Splummeshing: Namwali Serpell’s ‘The Furrows’
Adam Mars-Jones, 16 February 2023
Readers are comfortable with the notion of the unreliable narrator – although it’s not clear what a reliable one would be. A narrator without blind spots and a certain degree of myopia would be like Superman in his guise as Clark Kent, only pretending to need glasses. Namwali Serpell’s narrator is in a different category – does she even qualify as a narrator if she isn’t present at the story she is telling?