The Furrows

by Namwali Serpell, Kristen Ariza (Narrator), Ryan Vincent Anderson (Narrator)

How do you grieve an absence? A brilliantly inventive novel about loss and belonging, from the award-winning author of The Old Drift.
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022--Vulture, Lit Hub
I don't want to tell you what happened; I want to tell you how it felt.
Cassandra Williams is twelve, and her little brother Wayne is seven. One day, when they're alone together, an accident happens and Wayne is lost forever. Or so it seems. Though his body is never recovered, their mother, unable to give up hope, launches an organization dedicated to missing children. Their father simply leaves, starts another family somewhere else.
As C grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in coffee shops, airplane aisles, subways cars, cities on either coast. Here is her brother's older face, the light in his eyes, his lanky limbs, the way he seems to recognize her too. But it can't be, of course. Or can it? Disaster strikes again and C meets a man both mysterious and strangely familiar, a man who is also searching for someone, as well as his own place in the world. His name is Wayne.
Namwali Serpell's remarkable novel captures the ongoing and uncanny experience of grief--the past breaking over the present like waves in the sea. The Furrows is a bold and beautiful exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a masterful story of black identity, double consciousness, and the wishful and sometimes willful longing for reunion with those we've lost.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Contemporary, Novels, Grief, Literature

9 pages, Audible Audio

First published September 27, 2022

About the author

NAMWALI SERPELL is a Zambian writer who teaches at UC Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2011 and was selected for the Africa 39 in 2014. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing.

THE OLD DRIFT is her first novel. The chapter entitled "The Falls" is derived from The Autobiography of An Old Drifter, by the historical figure, Percy M. Clark (1874-1937).

Reviews

[Michael Burke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now a Shadow

Twelve year old Cassandra tries in vain to save her seven year old brother Wayne from drowning. She passed out, did not actually see him die, and the body was never recovered. Still– “I felt him die. He was dead.” The irrefutable truth is this young girl’s burden to bear alone. Her mother will not admit to his death and starts a foundation to assist finding missing children, at one point traumatizing her daughter with “If he’s alive, that means you didn’t kill him!” Cassandra’s father distantly accepts that their bonds are lost and her grandmother pointedly asks her what she did with that boy.

“I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt."

What follows are fruitless years of sessions with out-of-touch psychiatrists. There are multiple dreams of her brother dying in different scenarios, each time under Cassandra’s watch. Each elation she feels at seeing him is immediately crushed by realizing his death once more. The intense grief is real and halfway through you wonder if this theme can be sustained much longer, where is the resolution?

Suddenly, midway through the book, the narration flips over from Cassandra to a man she is making love to. This man is convinced her brother is still alive and is shadowing him. He takes Wayne’s name, investigates the family, meets up with Cassandra, and they quickly fall for each other. If it sounds confusing, it is. We are given bits and pieces of this Wayne’s background but things are unclear as to who he really is or represents.

Frankly, Cassandra’s voice is sorely missed when the narrators switch. After sharing so much emotional turmoil I mourned the intimacy that had been nurtured. I wanted to hear Cassandra telling me she was on the way to becoming whole again, but of course the gulf that is Wayne’s absence can never be filled. We do not lose her, we just see her continue the struggle from a different set of eyes.

In "The Furrows" Namwali Serpell has delivered a touching account of a journey into devastating loss, a journey without a comforting resolution. We are not always told what happened, we bear witness to how it felt.

Thank you to Hogarth Books, Random House and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #TheFurrows #NetGalley

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Furrows is billed as a book about grief, and to some extent it is, but it is also much more than that. Serpell is very much interested in exploring memory and how our recollection of events can fracture - and how the stories we tell are built and rebuilt over time. I thought the first half was almost perfect. We begin with a traumatic event, the details of which get murkier as we move along. There are a lot of interesting things going on in this section, including a key scene where a family watches a curated selection of videos, a fascinating treatment of memory building and how narrative is constructed after the fact. Then the perspective suddenly shifts and in the second half we get a messy exploration of race, power, class, and how those intersect with privilege. There’s some good raw material in the second part, and the themes are undeniably vital, but unfortunately it feels underbaked and follows the near perfection of the first part. Despite the unevenness, I found the book incredibly moving, a story that dares to be both poignant and innovative, eschewing conventional character building and a traditional blueprint for stories about grief.

[Angela M]

2.5 stars rounded up.
This novel felt like it was about the depths of grief and loss, and it’s a stunning portrayal of a family coping with that loss, the emotional trauma, the impact of it on them. However, it was one of those books that I didn’t quite “get” what was happening, in particular Part II. Why round up to three stars, then? Because of the amazing depiction of grief and because the main character, Cee repeats “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” She does. There are other reviews that tell more about the book, but in all fairness, since I didn’t quite understand everything, I’ll just leave it at this brief comment.

I read this with my book buddy Diane and we definitely agreed on this one . I was happy that I wasn’t the only one confused.

I received a copy of this from Penguin Random House through NetGalley.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 Two parts. First part, Cassandra was twelve, Wayne, seven when the ocean took Wayne, despite Cassandra's efforts to rescue him. His body is never found. Visceral descriptions, feelings of grief. A family torn apart. A young girl who never gets over her responsibility in Wayne's death. Or is Wayne just missing? Alternate scenarios are explored and at first it is hard to figure out what is true or not. But this first section, though confusing, tugs at the heartstrings

But .....then comes part two and this is where the author loses me. A new character, a case of mistaken identity and though it connects to the first part, I didn't like this part. Found it strange, unbelievable, the meaning not clear. Unanswered questions. Maybe I'm just not deep enough, I don't know but for me, it didn't work. For other readers it did

Buddy read with my friend Angela and we are both hoping our next read will be a better one

ARC from Netgalley.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt. When I was twelve my little brother drowned."

This is such a strong opening. I was immediately gripped. These three simple sentences hold out the promise of a harrowing, true read to come. Almost at once, though, the story let go of me. It's a story about childhood trauma and family trauma that includes the confusion and guilt and the way we revisit our traumas and try to remember, and sometimes misremember...but instead of leading me to believe in this trauma, this grief, the story added misty layers between the trauma and me, page by page, where eventually I felt like I was reading the story through a thick fog. The journey from first to last page was compelling and thought-provoking nonetheless, but also, a little cold, a little studied. This is the kind of book that is going to impress itself on readers in different ways. For some readers the elliptical storytelling, and unexpectedness of the way this story travels, will be a glorious perfect read--just not for me.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Wayne. You were moving along a groove, the one carved into the world for you. The morning was golden. The roads were as gray and smooth as the skin of sea-born creatures. At the crossroads, you were blindsided. You were as if blind and an immense force came at you from one side. As you stepped forward unaware, it came and knocked you out of your furrow and into another, plowed you up and over, put you in another place, elsewhere, where. I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.

The Furrows: An Elegy has a high literary experimental structure — nothing is straightforward or what it seems — and as such, I don’t relish being the novel’s first reviewer; I don’t know if I totally “got” this. I will say that as an examination of grief and mourning and memory and reality, I was deeply touched by many scenes. And as an exploration of the African American experience — double consciousness (as defined by W.E.B. Dubois), code-switching, class discrimination and incarceration — I am receptive to whatever Zambian-born, Baltimore-raised author (and Harvard professor of English) Namwali Serpell wants to share. Because this narrative is so slippery and surprising, I am loath to reveal too much about it, but I will say that if the first part seems to get a little repetitive, hang tight: part two switches to a different point-of-view, with a different structure and vibe. Serpell tells us several times here, “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt,” and that’s exactly what she has accomplished: The Furrows reveals the lived experience of a person without the actual details of that person’s life being terribly important. Probably genius, and therefore over my head. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

There’s a cinematic sense of anticipation but maybe everyone feels this way nowadays. Life seems both monotonous and constantly interrupted, a punctuated heartmonitor line of events, with maybe some befores and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn’t creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It erupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles. On TV, online, in the prosthetic minds we carry in our hands. It’s as if something immense or catastrophic is always on the cusp of happening. Everything feels asymptotically dramatic, on the verge, as if only a disaster could undo that universal first disaster: being born at all. We are all heroes of cataclysm now.

Since it’s in the publisher’s blurb, I’ll confirm that this starts off as the story of twelve year old Cassandra (Cee or C) and how she lost her seven year old brother, Wayne. And whether he’s dead or simply missing, there was definitely a splummeshing, a ssth-ing, a head rolling around in a strange way, an unreasonable way (but this was allowed: this was our every Sunday; our every weekday; our whole summer). With a white mother and a Black father (and consequently two very different grandmothers) and a middle-class upbringing, Cassandra’s doesn’t seem to be primarily an African American story: but, of course, no matter how she sees herself, society reduces her unique experiences to an African American story. In part two, we meet “Will” — raised in foster care, the fast track to prison was his inescapable fate — and along with the twinning effects of double consciousness and code-switching, Will is tormented by a vengeful doppelgänger. From Will’s POV, the language becomes more “street” and while his is a different type of African American experience from Cassandra’s, the details are unverifiable and don’t, ultimately, matter. I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.

As with her last novel, The Old Drift, I was consistently charmed by Serpell’s turns of phrase:

• My anger always met Reena like water hitting ice: it either rolled off or froze into her own armor.

• As the afternoon passes, time starts to fold under its own weight like honey.

• I’m in your thrall, those tall letters on either side of the word imprisoning me.

But again, as with her last novel, I found The Furrows to be so well-written as to be distracted by its craftedness; I never forgot that I was reading a book. And on the other hand: I never forgot that Serpell had something that she wanted me to learn, and I was here for that.

I don’t matter, you don’t matter, we’re all just matter, codes, scrambles of signs and symbols, the language the world mumbles to itself, or maybe its consciousness, our eyes and ears and mouths sprouting from it like polyps, here to watch and hear and sense it, to record its events and ruptures, its growing and its rotting, its dismal spin.

I can’t wait to read other reviews of The Furrows — I have no doubt that fans of Serpell’s work will not be disappointed with this novel and they will have plenty to say — and even if I’m not sure I totally “got” this, I can’t give it less than four stars.

[Faith · Rating 3 out of 5]

When Cee Williams was 12 she carried her 7 year old brother Wayne from the ocean. Cee then lost consciousness and Wayne disappeared. Their mother believes that Wayne is still alive, but his disappearance accentuated rifts in the family. Cee can’t remember what happened to Wayne, and even after many years of therapy she still imagines that she sees Wayne everywhere. Then a man named Wayne Williams enters her life.

I enjoyed “The Old Drift” by this author, but this book felt like the author was trying too hard to create an inventive structure. One of the problems is that it felt like 2 books. Most of the book focuses on Cee and how she copes with grief (and with the suggestion that she had something to do with Wayne’s disappearance). There is an abrupt shift in tone when the second Wayne appears. Part of his storyline appeared in the short story “Will Williams”. I liked that story, which was based on a Poe story, but it doesn’t fit at all with the Cee storyline. The book was already juggling grief, race and family dynamics. It really didn’t need to add Poe’s doppelgänger plot too.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Matt Quann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the books on the NYT's 10 best of 2022, The Furrows held the least appeal for me. The billing as an "experimental look into grief" sounded more like homework than an enjoyable reading experience. Well, consider me woefully bad at predicting what I'll like because The Furrows is one of my favourite reads of the year.

Cassandra, C, Cee, is only 12 years old when her seven year-old brother, Wayne, drowns at the beach and the loss obliterates her family. Compromised, the family unit fractures and frays as each member of the family struggles to find a way to cope. Curiously, the next chapters return to Wayne's death, but changes its circumstances. In each iteration, Cee is alone with Wayne, he dies, but his body goes missing.

I'll admit that during the early chapters I wondered where Serpell was going with this story. The writing was muscular with beautiful turns of phrase and evocative imagery, but I continued to worry that there would be little substance to what followed. All of that changes when the adult C meets a man who shares the name and appearance of her long lost brother. What follows that was a tying together of the experience of grief that left me in awe.

There's a dream-like logic to The Furrows that may have frustrated me in less deft hands. Shifting between dream sequences, perceived histories, and possible pasts and futures, it's tough to find your footing. It's almost like sticking your leg out the side of the bed to gain purchase on solid ground as the world spins around you. Serpell gives the reader just enough to hold on to while baffling their internal logic.

For me, The Furrows accomplishes one of the most difficult parts of literature. It creates a feeling, an experience, and an empathetic connection with the reader. As C puts it at various points throughout the novel "I don't want to tell you what happened, I want to tell you how it felt." Serpell, against all odds, succeeded entirely in connecting with this reader.

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) · Rating 2 out of 5]

❀ blog ❀ thestorygraph ❀ letterboxd ❀ tumblr ❀ ko-fi ❀

2 ½ stars

At first, The Furrows presents its readers with a labyrinthine yet hypotonic narrative about trauma, grief, and guilt. Cassandra, our central character, now an adult, recalls the death of her seven-year-old brother, Wayne when she was twelve. Then, this accident is presented to us again, except this time the circumstances are different. Cassandra tells different versions of his death, and while we cannot tell which one is closer to the truth, she is always somehow to blame. The trauma of his death, and her role in it, have clear ramifications on her adult self. She may not articulate her pain and guilt but the numbness and dissociative episodes she experiences, both as a teen and as an adult, speak volumes. As an adult in fact she says Wayne everywhere, and we are never sure whether the people in question are actually Wayne-look-alikes or merely figments of her imagination. In this way, the author renders the recursive and opaque nature of grief, which does not always manifest itself in tears and i-miss-yous. Interspersed within this very intimate yet enigmatic tale of loss and pain, are incisive observations on belonging and reconciliation. Namwali Serpell’s commentary on race in contemporary America brought to mind the work of Danzy Senna, as they are both unafraid of interrogating uncomfortable questions and realities related to race, racism, and colorism.

What lessened my appreciation of this novel was the role of a Wayne-look-alike. He is presented at first as someone who knows something about Cassandra’s history and her family. That he pursues her intentionally and omits telling her that he knows who she is…so many red flags. I seriously and genuinely thought that he was being presented as a potential threat to Cassandra who is so consumed by grief and guilt as to leave her guard down. minor spoilers: The way he describes and talks about her is incredibly gross and sexist. The guy basically sounds like Joe Goldberg from You ( he stalks her ffs! And, steals from her! He has sex with her and doesn’t tell her his true identity/motivations for pursuing her). Wtf. And yet…the story ultimately paints him and his actions in a good light? Because Cassandra’s mum calls the cops on him (a shitty and dangerous thing to do given that he is not white). But why then did the story go out of its way to paint him as this really creepy and manipulative person? Who decides to take advantage of a vulnerable woman? Daje! Their dynamic was incredibly off-putting and made me feel very queasy. The guy needed a restraint order and therapy.
The connection between him and Cassandra’s family also seemed kind of random and detract attention from the actual subject of the story (the trauma caused by Wayne’s death). Such a pity because I found the first few chapters to be really ingenious and enigmatic. I found the author’s approach to depicting grief to be both inventive and unflinching, and I liked the surreal and dreamlike quality permeating Cassandra’s recollections of Wayne’s accident and her childhood. The author blurs the line between what happened and what might have happened, in a way that creates tension and propels the narrative forward. Yet, as much as I liked the unreliable nature of her narrative, the supposedly romantic plot that eventually takes the novel’s centre stage, well that was several levels of yikes & oh-god-please-no.
If this book is on your radar I recommend you check out some more positive reviews out as ymmv.

[fatma · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

I honestly have no idea how to write this review because I didn't really "get" this book, or like it. I understand it's a story about grief and identity and race, but beyond that, I can't really tell you much. It's an experimental novel, but I'm not sure that its experimentation with form is successful. The story is split into two parts, and none of those parts really work: the first is quite repetitive, and then the second feels so different that it doesn't end up feeling connected to the first part at all. I don't categorically hate experimental novels, and I don't need to fully "get" a novel in order to appreciate what it's doing, or to even like it, but I'm just so lost when it comes to The Furrows. On a more fundamental level, I just did not get along with the writing in this book. The first couple of pages led me to believe that it was going to be lyrical and moving, but really the more you read the more the writing becomes stiff and tonally jarring. Sometimes it's nice, but other times it's weirdly grandiose and philosophizing. At one point during a sex scene where the narrator is taking her clothes off the text reads, "the absurdity of this drapery we all wear, the slapstick comedy of removing it." Little lines like that where the book's attempts to be Deep end up feeling forced and especially cliched.

I can only speculate, but The Furrows felt to me like a novel that shaped the story around its ideas rather than the other way around, more invested in the ideas it was trying to communicate instead of the story it was using to convey those ideas. All of this is to say, the characters were more a tool for the story's themes and not actual developed characters. I love novels that have at their heart certain themes/ideas that they're trying to explore, but when those themes/ideas aren't actually grounded in the characters and their stories, then chances are I won't be invested. And I wasn't: The Furrows went completely over my head, both in the sense that I didn't get it, but even more in the sense that it was utterly forgettable to me.

Thanks to Hogarth Press for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!

[LIsa Noell "Rocking the chutzpah!"]

Dnf

[John Banks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rounded down to 3.5 (I'll explain).

The Furrows offers an intriguing and moving exploration of grief, mourning, death, guilt and blame, memory, time, family, race, love and desire. Initially narrated by twelve year old Cassandra Williams (C) providing a disturbingly lyrical account of her seven year old brother, Wayne's death. They are together on a holiday outing at the beach when he drowns. His body isn't recovered and Cassandra's (C's) account of the event and the missing body leads her mother, Charlotte, to believe that he may not be dead but is missing (perhaps abducted). Charlotte starts up a philanthropic organisation (Vigil) that aims to fundraise and support families searching for missing children (offers an interesting take on white guilt, privilege and even commercialising of that entitlement). There's a sense that Charlotte 'knows' Wayne is likely dead but is repressing and memorialising by insisting he's missing. From this trauma at the heart of the book spirals a luminous and haunting tale.

The power of The Furrows though isn't so much in the tale as in the qualities of its telling. The language and imagery shimmers, dream-like and impressionistic, beautifully tracing the contours of C's inner life as she confronts this loss. The book opens with the lines "I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt. When I was twelve, my little brother drowned". This phrasing is repeated in various forms as a refrain through the book. It captures also the subtitle (The Furrows: An Elegy). The distinctive elegic qualities of the language and style had me rereading many passages.

Through the first half of the book C retells and perhaps re-experiences her brother's death in different contexts, each a slightly different version; she encounters men in various places (trains, airplanes, restaurants) that she views as Wayne (a haunting presence throughout her life). Each of the encounters is disruptive and ends with images of upheaval. The uncanny quality of these episodes resonate through the novel

The second half of The Furrows shifts the narrative to the voice of a young man (also named Wayne) who apprears to be trying to track down C's brother Wayne, believing him to be alive. The connection between the two Wayne's intrigues and provides a haunting thriller element. This second Wayne comes from a rough and violent background, he's lived on the streets, been incarcerated and learnt to get by with his hustle. I'll leave the details of why he's pursuing Wayne (introduces a vengence motif) and how he comes into C's life for readers to uncover. It does though develop as a quite tender and raw love story, a kind of redemptive desire through which C discovers possibilities for transforming grief, erotically, into something different and renewing. This unraveling of the second Wayne (how he has taken on this identity almost like a dopleganger and why) also works well to develop themes of mistaken identity, alternate realities, alternate selves, parallel lives and worlds.

With all this praise why the round down to 3.5. Partly because there's a jarring disjuncture between the events (and despite what the narrator claims about a focus on felt over happened there's a fascinating, thriller like narrative here pulling the reader along) and the poetic, lyrical style and imagery. I get that this is likely the idea (the lyrical, elegic transcending and transforming the narrative line and impulse: here the linear arrow of time of the narrated events are disrupted by the very different temporalities of language / image as it renders the time and memory of grief and loss) . My 4 is really for this language that entranced me. The final few pages take flight with a gorgeous vision.

I very much enjoyed my day immersed in the dream-like, surreal world that Serpell conjures. Here's a few samples to provide a sense of what I mean:

"I lean back and close my eyes. There's a cinematic sense of anticipation but maybe everyone feels this way nowadays. Life seeems monotonous and constantly interrupted, a punctuated heartmonitor line of events, with maybe some befores and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn't creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It erupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles. On TV, online, in the prosthetic minds we carry in our hands. It's as if something immense or catastrophic ias alway on the cusp of happening. Everything feels asymptotically dramatic, on the verge, as if only a disaster could undo that universal first disaster: being born at all. We are all heroes of cataclysm now."

How Serpell deploys this tale of loss, grief to explore these ideas of contemporary sensibility is quite stunning.

"I don't matter, you don't matter, we're all just matter, codes, scrambles of signs and symbols, the language the world mumbles to itself, or maybe its consciousness, our eyes and ears and mouth sprouting from i like polyps, here to watch and hear and sense it, to record its events and ruptures, its growing and its rotting, its dismal spin"

"The pink flower, reflecting itself, looks almost neon. The sun's beginning to set and we've reached that grayish-bronze twilight time of day that sharpens the eyesight, or maybe lets colors be their truest selves. A swan wafts by like a hallucination. The water behind it soothes itself smooth. When nature is wild and rampaging and you're fixed to the ground with awe, it's called the sublime. What do you call it when the soul careens at the sight of nature in stillness?"

[BookOfCinz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book explores grief and what it is like to grieve in such a nuanced way.

The book opens with Cassandra who is twelve and her brother Wayne who is seven heading to the beach to play. They do this regularly, just a normal day- until Wayne goes for a swim and his body is never found. Cassandra remembers trying to save him and a guy in a windbreaker assisting but the story just did not add up. With no body, and Cassandra not able to clearly let her parents what happened, her mother clings to the belief that Wayne is still alive. Her mother then starts an organization called Vigil with the hopes of keeping Wayne alive.

As Cassandra grows up, she lives with the ghost of her brother, she sees him everywhere and it shatters her world. She then meets a man who claims to be Wayne- but is this real?

He taught me that grief doesn’t choose its timing well; you never know when it’ll grip your neck.

I thoroughly enjoyed how the author portrayed grief and showcase how everyone grieves differently and that grief is never linear. I think sometimes we expect persons to “Get over it” after a certain time but this book showcases the opposite. I did think that the book lagged a little in getting to the point but overall, I enjoyed it.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly literary exploration of grief and guilt that somehow goes astray. While I loved the writing and atmosphere, I began to drift when alternate realities were introduced and found it hard to track. The loss of a vibrant younger brother is trauma enough without the repetitive forays.

[NILTON TEIXEIRA]

Interesting concept, but in my opinion the development lacks clarity - and I don’t read fiction books with the intention to analyze it.
Because I didn’t understand this book, I won’t rate it, as it would be unfair.
But I did read the whole thing, even though I felt totally disconnected. I even listened to the audiobook as I read the book.
Although not bad, I did find the writing a bit repetitive.
The storyline is more than just about grieving, but I really did not care about this book,
Fortunately it’s a small book.
Now, if you want to read something else about grieving, I do recommend “Harry’s Trees”, by Jon Cohen.

Ebook (Kobo): 295 pages (default), 80k words

Audiobook Narrated by Kristen Ariza, Ryan Vincent Anderson, Dion Graham: 8.8 hours (normal speed)

[Raul · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...people do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive."

This quote from Proust opens this elegiac book, titled as an elegy on the cover too, and as if to reiterate, the story begins: I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.

Cassandra is twelve when her eight year old brother, Wayne, dies. What follows is a lifetime of mourning; what remains of life in the aftermath of tragedy and the enshrouding grief.

The first half of this book is narrated by Cassandra recounting the tragic death, the uncertainty and hopefulness that follows when the body is missing, and the ways a family reels and breaks. Cassandra sees her brother in others as she grows into an adult and in ways that's startling to the reader.

The second half is mostly narrated by a man that Cassandra meets also named Wayne. His connection to Cassandra's deceased brother, even when he explains it, is never certain and parts of the story read like Dostoevsky's The Double, when it seems like one of the Waynes is a shadow of the other. Also, parts of the book are reminiscent of Morrison's Beloved where Sethe believes the young woman named Beloved is her daughter returned to her. It's almost as though the writer is leaving the door slightly ajar for the reader to explore possibility.

This is a dizzying tale and the book clearly frustrated some readers, for a reason, and has been harshly reviewed, in my opinion, and misunderstood. Reality is bent and the reader, using myself here, doesn't completely understand what is happening most times. Prose is expected to elucidate. Where poetry rises heavenward, prose is supposedly grounded. Which I think explains some of the frustration with the other reviews of the book I've seen.

But this book already described itself as an elegy, and not a novel. The lines: "I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt." recur like a refrain, perhaps to remind the reader and even assure them that the feeling of grief and loss is more important than plot. Undoubtedly, I've not understood what happens in this book, not completely anyway, which can be very annoying for the reader as we don't like to feel inadequate, but I've understood how it felt. The beautiful prose and clear and brilliantly written voices carried me while everything else jostled and tumbled (this is truly well organised chaos in the form of a book), and this is a confounding read filled with uncertainties. But what's certain is that it's a smart book, Serpell is clearly an intelligent person and writer, and that it is a challenging but good book.

[Tundra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant read. One of those books where you keep thinking you can see where it’s going and what’s happening but it’s like you’re walking through fog getting glimpses of something that are surely trees but turn out to be shadows. There are also evocative descriptions and imagery that create a powerful sense of place and tip into the realm of speculative fiction. Sometimes not knowing exactly what is happening in a plot can be annoying but Serpell uses this as a powerful narrative crafting tool to hone in on the premise of the story - a child is presumed dead but the body is missing. Serpell has thrown the reader into the same situation as the characters— what is really happening? , is memory reliable? , how do you move on when you have no closure?
The change in narrator, later in the story, throws the reader again. The voice of Wayne is texturally so different and his story is compelling. At this stage I was just hoping to not have some fantastical Hollywood ending to the story. Thankfully it does not.
Imagining how people live on with missing family is such a compelling premise and this novel explores many of the possible traumatic implications. Recently the father of the missing Beaumont children (this is a very famous Australian case - google it) passed away. I can’t imagine the burden of how not knowing impacted his entire life.

[Taryn Braz · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first half of this book, which discusses Cassandra Williams’s grief and reckoning with the death and disappearance of her younger brother Wayne, is absolutely beautiful. I love that the front of this book describes it as an elegy, because that feels most apt - it’s incredibly poetic and surreal as we go through C’s trauma and follow her from the moment she loses her brother, to her as an adult. However, its let down by a jarring and frustrating narrative and narrator shift as it follows another Wayne Williams. It felt a bit like the author had two separate ideas in mind, and jammed them together to make it fit into this. For such a short book, the last 100 or so pages really dragged on as I tried to figure out what the point was and why I should care about Wayne. Pretty disappointed considering how much praise this got!

[Zoya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have rarely, if ever, come across writing that seems so frenetic and urgent, and yet masks an exquisite amount of control on part of the writer. This novel brings the destability and viscerality of grief to life, and gives its all-pervasive untidiness a language. It is surreal in that it is difficult to separate reality from fiction, which goes to show how difficult it is for me to describe it. You have to read The Furrows to experience it. Hands down one of the best books of the year.

[Zsa Zsa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the first third of the book. I am going to tell you how it feels. And I liked the fact that the book kept me guessing, it was an elegy and a mystery. Somehow, around the end it became too vague. The pain not too sharp anymore. 3.5 stars

[Oscreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant!! One of the best American novels out in 2022. Probably the best.

[Kacey · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. I really wanted to like this book, but I just didn’t get it. Though by the end I understood how everything connected, I still kind of didn’t? The first part very much delivered on the opening lines, “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” It’s various versions of the main character’s brother dying when she was twelve, and he was seven. This was a moving picture of grief, but it got old. I appreciated it, but it was too repetitive for me and I wished for more of a linear story. Then, in part two, I got the linear story and was still confused. The characters’ relationships to one another were too ambiguous for too long, and even at the end when everything was “resolved” I still had a ton of questions. It was fine, but I just couldn’t get into it because the questions I had confused me more than they compelled me to keep reading.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

This hallucinatory novel about a sister, C's, grief following the loss of her seven-year-old brother Wayne works emotionally rather than logically: if you want to try it, I'd suggest taking C's refrain 'I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt' very literally. The first half of The Furrows takes us through a series of what may be mismemories, parallel realities or nightmares as C repeats the story of Wayne's death and her later encounter, as an adult, with an man called Wayne, played out in different settings but always with the same recurring motifs. I admired Namwali Serpell's craft in this section of the novel but found it difficult to turn back to it whenever I put it down. This changed during the last hundred pages or so, when I found myself eager to read on to unravel the puzzle-box mystery of the multiple Waynes that wander into and through this narrative. I also loved the repeated imagery of the furrows, and the way that Serpell ties some of her ideas together in a passage that suggests 'History is a mop'.  The final paragraphs are deliberately oblique, but I thought they were brilliant - Serpell definitely does make us feel the crashing, destructive nature of sudden death. It's difficult to write much more about this text without ruining it, but it worked for me despite my entrenched suspicion of magical realist adjacent stuff.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Sarah Jaffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A work read but fucking hell it is good. Article coming.

[Diane Kresh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a stretch read. I knew almost nothing about it other than a rave review by MJ Franklin of the NYT Book review team. The subtitle “An Elegy” is important, both as a tip off to the subject matter (death and grief) and as literary form. The book is actually two: the first part is s largely straightforward telling (and retelling a la Rashoman) of the drowning death of Wayne Williams, the seven-year old younger brother of Cassandra, principal narrator of the first part and the one who witnessed the death. The family is devastated and much of the “action” of the first part is the story of how the family members, mother, father, Cassandra, grandmother, cope (or don’t) with the loss. The second half switches narration from Cassandra to a young Wayne doppelgänger, also named Wayne Williams, who has his own back story of grief and loss. There is a third principle character, a man who goes by the name of Will who is actually named — you guessed it — Wayne Williams. The author herself has said the second part was informed by noir. The book is genre-driven, the language poetic and vivid, the story inventive. As a reader, I decided it was more important for me to relax and enjoy the ride; worry less about resolution and meaning and the other stuff one tends to worry about with a challenging book.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I read this story, I felt disconcerted. Serpell regularly started a scene but didn't conclude it before it jumped to something else. The abandoned storylines were unfulfilling. It all came together, but in a way that I wasn’t sure I understood. I certainly didn’t know what message I was supposed to take from the book.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the POV switch to Wayne, everything fell apart.

[Kasia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Woman’s reflections on motherhood and whether or not have a child.

[Kiki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Omg this book is so profoundly strange and weird and monstrous and devastating and I love it?????? Namwali. 😭