, for me anyway, are left hanging. A man murders his brother and steals his identity. That’s it. A clinic furthers the search for an AIDS vaccine. The clinic is surreptitiously burned to the ground. A doctor’s son continues his dad’s work but the reader is left wondering what happened to the work exactly.

A damn is constructed at the beginning of the book to deliver electricity to the extractive industries along the Zambezi River. Descendants of the originators of the dam return to it but exactly why is a little sketchy.

I didn’t quite get the climax, who wins and who loses. What exactly are people protesting: ancient history or the contemporary data-driven world we live in. I kinda think facebook and Google were the villains by the end of the book but even this is cloaked in innuendo.

There was something about the American-Chinese-international high tech conspiracy that left me a little confused. As if there were a new colonialism at work. The metaphor just didn’t hold water for me.

Because I am older I am looking for plausible behaviour in the characters. In this novel I find much of the behaviour as so obtuse I simple cannot identify with it on any level beyond that of juvenile, including that of the adults.

Not even if it were the most ingenious magical realism.

The acknowledgements at the end of the novel indicate a lot of writing workshops and mentors, but the novel was not ready for publication in my opinion.… (plus d'informations)

I requested this from NetGalley solely based on the author, because I loved 2019's generational family members, The Old Drift, so much. Otherwise I probably would have skipped over, I don't read nearly as much literary/contemporary as other genres.

It was worth the gamble. Grief, especially the sort stemming from a childhood tragedy, is a messy thing with sharp edges and fuzzy ones, crying out for closure that may never come. This novel reflects that well. C's little brother drowned when she was 12, he was 7, and no body recovered. The first act deals primarily with that, from the sister's POV, dealing with a broken family, a mother determined not to give up hope though in ways that are detrimental to anyone else's closure, and navigating a coming of age under the shadow of tragedy.

I'm afraid to go too much into part 2 because spoilers. I went in blind and I think that serves best. I'll say you're thrust into a new POV quite suddenly and it serves well to give a reader a sense of non-closure because you don't know WHAT to think. A bit of stream of consciousness adds to the melee of feelings.

At the end of it all, this is a book that explores grief, inability to let go, in an extremely visceral way. You're gonna feel all kind of ways. I would TW for those that have experienced the sort of gut-wrenching tragedy of non-closure. It's a great book but it *hurts*.… (plus d'informations)