"Wise, warm, witty and dizzyingly wide-ranging... Stranger faces refuse to signify or symbolize, which may be exactly why we try so hard to read them—and why it is so fun to read about them, at least when Serpell is doing the writing."—The New York Times
"Serpell can reanimate any subject, be it Hitchcock or emojis, and her bright, brainy collection is a model for how to surface the fun in a critical question."—The New Yorker
"Highly intellectual scholarship that casts a smart yet playful eye on pop culture as well as literary theory."—The Boston Globe
"Serpell delivers a brilliant essay collection that, informed by semiotics, proposes a way of thinking about the human face that views each person’s countenance as possessed of culturally and individually constructed meaning that can change radically according to the beholder... Serpell’s vital treatise is one readers will find themselves returning to again and again."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Praise for The Old Drift:
“Extraordinary, ambitious, evocative… The Old Drift is 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.” —SALMAN RUSHDIE, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (cover)
“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.”—DWIGHT GARNER, THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Namwali Serpell’s vibrant, intellectually rich debut novel, The Old Drift… refuses to conform to expectations. . . . This oddball cast of characters simply represents the joys of the picaresque novel, in which the author’s set design is intentionally surreal and ironic. . . . Serpell is a natural social novelist, capable of conjuring a Dickensian range of characters with a painterly eye for detail. . . . [A] clear-eyed, energetic and richly entertaining novel.”—THE WASHINGTON POST
“There are moments of such heart-wrenching poignancy that I had to put the book down several times and recompose myself. Serpell writes with the emotional maturity and sardonic smile of one who has lived several times already. It is the reader’s great privilege to follow her strange and vivid characters from cradle to grave.”—THE SUNDAY TIMES
2020-05-18
A set of essays reconsidering how we think about faces through the lens of films, books, emoji, and more.
Serpell is one of our brightest new fiction writers and essayists. Her 2019 novel, The Old Drift, which won both the Windham-Campbell Prize and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, addresses colonialism with rare intelligence and sweep while her work for the New York Review of Booksmakes her a compelling voice on race and Africa in culture. This short book, based on her research, isn’t the easiest place to get to know her, but it’s rich with thoughtful considerations of the human face and how we look at it. In the case of Joseph Merrick, aka the Elephant Man, Serpell is intrigued at how his deformities inspire a host of metaphors, not all involving ugliness and horror. In Hannah Crafts, the cryptic author of the slave narrative The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Serpell finds a trove of subversions of expectations of black and white “faces,” from the narrator’s light skin and author’s plagiarism onward. In a concluding chapter, the author reconsiders the emoji’s role in culture and how the lack of common interpretations opens up the images to playful and nuanced interpretations. That plus two more essays on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man doesn’t add up to a cohesive thesis on faces. Serpell writes that she wishes to “shatter” conventional interpretations of the face, but she isn’t moved to assemble a new one from the pieces. Her discussion of fetishes drifts into academic jargon, and she is, by her own admission, overly obsessed with the role of a mop in Hitchcock’s classic. But in recasting the Elephant Man’s face as a thing of beauty (or at least one with its own aesthetics) and studying digital avatars for multitudes of expression (including blackface), she’s broken ground for further commentary.
A scholarly but engrossing meditation that challenges what we see in portraits—and in our mirrors.