Namwali Serpell’s extraordinary, ambitious, evocative first novel, The Old Drift, contributes powerfully to this new wave ... 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 ... The novel tells the intertwined stories of three families ... 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 ... The novel’s greatest strength lies in its creation of three unforgettable female characters ... the emotional devastation wrought by illness is keenly felt in these pages ... an impressive book, ranging skillfully between historical and science fiction, shifting gears between political argument, psychological realism and rich fabulism ... a dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.
... audacious ... an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic, set mostly in what is now Zambia ... 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 ... The reader who picks up The Old Drift is likely to be more than simply impressed. This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade. It made the skin on the back of my neck prickle. Serpell seems to want to stuff the entire world into her novel — biology, race, subjugation, revolutionary politics, technology — but it retains a human scale ... Serpell carefully husbands her resources. She unspools her intricate and overlapping stories calmly. Small narrative hunches pay off big later, like cherries coming up on a slot machine. Yet she’s such a generous writer. The people and the ideas in The Old Drift, like dervishes, are set whirling. When that whirling stops, you can hear the mosquitoes again. They’re still out there. They sound like tiny drones. They sound like dread.
Be prepared because this is a big book in all senses. Clocking in at a whomping 566 pages it sprawls over a century and overflows with staggering brilliance. In this wonderfully chaotic epic, Namwali Serpell invites us into an indelible world that’s part history, part sci-fi, totally political, and often as heartbreaking as it is weirdly hilarious ... filled with as much riotous color and sound as an outdoor bazaar ... Serpell unfolds in thrilling detail how the Africans fight back, win self-government, and replace the British flag for the Zambian one ... The writing is gorgeous and fiercely attuned to magical realism ... Still, even though The Old Drift’ is a little overstuffed, a little too long, it has the feel of a fairy tale, and it pulls you into its strange magic with page after ambitious page.
... vibrant, intellectually rich ... like any good nation-hoovering novel, [this book] too refuses to conform to expectations ... Serpell is a natural social novelist, capable of conjuring a Dickensian range of characters with a painterly eye for detail ... Here too, Serpell gets to have it both ways. She delivers a satisfying, dramatic climax that represents the comeuppance of 19th century colonialism, as Naila and the half-brothers monkey-wrench the tools of the oppressor. And yet Serpell is too much the realist — the skeptical social novelist — to believe the fate of a nation can be resolved so tidily. After more than 550 pages, the novel is breathtaking, yet it feels like only one chapter in an ongoing story about people who see profit in Africa and who get sacrificed for profit’s sake ... Serpell resists the simple efficiency she critiques, and her clear-eyed, energetic and richly entertaining novel is all the better for it.
Her insight and cutting wit reveal these national borders as political fabrications imposed on people and their traditions ... 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 ... gathers an enormous cast that dramatizes Zambia’s multicultural milieu, while meditating on the historical conditions that produced it ... 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 ... this sense of possibility is present in the incandescent precision of Serpell’s prose ... Serpell’s command of the minutia of sentence craft, and her ability to balance that craft against this novel’s massive historical scale is thrilling. The Old Drift feels like entering a wormhole, where time is both slow enough for us to note the way a woman’s dress knocks a wine glass off balance as she walks by, and vast enough that we may see exactly how feeble, how ultimately incidental to human history, nations are. By writing across history and fiction, Serpell has written a novel where micro and macroscopic scales are inextricably combined, where power might be accidental, but the balancing of the scales is always by design.
...a sprawling epic that unfolds with the wild detail of a Hieronymus Bosch painting ... a massive, complicated work with a straightforward Hegelian opposition at its heart: Colonialism and anti-colonialism collide, and the resulting clash transforms Serpell’s fictional Zambia ... [Serpell] highlight[s] how easily surveillance can masquerade as progress, and expose the subtle ways colonialism persists in contemporary political life. To do this, Serpell emphasizes global financial disparities ... but there’s far more of [Ursula] Le Guin’s idealism to be found in Serpell’s future, which, by the novel’s end, looks newly and radically free.
Serpell's style is florid, but the excess often comes with a point ... Serpell also performs exquisite acts of literary ventriloquism (in addition to scattered allusions from Shakespeare to Milton to Lucretius to Virgil) ... The Old Drift offers a view of human history characterized by generative mistakes, from Dr Livingstone's fatal calculation about the source of the Nile to evolution itself.
... ambitious ... This is a founding epic ... [The book explores] heavy subjects, but Ms. Serpell’s approach is jocular and mischievous, with an eye for the absurd ... The florid prose, which ranges from parodies of Victorian memoirs to the music of contemporary street slang, adds to an ironic effect that sometimes borders on glibness ... Irony is generally not a strong enough posture to sustain the weight of an epic, and stretches of this long book wander along with little discernible purpose. This is frustrating but likely intentional, as it captures the arbitrary, chaotic nature of the country it celebrates...
... Serpell marks her writerly territory: playful yet still seriously engaged, her imagination largely unfettered. In a novel that spans the breadth of Zambia’s precolonial past to its digital future, Serpell’s unbound imagination is often a thing of beauty ... Serpell’s range of focus is too inexhaustible, although it is in the familial space with its dramas of loves, betrayals, desires and dreams that she excels. Her Zambian characters are especially brimming and compelling.
Proudly uncategorizable, Serpell’s excellent first novel traverses a shifting genre landscape while delving into Zambia’s tumultuous history in intimate detail ... 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.
Namwali Serpell’s impressive first novel is an indulgent, centuries-spanning slab of life marbled with subplots, zigzagging between characters and decades to play snakes and ladders with the bloodlines of three Zambian families with roots from around the world ... For 200 pages or so The Old Drift is electric with the sense that Serpell is laying down pieces in a puzzle kept teasingly out of sight ... A growing sense that The Old Drift could go on for ever is tribute to its inventiveness but also a feeling of weightlessness in what begins to resemble a series of vignettes strung together with lusty sex scenes (the main source of interaction between characters, with diminishing returns). The novel’s pleasures are largely local, in its multi-accented brio and pin-sharp scene-making ... What initially seems an old-fashioned saga proves more interested in genre than in character.
... an expansive yet intricate novel that bends, inverts and at times ignores conventions of time and place. Part historical fiction, part futurism, part fantasy, Serpell’s hundred-year saga of three families and their intertwined fortunes is as unique as it is ambitious. And in just about every way, it succeeds ... There is a timeless quality to Serpell’s storytelling ... In clumsier hands this complex, sprawling, century--spanning book might have easily folded in on itself, a victim of its scale and scope. Instead, The Old Drift holds together, its many strands diverging and converging in strange but undeniable rhythm ... And for all the ways it subverts and reinvents convention, The Old Drift is a very human book, deeply concerned with that most virulent strain of history: the unpunishable crimes of others.
Three multicultural families' pasts and presents, told by a swarming chorus of voices, culminate in a tale as mysterious as it is timeless ... 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.
...an ambitious literary debut ... The things humans shed—hair, tears, blood, viruses—take on magical properties in The Old Drift. A character cries a river of tears every day after her lover leaves her, for instance, and Sibilla’s hair can only described as supernatural ... Generations bleed one into the next, seeking solid ground ... Bearing children is the downfall of so many of the women in this story, the moment when their lives begin to unravel ... Serpell’s novel imagines a future where the problems of one generation are addressed by people who have made an effort to learn from the past. What a novel idea.
... the real heart of The Old Drift is a soap opera of mid- to late-twentieth-century Zambia whose slightly flattening characterization is leavened by genuine sympathy and eased by humour and brisk pacing ... funny, inventive and propulsive; at other times it can be heavy-handed and portentous. The weakest sections are those set in the colonial past, where character gives way to cypher and dialogue to pamphleteering that would be shockingly prescient had it not been written last year. Certainly many readers will find this comforting – a lack of real characterization means they can sniff at the evils of colonialism without having to feel anything substantial about it – but it’s a deciduous comfort. Indeed, by the end, the novel itself seems to lose faith in aspects of its own early assertions ... a book for those who are confident that more is definitely more.
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 ... Blending intimate and at times implausible events with real-life history, this first novel by Serpell—a 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 García Márquez are inevitable and likely warranted. But this novel’s generous spirit, sensory richness, and visionary heft make it almost unique among magical realist epics.
The Old Drift, asks a lot of big questions about Zambia but also more generally about the history of the postcolonial world ... The scope of these questions is necessarily too wide even for a novel of nearly 600 pages, but just raising them opens us up to a world humming with human life and complexity, and some nonhuman murmurings ... The novel’s wide scope, however, doesn’t prevent it from being extremely specific, as attuned to the light and smell and intimacy of everyday life as it is to the violence and inequalities of colonialism and patriarchy ... Serpell is a master portraitist: Even the tertiary characters have distinct personalities of their own, and the moments of human connection are frequent and genuinely touching ... Serpell is a nimble storyteller, weaving this web of connections delicately and convincingly. She also deftly engages with the ever-evolving political and moral questions that these intersecting families face in a changing Zambia, and she has a sharp eye for the contradictions and hypocrisies of Europeans in Africa ... While she was writing The Old Drift, Serpell jokingly referred to it as 'The Great Zambian Novel.' But it delivers on that tagline. It’s a study in the creation of a national consciousness, casting a sharp eye on how history gets made and remembered.
A rich, complex saga of three intertwined families over the course of more than a century ... 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 García Márquez 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.
