Namwali SerpellCritiques

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

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.

Engaging historical fiction that follows three generations from three families while artfully weaving in the history of Zambia. The final near-future section wasn't as successful but it was still an enjoyable read overall.

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*.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-furrows-by-namwali-serpell-brief-note/

The core of the story is parallel timelines where one of the leading characters did or didn’t die, which is often taken as sf, and some reflection on identity that wanders close to Philip K. Dick territory. This turns into commentary on grief, and on the problems of the contemporary US. Not sure that it totally hung together at the end.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-old-drift-by-namwali-serpell/

I thought The Old Drift was tremendous. It’s mostly about the interlinking lives of three families in Zambia, mostly in Lusaka but starting at the Victoria Falls, over the decades from the early twentieth century to the very near future, in a timeline that diverges slight from ours in terms of technology. I don’t think I’d ever read anything much about Zambia before, and this really conveyed the spirit of a young and also old country, with European and Asian inputs to an African culture. It’s quite a tech-oriented story as well, but the core is the vividly imagined relationships and environment of the characters, with different points of view sympathetically given. It stretched my mind in an unexpected way. Recommended.

I wanted to like this book. I have been fascinated by Rhodesia/Zambia/Zimbabwe since reading Doris Lessing's books 50 years ago. The thread of the book is the history of Zambia, not the characters. Although there are some intersections of characters there is no continuity between the stories. I read every word for about 1/3 then started skipping parts that bored me then quit at about 2/3.

Very well written and fascinating story of the the interlinked lives of three families, and Zambia and Zimbabwe history, from Dr Livingstone to the near future. Not really a science fiction novel, although it does include a few inventions right at the end, and the inclusion of the history of the Afronauts who wanted to join the space race in the 1960s was entertaining and enlightening.

This took several unexpected turns, including right at the end. Most of them added to the tale, building to a crescendo that the author just kind of snuffs out in a bizarre finish.

Ultimately, this book exhausted me. It just dragged on too long and I quit after being 85 percent complete. Too bad...there was a kernel of a good story and clearly and talented writer.½

This book was lent to me after a poor recommendation, and I agree. It was a sad story about a family's loss and how so many people were affected through their lives. there was much repetition and boring details, so it did very little for me. there was some lyrical writing, but not enough to make it worth the time i spent on the story. the discussion regarding biracial people was also at times interesting.

I listened to Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows this week and I can’t stop thinking/ talking about it. Pynchonesque. Structurally reminds me of Philip Roth’s Counterlife with a deceptive / self deceptive narrator who reinvents and undermines their story as the novel unfolds. Easily my favorite book of 2022.

“I set out for the drift five miles above the Falls, the port of entry into North-western Rhodesia. The Zambesi is at its deepest and narrowest here for hundreds of miles, so it’s the handiest spot for ‘drifting’ a body across. At first it was called Sekute’s Drift after a chief of the Leya. Then it was Clarke’s Drift, after the first white settler, whom I soon met. No one knows when it became The Old Drift.”

Multigenerational family saga that takes place from 1903 to 2023 in Zambia. It starts out as historical fiction in colonial times, covers Zambian independence in 1964, and ends in science fiction, including surveillance by mini-drones and devices implanted into human hands.

It is divided into three parts – The Grandmothers, The Mothers, and The Children. These parts are focused on the relationships, marriages, and offspring, describing the nitty gritty details of life, down to the ever-present droning mosquitos. These mosquitos even serve as narrators of interludes, which I assume is meant to be a form of Greek Chorus. There is a great section in the middle about the (real) Zambian space program.

It contains some very nicely written segments but comes across as a conglomeration of individual pieces. If I were asked to suggest an improvement for this debut, it would be to tighten it up. There are many digressions into areas that I ultimately found did not contribute much. The numerous characters and family relationships can be difficult to keep straight. It is lengthy (and feels lengthy while reading it). I can appreciate the creativity, but I am ultimately glad to be finished.

Title: The Furrows
Author: Namwali Serpell
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Reviewed By: Arlena Dean
Rating: Four
Review:
"The Furrows" by Namwali Serpell

My Assessment:

"The Furrows" was quite a read that explored 'trauma, race, family dynamics, loss, and grief in a mysterious, challenging, fascinating way. The reader will have to keep up because this novel seems to have two storylines with this biracial family William's family [C - Cassandra, Wayne], who were brother and sister, and Wayne, that wasn't the brother, however, was connected to the story. 'The Furrows' story involved death in this family along with loneliness, memory, identity, and dreams. The story's plot will keep you turning the pages while wondering and guessing what is going on in it because it skips quite a bit back and forth, where one may have to re-read several portions for a better understanding. The quote 'l don't want to tell you what happened, l want to tell you how it felt, and it was just that as this author delivers a good story to the reader. It was very well presented to the reader how each of the family members dealt with the death of this lost son. The characters were very intriguing in the parts they delivered to the story.

To get the whole story, the reader must pick it up and see how well this author brings this accomplished story out o the reader because I don't want to tell too much more. But, if you stick with it, the reader will get a perfectly delivered story.

Thanks to NetGallery and Hogarth Press for providing me with an eARC and my giving my honest opinion of the read.

This was a Big Fat Book Group read, which I perhaps wouldn't have come across otherwise. It's a pretty ambitious book, mixing history, sci-fi and magic realism over 3 generations. Some of the earlier sections seem completely fanciful, but wikipedia suggests they are fairly faithful to historical fact - I'm thinking especially of the sections about the Zambian space program. As it gets further on and runs into the future it becomes more sci-fi. I'm not sure it entirely works all the time, but its really a roller coaster of a read, and I learnt so much about Zambia.½

Mosquitoes play a prominent role in this work of African historical fiction / magical realism/ multi-generational epic. The present day and weird future parts a much less of a slog than the colonial parts.

This is a schizophrenic book with no idea what it wants to be: historical fiction? Magical realism? Sci-fi? Folk tale? It’s none consistently. The writing style changes throughout, even within chapters. She apparently published bits & pieces, then blended it together to make a bumpy & weird story. Its blurb makes it sound amazing. Sadly. It’s not.

This book is about the descendants of 3 matriarchs in Zambia, as they intersect before Zambia becomes a nation to the near future. The Kariba Dam surprisingly is an important part of the intersection of families. It’s a difficult read because it mixes genres in weird ways, making what could have been an fascinating story of a country into a struggle to read or care.

I didn’t connect with any character, not for lack of trying—it’s not a kind representation of the Zambian people. Two stars for the family stories, which, interspersed between the weirdness, were interesting.

I purchased the hardcover book in 2019, and had so many other books on my TBR until I came across the Read Soul Lit Summer Readalong Group on Goodreads.com. The book was the July 2021 selection. My perfect opportunity to read this book.

The book is based on major historical and current events as well as fictional accounts. Debut novelist features the African nation of Zambia as the center player in this novel utilizing music and scents. She describes the essence of her homeland before European influence.

The beginning chapter - “The Falls” is something from The National Geographic Magazine. Wild boars, and antelopes. The Old Drift, significant story elements relate to the Zambezi River, a section of which was called "The Drift" during the late 19th century when early European explorers deemed it a relatively easy place to cross compared with more treacherous gorges, rapids or waterfalls. Also mentioned in the novel, European engineers built a hydroelectric dam at Kariba in the 1950s, forming one of Africa's largest freshwater lakes. Today, Victoria Falls is considered one of the wonders of the world; the sounds of its 300 foot drop can be heard for miles.

The novel is divided into three sections, and depicts complex characters from many racial backgrounds. The first section is “The Grandmothers” - Sibilla is an interesting story about a very hairy lady. Federico and Sibilla flee their homeland, Italy, under mysterious circumstances. Agnes is a blind tennis player, marries Ronald (an interracial couple), and Matha is an intellectual and attended school disguised as a boy. Matha and Godfrey are based on fact. At the height of the Cold War in 1964, a schoolteacher launched the Zambian Space Program with a dozen aspiring teenage astronauts. The second section is “The Mothers”. Sylvia is a hairstylist, Isabella “Isa” marries Balaji, an Indian merchant. Isa shaves her daughters heads for wigs, and Thandie is a Flight Attendant. The third half of the book - “The Children” was a disappointment to me. Joseph, the son of a mixed race father and a black mom. Jacob is an innovator that designs and builds minidrones, because of his inspiring grandmother, and Naila were my least favorite characters.

The family tree diagram at the beginning of the book was a crucial necessity. Old languages and new are evident through the entire novel. Who was the boy on the bike, hit by a car and left injured? I had to know. How can a territory of many cultures transcend historic conflicts and systematic oppression?

It’s brilliant how Sepell brings the characters together. I stuck with the story, thankfully. I wanted to DNF (Did Not Finish) this book, but my curiosity outdid me. The futuristic elements set the climatic end to the novel in the year 2023, but had some elements that are relatable to today’s matters of climate change, poverty, a pandemic outbreak, and politics. Though entirely fictional the tracking and vaccinating people without consent does not seem at all far-fetched in our day and time.

566 page read had to capture and keep my attention. It faulted in some cases and then reignited in others. Listening to the audiobook was a big plus. The narrator was excellent in bringing the characters to life. Serpell has weaved a complex historical fiction with a compelling settings of Zambia, Italy, England, and India, and delivers an intriguing, delightful, magical, heartbreaking, and challenging novel. Clever wordplay, astonishing prose, tragicomedy intermingled with this multigenerational saga. Impressive!½

More like 4.5 stars. The Old Drift sneaks up on you. It starts slow and steady and then suddenly you are hooked into their worlds, family and histories. I toggled between reading the book and listening to the Audible. I highly recommend both options. This will be a great discussion book for book clubs

This is an epic novel that attempts to depict the history of Zambia through the fictional stories of several generations of a few interrelated families. The characters are a mix of Black African people native to the region that would become Zambia as well as European colonizers and expatriates. The novel begins with explorer David Livingstone seeing Victoria Falls for the first time. This is ironic since later in the novel a character says that when telling stories to white people you need to always start with a white person "discovering" something. The novel ends in a near future time when biotechnology has become commonplace.

The stories in this novel draw on the traditions of magical realism. For example a woman's hair grows so fast so as to constantly cover her entire body. Her daughters, on the other hand, have fast growing hair on their heads that they are able to profit from by selling for wigs. Some parts of the story seem ludicrous but are drawn from actual Zambian history, such as the plan for a Zambian space program in the 1960s to send a woman to Mars with several cats. This may or may not have been a joke in real life.

The novel is sprawling and it includes a large cast of characters and I found it hard to remember who is who. The novel is also written in a style more akin to history than a literary narrative which made it hard for me to hold my attention. I would chalk this up as a reader issue than a flaw of the book, though.

Overall, this is a weird and wonderful work of fiction. Serpell is a young contemporary author and it will be interesting to see what she produces next.½

Incredibly well constructed and well written. I really wanted to like this more than I did. The setting is interesting and I am normally a fan magical realism and speculative fiction. Ultimately, I just couldn't really connect much with the characters, and had to push myself to keep going to finish.

This novel follows the increasingly intertwined relationships between three families across multiple generations in central Africa as colonialism creates Nyasaland and Rhodesia and then evolves into the independent Zimbabwe. The action begins in the late 19th century and extends through to the near future (the 2020s).

The narrative framework here is very complex with a large cast and characters that hold centre stage in one section then reappearing in a support role in later chapters, or vice verse, playing support and then becoming central to the story. Events are described multiple times, from different character viewpoints at different times in their lives; for example, a woman takes part in an event, which is later re-described from the perspective of her child when an adult.

The focus is relentlessly on the lived lives of the characters involved with references to political changes or the wider historical context intruding through asides or picked up in casual conversations. The main characters for the first two-thirds of the book are exclusively women. It is only in the last third that two male characters take centre stage.

A driving engine for the book is magical realism - coincidences too strange to be believed; character traits, both moral and physical, that are distinctly odd; the use of hair as a defining element of both unity and division. I am not convinced all of these work. The rest of the world seems to accept these oddities as normal behaviour and never give them a second thought; and some are nothing more than personal tics that do not seem to add to the flow of the story.

The ending is particularly well done with Africa as the ground zero for a radical realignment and merging of technology and nature that may dominate the world.

Very readable, but perhaps a bit too deep for me.½

Sentence by sentence Serpell is an excellent prose stylist, and I enjoyed reading this novel very much. The scenes are evocative. The dialogue frequently dazzled me with its sharpness and its ability to cut straight to the bone and tell me how to think about a given character.

For me, though, I missed a through-line. I missed a unifying theme. I have no idea what the book's about.

The novel is almost perversely disinterested in giving meaning to the lives of its characters. It's not interested in allowing them to perceive the beauty, or the ugliness, or the cosmic 'all' around them. They have spurts of feeling toward one another that fade out or grow ugly over time. Their loves and triumphs are narrow and animal, and only occasionally tragic. The author tosses her characters into a drifting river of story, but they never get anywhere--they all seem to get stuck along the banks at some point.

I don't think this book is too long. But I do think it has too many characters. Time after time I grew interested in a character only to have that character get written out of the story. Now and then a character would come back, but only hundreds of pages later, in a flurry of narrative summary that didn't satisfy me.

I just read another intergenerational book that delighted me--[b:Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters|34552816|Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters|Maria José Silveira|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1516393133i/34552816._SY75_.jpg|23754919]. It was also episodic and it also spanned a very long time frame. But in that book's case, the humanity and the agency of the characters moved me very much. Not so here. In The Old Drift, both the events and also the characters' reactions to events seemed passive and almost chaotically random.

Interesting book. Way too long but lovely people and interesting issues.½

This novel is long and complex. At first, it feels like a collection of short stories, loosely connected by location - the Old Drift, a section of the Zambezi river - but over the generations all of the characters' lives become intertwined. In some ways, the book starts about 3 generations before the story actually begins, but that's because it's really a story about Zambia and colonialism more than a story about any individuals.

It reminds me a lot of Overstory: in both books, we are introduced to a bunch of characters who don't seem to have anything to do with each other, but whose stories eventually become tightly connected, and in both books, we realize in the very last pages that humans weren't really the main characters at all.

Serpell's writing is beautiful and engaging: with a less-skilled author, I would have wanted this book to be half as long, but her writing is so gorgeous, her characters so real, that I could have kept reading for another 600 pages.

Speaking of characters..... there are a lot of them. Enough that it can be hard to keep them all straight. Naturally some of them are better-developed than others, but Serpell is one of those writers who can evoke an entire person with a few sentences. Ultimately, though, the humans that are the focus of the events of the story aren't really the main characters. The story is really about Zambia and colonialism, from the racism of the first white explorers to the racism of the Chinese scientists who use Zambians as human guinea pigs for AIDS medications, to the vague outside political and technological forces who give Zambians technology just so they can control them.

The end of the book is at once exhilarating, ambitious, and a bit unsatisfying. There's a lot to chew on here, and ultimately it's hard to be sure what the reader's big takeaway should be. Then again, this book defies all genres and expectations, so that shouldn't be a surprise.

I'm going to be thinking about this book for weeks, and I can't wait for Serpell to write another novel.