The Newest Oprah Book Club 2016 Selection
From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor—engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
Like the protagonist of Gulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
From the Hardcover edition.
A suprisingly inferior work It’s unfortunate that I could not appreciate this read as others have. While much of the prose style has its strengths, the feeling and sensibility is surprisingly exploitative; I want to say, it borders on the sensational. This is unusual for a writer who has enjoyed much in the way of esteemed awards and Fellowships such as the Guggenheim–Harvard-education notwithstanding. But I have always maintained that schools like Harvard do not an original talent make. No one is going to be reading…
Literally The underground railroad is used literally here. The book had a dynamic beginning but becomes too ambitious midway. By ambitious, I mean tying in too many current and nineteenth century ideas into too few pages. For example the sterilization of poor, women of color and those with mental illness as expoused by Margaret Sanger Harris founder of Planned Parenthood.
Underground Railroad Doesn’t Deliver Of the great novels on slavery – Beloved, Middle Passage, Known World, Good Lord Bird – Underground Railroad approaches the antebellum period in the most high realist style. Despite the conceit of the Railroad, which is the least developed and least convincing aspect of the novel, the tone, style, milieu, settings, descriptions, landcapes, language are immersive. Ironically, Whitehead, a fabulist, has created a great realist novel – I would say one of the most convincingly written in our…