Namwali Serpell

She read most of her audio books.

I think she re-recorded ones that had already been read by actresses.

And she says in an interview that her reading is the correct reading because the way that she pauses, the rhythm that she actually...

found so important that she would intentionally break the grammar at rhythm.

And so something that I found a lot of readers say is that listening to her audiobooks

is an experience of total immersion.

You don't feel baffled or confused or anything like that because of the way that she actually recounts the story.

I also think it's important when we talk about difficulty and complexity and ambiguity, these things that we value as professors and literary critics and professional readers in some sense,

One thing to point out is that life is difficult.

You know, situations in life are complex.

It's not necessarily about opacity.

It's really about full engagement with every aspect of something.

And one of the qualities that Morrison is very interested in replicating in her work, and she says she wants it to be available to kind of a village listener, like an everyday person, because she thinks that the important thing

One of the important things that literature can do is that it can start a conversation about irresolvable, intractable, contradictory situations in life.

Right.

So she says, you know, at the end of the story in an African folktale, you don't have the moral of the story.

You don't have a single message.

What you have is the storyteller turns to the audience and says, what do you think?

You finish it.

And she tried to replicate that, which is not a kind of, you know, high canonical, you know, professors at Harvard and Princeton concept.