From the Bookshelf of The Roundtable…

The Old Drift

Namwali Serpell

Start date: June 1, 2022

Finish date: June 30, 2022

Discussion: 2022 Fantasy Tournament

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2022 Fantasy Tournament

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What Members Thought

Jul 08, 2019 Lark Benobi rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2019, africa, zambia, zimbabwe

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 i ...more

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Jun 24, 2019 Nadine in California rated it it was amazing

I think long and hard before I read a looong novel these days - too often there's a perfectly good 300 page book trapped in a 600 page body. Not here! I was an enthused, immersed reader from start to finish. The way the novel is divided into sections and subsections keeps it moving (it's not a ponderous epic) and although the story is told chronologically, it sometimes does a cha-cha with small bits of time - two steps forward, one step back, that reveals quirks and coincidences in a clever way. ...more

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Aug 15, 2021 Irene rated it really liked it

The story of several interconnected families from vastly different backgrounds are told in this intergenerational novel of Zambia. In the unfolding of these people is contained the unfolding of the country. A little science fiction, a little magical realism, a bit of political rhetoric and philosophical musings, are skillfully woven into this complex saga of community and country.

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Jun 11, 2022 Erika rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction-science-fiction, fiction-historical, fiction-magical

This book spans over 100 years in the history of land in southern Africa (known for a time as Rhodesia) that became, eventually, Zambia and Zimbabwe, but it travels across the world (England and India), and traces the history of three families over multiple generations. There is a chance meeting of one member of each at the very start of the book, but we follow the lives of three subsequent generations, the grandmothers, the mothers, and then the children, all of whom we see grow from birth to/t This book spans over 100 years in the history of land in southern Africa (known for a time as Rhodesia) that became, eventually, Zambia and Zimbabwe, but it travels across the world (England and India), and traces the history of three families over multiple generations. There is a chance meeting of one member of each at the very start of the book, but we follow the lives of three subsequent generations, the grandmothers, the mothers, and then the children, all of whom we see grow from birth to/through adulthood. Each person in each generation has a separate section of the book, and from time to time we see the same event from two different perspectives. And they all come together at the end, beautifully, really beautifully. The Greek chorus (italicized mosquitoes) fit, in the end, but they were jarring at first.

But what is this? What genre? It is its own, I think. It has a few elements that feel like magical realism (tied to each grandmother, in fact), but she offers a few hints along the way that perhaps there are scientific explanations. I prefer the magical view, personally. It's historical fiction, because yes, the backdrop is always the real history, from Percy Clarke coming to Rhodesia through the independence process, the election of Kenneth Kaunda, and yes, there really was a Zambian Space Program, and Marthe Mwambwa was a real person, as was Edward Nkoloso. (And what, oh what, do we make of that entire exercise?) It's science fiction, perhaps, because the science Serpell imagines is science of the future (though perhaps the not too distant future). But I think it's mainly just fiction: an engrossing, thoughtful, and moderately complex piece of fiction.

This is not just a good read; it's sophisticated, well-crafted, and, I think, destined for a long life on many reading lists. Serpell knows what she's doing. I said to my husband, when I was about 2/3 through, that she must have spent a decade writing this. After I finished, I read some interviews with her, and, indeed, she had. Spent around a decade. My husband said, how did you know? What, about this book, made it clear that so many years of work had gone into it?

It's meticulously researched. And the book spans so much time (true time, true history, true people), so many places, and so many subjects (from virus and vaccine to mechanical engineering) in rich detail. It's intricately plotted (thank goodness for the family trees at the beginning, to which I flipped constantly), and the inter-weaving of the stories had, I think, been massaged over time. And the writing is sharp, clear, and fluid; it had been written, and rewritten, and rewritten. And it's a doorstop. There's no way it take less than a decade to put together.

My one criticism: I did incessantly flip back to the family trees, sometimes simply to remind myself which person a character was. That is partly on me (bad memory). But it's also possible she did not do enough to make the individual characters stick. They have disinctive stories, to be sure, but I am not entirely sure they all had distinctive enough personalities. And my one warning for others: it took me a while to get into the book. It was very nearly a DNF. I was reading it for a book group; had I not been committed through that group, I would have stopped after the first grandmother or certainly after the second. I recommend that anyone starting the book read into the mothers section before making a decision. ...more

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Mar 21, 2022 Dawn rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, did-not-finish

I really wanted to like this book. With Victoria Falls and the Zambezi River as a backdrop, the history of Rhodesia to Zambia, and a bit of magic....I would have loved to be immersed in the world. But it was not to be and I am leaving the book unfinished after completing the Grandmothers stories.

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