The next chapter reimagines his disappearance as an accident on the walk to school the next reimagines it again. Maybe drowning wasn’t the cause of Wayne’s death. The book moves forward in time, then back again. The latest from Ling Ma, Yiyun Li, Russell Banks and Namwali Serpell as well as exciting newcomers round out our critics’ most anticipated fall books. Wayne’s body is never found.īooks 30 books we can’t wait for this fall There’s a white man with a blue windbreaker who might be there to help. Cassandra’s brother Wayne disappears in the first chapter while the siblings are swimming in the ocean. The chapters unfold under a miasma of uncertainty. I want to tell you how it felt.” Like all great first lines, they function as instructions for reading the whole book.
The first sentences of “The Furrows”: “I don’t want to tell you what happened. The bombast of “The Old Drift” has been replaced with intimacy, intense emotionality and specificity, but the ambition, the acuity of the intelligence, remains. But it is a further testament to Serpell’s abilities and alacrity as an artist that, this time, I was completely in the thrall of the thing she made. I bring in taste only to tell you that her second novel, “ The Furrows,” out this week, is also a success on the terms it set out for itself. Had I been assigned to write about it, I would have focused on all the ways, on its specific terms, it succeeded wildly.
On the terms “ The Old Drift” set out for itself, it was absolutely an accomplishment. If I’ve done my job well, you’ll seldom know whether I liked a book or not. Taste is only so interesting in criticism. There was no question, reading that book, of its dexterity and complexity, of the fact that Serpell’s brain was extraordinary. It was ambitious, polyphonic, multigenerational, compared (deservedly) both to Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie. I have long been an admirer of Namwali Serpell’s criticism, but it feels worth noting at the outset that I struggled with her debut novel, “The Old Drift.” The mastery and brilliance were obvious. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
0 kommentar(er)
