this sense of possibility is present in the incandescent precision of Serpell’s prose. In a novel that frames the founding of national borders as the products of unfit men’s reckless behavior, it is only appropriate that the writing should itself dismiss the idea of genre boundaries. gathers an enormous cast that dramatizes Zambia’s multicultural milieu, while meditating on the historical conditions that produced it. In the course of a wondrous and formally itinerant 527 pages, The Old Drift happily refuses categorization, touching down in thriller, sci-fi, magical-realist, historical, and socio-political territories as the needs of the novel and Serpell’s prodigious imagination require. Her insight and cutting wit reveal these national borders as political fabrications imposed on people and their traditions. When that whirling stops, you can hear the mosquitoes again. The people and the ideas in The Old Drift, like dervishes, are set whirling. Small narrative hunches pay off big later, like cherries coming up on a slot machine. She unspools her intricate and overlapping stories calmly. Serpell carefully husbands her resources. Serpell seems to want to stuff the entire world into her novel - biology, race, subjugation, revolutionary politics, technology - but it retains a human scale. It made the skin on the back of my neck prickle. This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade. The reader who picks up The Old Drift is likely to be more than simply impressed. The plot pivots gracefully - this is a supremely confident literary performance - from accounts of the region’s early white colonizers and despoilers through the worst years of the AIDS crisis. an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic, set mostly in what is now Zambia. a dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.
an impressive book, ranging skillfully between historical and science fiction, shifting gears between political argument, psychological realism and rich fabulism. the emotional devastation wrought by illness is keenly felt in these pages. The novel’s greatest strength lies in its creation of three unforgettable female characters. That it doesn’t read that way is a tribute to the energy with which the stories are told, and the vivid detail in which the world of the book is created. At first glance this may strike the reader as overly schematic.
The novel tells the intertwined stories of three families.
The Old Drift is a strong and confident enough piece of writing to stand on its own two feet and is perhaps not well served by being placed on the shoulders of giants. Namwali Serpell’s extraordinary, ambitious, evocative first novel, The Old Drift, contributes powerfully to this new wave.
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