no bones to bury, no truth to pin, no mysteries solved – only the inescapable rhythms of loss
Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence. A room echoes with the “curbed bedlam” of sitcom laughter; commuters ignore each other in the “slotted indifference” of a train carriage. There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable – no bones to bury, no truth to pin, no mysteries solved – only the inescapable rhythms of loss. “It’s like swimming,” she writes. “You stroke and kick to get to the outermost edge of the wave. You feel the momentum: go on go on go on. But always, something tugs you back into the scooped water, the furrows, those relentless grooves.”
— Beejay Silcox, from “The Furrows by Namwali Serpell review – bravura investigation of grief” (The Guardian, August 17, 2022)
