Review by New York Times Review
Something is happening in African literature: The women are coming. For decades now, a river of original and important writing by female authors has been flowing out of that continent - books by writers such as Marlene van Niekerk, of whose second novel Liesl Schillinger wrote in these pages, "books like 'Agaat ... are the reason people read novels"; Tsitsi Dangarembga ("Nervous Conditions"); and, of course, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Now that river has burst its banks and become a flood. Namwali Serpell's extraordinary, ambitious, evocative first novel, "The Old Drift," contributes powerfully to this new wave. Interestingly, many of the contemporary books overlap with and even echo one another. Petina Gappah's forthcoming novel, "Out of Darkness, Shining Light," takes on the subject of the explorer David Livingstone and his African companions; "The Old Drift" also begins with Livingstone (but then moves on). Serpell's novel is a multigenerational exploration of Zambia's past, present and even its near future; another recent debut, "Harmattan Rain," by Ayesha Harruna Attah, looks at the story of Ghana through the lives of three generations of women. And in September Maaza Mengiste's "The Shadow King" will take on the subject of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, moving beyond history to a kind of modern mythmaking, and looking at history primarily through the eyes of its female characters. "The Old Drift," too, incorporates elements of fabulism into the history of Zambia, and, again, sees that history mostly through women's eyes. Novuyo Rosa Tshuma's "House of Stone," published in the United States in January, has already been highly praised in The Guardian for summing up "not only ... Zimbabwean history, but also all of African colonial history" - a large claim on behalf of any novel. Equally large claims have already been made for "The Old Drift," which early reviewers have garlanded with comparisons to Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Meanwhile, another recent novel, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's "Kintu," has been called a Ugandan "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Trailing clouds of glory do they come. "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. Its structure is formal, three parts containing three sections each - "The Grandmothers," "The Mothers" and "The Children." Each of the nine sections is centered on one dominant character, all women in the first two parts, and, in the final section, two young men and one young woman. In between are to be found short, italicized sections narrated by an unnamed "we," which work as a sort of Greek-chorus commentary on the action. The novel tells the intertwined stories of three families - one white, one black and one the product of an interracial marriage - making jumps in time to tell the various dynastic tales until the three clans merge into one near the end. At first glance this may strike the reader as overly schematic. 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. Historical figures mingle with fictional ones in these family sagas. Two years ago, in The New Yorker, Serpeli wrote a lengthy nonfictional account of one of these figures, Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, a schoolteacher, revolutionary and "Afronaut," the head of the absurd Zambian Space Program, which trained young people to go to the moon "by spinning them around a tree in an oil drum and teaching them to walk on their hands." Nkoloso and the Afronauts play important parts in "The Old Drift." In addition, two of the patriarchs of her fictional dynasties are real people: the hotelier Pierre or Pietro Gavuzzi, who ran the Victoria Falls Hotel at the early settlement near the waterfall known as the Old Drift, and the colonial-era traveler Percy M. Clark, the author of a guidebook to the Falls written circa 1910. Percy is allowed to tell his story and the story of the Old Drift's founding in the first person; after that, the third person, and fiction, take over. The novel's greatest strength lies in its creation of three unforgettable female characters. Agnes, the white upper-class English girl (and granddaughter of Percy Clark), loses her sight and falls in love with a black man without knowing he's black, and, expelled from her family, follows him to Africa to become a gentle, grand presence throughout the book. Matha, one of Nkoloso's Afronauts who, following a heartbreak, is afflicted by endless, unstoppable tears for the rest of her life, becomes known as the "crying woman." Most striking of all is Sibilla, an illegitimate offshoot of the Gavuzzi family, who suffers from extreme hirsutism, every part of her body sprouting luxuriant hair (if one wanted to be unkind, one might think of Cousin Itt). Sibilla and her hair - weaving, dancing, whirling, whitening into old age - dominate the novel and give it its defining imagery, its infinitely variable leitmotif. Hair is everywhere: Trails of hair are left so that lovers can find each other, hair salons are opened and form the backdrop to crucial scenes, hair is shaven off the heads of women mourners. "What are you made of?" one character demands, and the answer is one that the novel itself might give: "Hair." Around these three iconic characters is woven a complex narrative of the founding and growth of Zambia, and, in the book's second half, of the arrival of and battle against what is referred to only as "The Virus" - the H.I.V./AIDS pandemic, which, by the year 2000, affected more than 15 percent of the Zambian population, more than half of the afflicted being women. The book's three dynasties are not spared, and the emotional devastation wrought by illness is keenly felt in these pages. Which leads me back to the Greek chorus, the anonymous "we." It transpires that "we" are mosquitoes, commenting on what the human beings are getting up to. For much of the book I wasn't sure about these buzzy passages, especially in the Virus sections, when the bloodsucking Anopheles gambiae sing "Blood, blood, glorious blood!" Parodying the old Hippopotamus Song about glorious mud, they run the risk of confusing the reader (since mosquitoes are unable to carry The Virus or transmit it to human beings). However, in the final section of the book, when Serpeli daringly pushes past the present day to take us into a technologically advanced future and a climax that combines revolution and catastrophe, the mosquito trope is cleverly transformed and begins to make sense. "The Old Drift" is an impressive book, ranging skillfully between historical and science fiction, shifting gears between political argument, psychological realism and rich fabulism. It isn't perfect. It's long, and there are longueurs. Not all of the nine leading characters are as interesting as Agnes, Matha and Sibilla. Sometimes the history, the medical information and the science are laid on with too heavy a hand. But these imperfections should not detract from what is, by any standard, a dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpeli as a writer on the world stage. salman rushdie is the author of 13 novels, most recently "The Golden House."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Proudly uncategorizable, Serpell's excellent first novel traverses a shifting genre landscape while delving into Zambia's tumultuous history in intimate detail. The Old Drift is a settlement along the Zambezi River, in which the novel begins in the early twentieth century. It concludes in 2023, covering British colonialism, the Kariba Dam's construction, Zambian independence, the AIDS epidemic, and more. To err is human, that's your doom and delight, pronounces the unusual swarm of creatures narrating the story, which emphasizes the circumstantial and genetic chances affecting one's life. While a genealogical chart reveals people's connections, the plot remains surprising. The tale of Sibilla, a hirsute Italian woman, has fairy-tale echoes. Matha, a teenage girl, trains as an astronaut, while other characters play major roles in medical research. From the Shiwa Ng'andu estate to the Kalingalinga compound, the deeply human, ethnically diverse characters fall in love, grieve, betray one another, and make shocking choices. In this smartly composed epic, magical realism and science fiction interweave with authentic history, and the colour bar, the importance of female education, and the consequences of technological change figure strongly. It's also a unique immigration story showing how people from elsewhere are enfolded into the country's fabric. While a bit too lengthy, Serpell's novel is absorbing, occasionally strange, and entrenched in Zambian culture in all, an unforgettable original.--Sarah Johnson Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Serpell's debut is a rich, complex saga of three intertwined families over the course of more than a century. The epic stretches out from a single violent encounter: in the early 20th century, a British colonialist adopts North-western Rhodesia (now Zambia) as his home, settling in the Old Drift, a settlement near Victoria Falls, where the colonist gets into a fateful skirmish with a local hotelier. After this, readers first meet Sibilla, the hotelier's granddaughter, a woman born with hair covering her body, who runs away to Africa with a man who frequents the wealthy Italian estate at which her mother is a servant; then, in England, there's Agnes, the colonialist's granddaughter, a rich white girl and talented tennis player who goes blind and falls in love with a student who, unbeknownst to her, is black; and Matha, the servant's granddaughter, a spirited prodigy who joins a local radical's avant-garde activism. In part two, Agnes's son, Lionel, has an affair with Matha's daughter, which leads to a confrontation that also involves Naila, Sibilla's granddaughter. Serpell expertly weaves in a preponderance of themes, issues, and history, including Zambia's independence, the AIDS epidemic, white supremacy, patriarchy, familial legacy, and the infinite variations of lust and love. Recalling the work of Toni Morrison and Gabriel GarcA-a MA¡rquez as a sometimes magical, sometimes horrifically real portrait of a place, Serpell's novel goes into the future of the 2020s, when the various plot threads come together in a startling conclusion. Intricately imagined, brilliantly constructed, and staggering in its scope, this is an astonishing novel. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT In 1904, across the Zambezi River from the Old Drift colonial settlement, one Percy M. Clark, plagued with fever, pulls the hat-and a large amount of hair-off of Italian hotelier Pietro Gavuzzi. Pietro's daughter Lina then hits young native N'gulube. Thus starts a generational story of three families that cannot escape one another. Chapters unfold through the eyes of the grandmothers, including one with hair all over her body; the mothers; then the children; with the accounts of the grandchildren-Joseph, Jacob, and Naila-leading readers into the future of Zambia. Three multicultural families' pasts and presents, told by a swarming chorus of voices, culminate in a tale as mysterious as it is timeless. VERDICT This stunning cross-genre debut draws on Zambian history and is twisted with inverted stereotypes and explicit racist language that only reinforces the far-flung exploration of humanity. [See Prepub Alert, 9/24/18.]-Kristi Chadwick, -Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The past, present, and future of an African nation is filtered with humane wit, vibrant rhetoric, and relentless ingenuity through the interweaving sagas of three very different families.The year is 1904, and an itinerant would-be photographer named Percy Clark has wandered from his native England to a colonial outpost along the Zambezi River in what was then known as the Northwestern Rhodesia territory. One momentous day, Clark, addled by fever, is stumbling around the lobby of the Victoria Falls Hotel and somehow manages to inadvertently pull a hank of hair from the pate of the hotel's Italian manager, whose 5-year-old daughter angrily responds by striking an "innocent native" passer-by so hard that "he became an imbecile." From the moment that inexplicable calamity occurs, the descendants of these individuals find their respective fates entwined through what's left of the 20th century and beyond as the land around them morphs into the nation of Zambia. Sometime in the 1960s, for instance, Percy's wealthy granddaughter, Agnes, deprived by blindness of a promising tennis career, falls in love with a brilliant black exchange student whom she accompanies back to the soon-to-be-independent Zambia he calls home. During those same years, Matha, the precocious granddaughter of the poor assault victim, is among several math-and-science prodigies recruited by the country's Minister of Space Research to train for a mission to the moon by decade's end. Strangest of all these progenies is Sibilla, the granddaughter of the hotel manager, who is born with streams and streams of hair that never stops growingand apparently makes things grow out of the ground, too. The children and the children's children of these women find themselves inexorably, absurdly, and at times tragically drawn together through the history of both Zambia and the patch of land where their ancestors first collided. Blending intimate and at times implausible events with real-life history, this first novel by Serpella Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and who's won the Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story "The Sack"enchants its readers with prose as luxuriant and flowing as Sibilla's hair.Comparisons with Gabriel Garca Mrquez are inevitable and likely warranted. But this novel's generous spirit, sensory richness, and visionary heft make it almost unique among magical realist epics. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
