The closest thing, I think, that I’ve read, in fictional form, to my favourite film, which is Last Year at Marienbad. There’s such swirl and control to its sentence rhythm. She inches us up as close to the real as May-Lan does in ‘Candy Glass’: here, it’s when “Apollo boogies on the margins” – look at that, packing so much sound and anxiety into the small words. You can’t teach that. You can’t teach “unfunky”, “meat man”, “jiggly bedroom memories”. That’s just the first page. That’s just the language. Wait till you catch the rest. I can’t articulate it: the speed, the tumble, the tuneage of this one leave me a bit too bruised to manage. But Namwali Serpell unpacks this story’s political capabilities in ‘The Banality of Empathy’ – and the clock has really struck out there for that essay.
First published in Lightspeed 185, October 2016, and available to read online here
A Personal Anthology 