The Underground Railroad

This book was horribly sad, it tore my heart open repeatedly. I don't usually read books like this but it was chosen for a book club I wanted to attend. I couldn't even get through the first page without crying. I had to put it down to rest my heart. I never made it to that book club meeting.

I know it is fiction and one major detail was changed but that didn't take away from the story. I know that the majority of the book was close enough to the real thing and the terror that people endured was just as real. I have read about the horrible things that humans did to other humans because of the color of their skin and it is heart-rending. I wish it all could be considered fiction but the sad truth is that this horrible story was a reality for too many souls. There is language that I like to avoid but in this book, it is part of the reality.

This book was challenging to read, but very compelling–I was so invested in Cora's story that I found it hard to put down. The challenges were: of course it's hard to read about the brutal (fictionalized) realities of slavery, but I'd already read several slave narratives and the like, so I mean...horrible to read but not shocking, I guess? But I really struggled to understand what was going on with the alternate history and I really struggled to understand what the point of it was. Would Cora's story have been any less effective in a work of more realistic historical fiction? Like I just don't think I GOT it on some level. But I mean it won like 500 awards so what do I know?

I went and read a bunch of reviews/interviews to try to unpack this; for me, this was the most interesting/helpful one, if anyone else is curious:

https://www.npr.org/2016/11/18/502558001/colson-whiteheads-underground-railroad-is-a-literal-train-to-freedom

Between 3 and 4 stars. The story of Cora, a slave's escape and journey across several states during the pre-civil-war era with the not metaphorical but literal underground railroad. I definitely enjoyed parts of this (especially the beginning and the end) and the occasional beautiful wordings, but the main character never really came to life, was lacking in personality development. Sometimes the narration jumped around, and that was disruptive. Either this book should have been double the length - become an opus featuring more adventures, more characters, more details - or should have had a tighter storyline more focused on the railroad. This and Homegoing have been dominating many of the best-of lists of 2016, and Homegoing - which deals with a similar subject matter - is miles better. This reads like a very negative review, though it shouldn't be. This book just doesn't seem to live up to it's potential and that's disappointing.

Short review: Interesting concept, but felt forced. It was good that I had read this after reading a bunch of history on slavery, the civil war and reconstruction. That meant that I got most of the historical allusions. (Basically assume that virtually every plot point is based on a real historical event.)

My slightly longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/underground-railroad/

The Underground Railroad is the harrowing tale of an escaped slave, Cora, and her determined odyssey towards freedom, and was an interesting read, but not quite what I was expecting.

It is written in a beautiful yet matter-of-fact tone that, while not first person, suits Cora's point-of-view, as she is reserved, resilient, and steely. The plain, pragmatic descriptions of the horrors that she endures add some strange distance, but allows the events to stand on their own, harsh and unadorned, for what they are.

There are chapters that focus on some of the supporting characters interspersed throughout the novel, to fill in time jumps in the main narrative. These were appreciated extra touches, with the final one being particularly devastating.

This left me underwhelmed. It's not that it's a bad book - it certainly isn't. I was interested the whole way. I felt a little twist in my stomach and my throat at the end, so I know I was emotionally invested. The writing is good; plain, straight-forward, but tight and with perfectly strong metaphors. The narrative is gripping. The characters internal lives are complex and sustaining. Yet, something left me feeling uninspired. I put the book down and it was out of my head as soon as it touched the table.

Maybe it was that it was too plot-driven, and that's not my type of book: especially when the “almost caught her; didn't catch her... almost caught her again; foiled again!” storyline became wholly implausible, the escapes too narrow, such that it gave the more brutal, very real moments a bit less credibility. Reading this was like watching a movie, where you are always aware that you are in a movie, and also kind of thinking about what you're going to have for dinner. Something failed to captivate me.

But, like I said, it was still a good read and it's always good to remember histories atrocities through narrative, and to keep giving the victims of those atrocities the rich consciousness they deserve.

I feel like I've read a lot of books so far this year that I don't really have any strong thoughts on. This is another one of those. It's well written, but I don't think I was thoroughly engaged while reading through it.

I've had it on my to-read list for awhile and just picked it up because it's been turned into a TV show now and I heard something intriguing about the premise that I didn't realise before that sounded really neat, but ultimately I just thought this was okay. Oh well.

Whitehead can't seem to decide if he wants to write a novel or an essay. When he focuses on the novel, the results are salutary. The prose is rich and descriptive and powerfully depicts the horrific injustice taking place. But Whitehead can't seem to help adding a didactic element to the prose that doesn't mesh with the protagonist. Whitehead wanted to say something, and shoehorned it into Coras thoughts in a clumsy and obtuse way. We know the thoughts are Whiteheads, not Coras. The same message could have been delivered more deftly and better integrated with the protagonists character, or through other mechanisms. Furthermore, the railroad theme is interesting, but wasn't deployed as effectively as it could have been.

The first 40% of the novel superb , but things start to unravel from North Carolina onward.

I quite liked the opening of the book. For me it fell apart a bit when he makes the underground railroad and actual underground railroad. Each individual portion was quite engaging and often horrifying. But The effort to force of this to happen to the same character didn't work for me. I think this book would have worked better as a collection of short stories and novelettes about different characters experience different forms of racism across the US.

Du même auteur, j'avais beaucoup aimé The Nickel Boys, son roman paru l'année dernière qui parlait d'un pensionnat / centre de rééducation pour adolescents noirs américains qui y subissaient les pires tortures dans les années 1950-1960.

Cela m'a donné envie de plonger dans ses oeuvres précédentes, et notamment ce roman de 2016 consacré à l'esclavagisme dans le Sud des Etats-Unis et des réseaux d'aide aux esclaves évadés.

Nous y suivons Cora, jeune esclave dans une plantation de coton en Géorgie, dans sa tentative d'évasion et sa fuite effrénée, poursuivie par ce que j'ai envie de définir comme un chasseur de primes spécialisé dans la capture d'esclaves en fuite.

Le roman se compose de plusieurs longs chapitres correspondant aux différentes étapes du périple de Cora. Le récit alterne les moments où Cora semble s'installer dans une nouvelle vie loin de son ancienne condition d'esclave, et des passages où l'action s'accélère et où Cora doit fuir à nouveau pour éviter le retour en Géorgie et la mort qui l'y attend à coup sûr en punition.

J'ai bien aimé ce roman, avec sa jolie galerie de personnages secondaires qui aident Cora dans sa fuite. J'ai surtout aimé le discours sur l'esclavage, l'économie de l'esclavagisme dans les Etats du sud, et l'inhumanité de cette condition pour celles et ceux qui l'ont subie. C'est un roman bien ficelé sur l'injustice, sur l'histoire peu glorieuse des Etats-Unis d'Amérique, une histoire qui résonne encore de nos jours lorsqu'on évoque la question raciale.

Beautiful word choice and paints the black community as taking very small wins (celebrating a birthday on different days—perhaps not even a real birthday, but just a reason to have a small celebration and break) and forging their community while suffering through the evils of slavery. I enjoyed seeing a fictional representation of the underground railroad and the potential historical situations that black individuals most likely faced. I did not enjoy how removed I was from the characters–I agree with other reviews that said that switching it to first-person-pov would have helped immensely. Additionally, it was jarring to switch in between the individuals and their stories.

This book is a great look into slavery, the south, and the hopes and realities of many black individuals. Not always the best writing overall, but beautiful words convey the harsh realities of history.

Quote:
“A reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.”

“He wrung out every possible dollar. When black blood was money, the savvy business man knew to open every vein.”

“What a world, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close, but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn't stand.”

I genuinely loved this book for many different reasons. Firstly, I know the history of how the States came to be (a little), but the specifics of it all isn't something I'm familiar with. I really enjoyed and appreciated a closer look into the life, and variations of a life, you might expect living in different states in that time period. I love the closeness we feel to Cora, in fact, I found her to be an endearing character. I really resonated with her struggle with her relationship with her mother, the sudden moments of anger she felt and admired how human she felt at times.

Similarly, the book struck a really strong emotional chord with me throughout. I really feel like this book was the one that made me feel the most this year.

Hits hard from the very beginning and keeps on hitting. Three hundred pages of cruelty; suffering; the very worst of humanity. Brief moments of respite, in each of which our heroes pause, catch their breath, wonder whether they're safe at last. (Not-much-of-a-spoiler alert: they're not). Further suffering ensues.

I found it heavyhanded at times— then again how could it not be? — and the writing uneven: beautiful at times, a slog near the end; but maybe that was just me. Like other books I've read recently, the reader is kept at a distance, but with third-person narrative that distance feels clinical, objective, not uncaring; the absence of connection coming out of self-preservation, a necessary response to a lifetime of loss.

The “railroad” gimmick didn't really work for me, but it was a minor plot point overall, unobtrusive.

5 stars for shock, suspense, and the journey through the story. Loved the structure of Cora moving through different locations, with characters moving in and out of the story.

3 stars for character development. There was some depth to Ridgeway and Cora, and some good depth to the couple in the house, but I'd have enjoyed more. Cora's feelings could have been conveyed more too.

Fantastic book, strong recommend.

Initially I really liked this book. The physical underground railway caused me no issues. However, it all began to go wrong with the other divergences from history. Increasingly, his writing style grated. Mabel's short tale near the end was wonderful, but by then I just wanted the book to finish. The book left me cold and that seems wrong for such an important subject.

The power of Oprah Winfrey in the world of books is hard to overstate. Indeed, it is such than in 2016, her selection of The Underground Railroad for her legendary book club drove Colson Whitehead and his publisher to release it two months ahead of schedule. From there, it won a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and ended up on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize. Obviously that kind of critical attention had nothing to do with Winfrey, but it probably helped the book become a #1 best-seller. Which means that a lot of people who might not have otherwise picked it up did, which is a good thing because this book bends time and history to lay out a damning case on the way America has done wrong by Black people.

Set in the antebellum South, The Underground Railroad focuses on the journey of one slave woman, Cora, towards freedom. The granddaughter of a woman who survived the Middle Passage and was enslaved in Georgia, and the daughter of a slave who ran away when she was just a child, Cora has spent much of her life as an outcast even among her own community. So she's surprised when another slave, Caesar, approaches her to run away with him to find the Underground Railroad. In Whitehead's alternative history, the railroad is literal...there are stations built into the earth that spirit slaves away to the north.

Run away they do, and Cora finds herself first in South Carolina, which in this world has outlawed slavery but holds ownership of Black people itself, and then distributes them as it sees fit in service work. But they're also secretly infecting men with syphilis to study it, and sterilizing women...and then Cora finds out she's being chased by a man called Ridgeway, a slave catcher. So the next stop is North Carolina, which has abolished slavery too...out of a fear that the Black majority population of the state will rebel against their masters. It's replaced their labor with white indentured servants, and escaped slaves are publicly executed. Cora hides there for a while, but before she can devise an escape, she's caught by Ridgeway. That doesn't mean she stops fighting for her freedom, but freedom isn't an easy thing for a slave to find.

I wanted to love this. I wanted to find it a revelation. And it's good, very good actually. Whitehead's prose is both lovely and powerful. And I understand why he can't “go easy” on Cora...it reads sometimes like she's a punching bag for the universe and she barely gets room to breathe before she's knocked down again, but that's probably what it feels like to be African-American, obviously back then and to a lesser but still very real degree even now. And the characters are interesting, with Whitehead even writing one-off chapters from perspectives other than Cora's, to give us context for the people who have an impact on Cora's life and where they're coming from when they interact with her.

But I just never connected with and got emotionally invested in the novel the way I do for the books that distinguish themselves for me as “great”. I cared only in a kind of distant way about Cora, and for all that the side characters were developed they mostly just faded away...when Caesar and Cora are separated relatively early in the proceedings, for instance, I never found myself missing him on the page. And while I cared about Cora and what was going to become of her, it was never in the way where I wanted to skip ahead to see how she might make it around each obstacle thrown in her path. I'm not quite sure why that was, honestly...like I said, Whitehead's writing is incredible so it's not for any lack of ability to make her more compelling on his part. It just didn't quite get there for me. Nevertheless, it's a very good and powerful book, and one that I'd recommend to just about everyone.

Phew! This was a difficult read. Not difficult in language or concept, but difficult because so much of it actually happened (although much of the book is speculative fiction, the treatment of slaves is a fact); is a part of history, and that is terrifying. Man's inhumanity to man. It would have received 5 stars had I not had to force myself to return to the horror again and again. An important book no doubt and worthy award winner.

What if the famous underground railroad wasn’t just a series of underground tunnels, but an actual underground railroad, with stations and trains on tracks? Colson Whitehead answers that question in The Underground Railroad.

Cora is a victim of or at least a witness to every possible atrocity committed against her fellow slaves on the Randall plantation where she grew up and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. Colson is not afraid to slap his readers in the face with very real details of America’s terrible history and it’s very hard to read. I was already crying by the end of the first part, which is 8 pages long.

Although it elicited a lot of emotion from me, the writing itself is very matter-of-fact and unemotional, which felt a little jarring at first, but soon came to feel like a nod to how powerless Cora and the other slaves were. Every horrible thing that happened was just a fact of life, and they had to remove themselves from it without dwelling on it or allowing themselves to feel those painful emotions. Even after her escape, Cora often felt powerless, unable to be herself, unable to embrace any of her true emotions. I think the writing reflected that perfectly.

However, there were some jumps in time here and there that were really confusing for me as there was a severe lack of cohesive transition between flashbacks and the now. Sometimes it was a couple weeks ago, sometimes it was right now, sometimes it was suddenly a month later, and I often had no idea which it was until I read quite a bit and figured it out for myself.

I loved Cora and I loved the premise, but the erratic timeline and the incredibly abrupt ending unfortunately hindered my overall enjoyment of the book. The ending is really the thing that messed with me the most. I can’t figure out why it ended so suddenly!

Still, I’d recommend The Underground Railroad to basically everyone ever. It’s an important story that highlights a part of American history that too many people ignore but shouldn’t be forgotten, and it is absolutely worth the read.

This is by far the most intense, emotional, and heart wrenching fictional book that I have ever read. It is fictional so there are aspects of the book that are fantastical but I believe that this adds to the experience. Colson Whitehead does an amazing job combing many of the atrocities that the USA has committed against African Americans into the singular experience of Cora. Through Cora the reader gets to experience first hand the rape, despair, and heart break that white Americans caused among the African American community. I found the that the adjustment to new circumstances and the hope that comes right before tragedy very poignant especially considering current events. Throughout US history we have grown complacent when, slavery was not allowed above the 32nd parallel, slavery was abolished in 1865, after the Civil Rights movement, and after the first Black president was elected. After each of these events there has been a resurgence of white-supremacy. I have learned from this book and the events over the past year that it is imperative that we never stop fighting for equal treatment of all human beings.

Cora is a slave on a plantation run by a cruel owner. The first time she is asked to run away, she says no. The second time, yes.

You'll never buy the tales of happy slaves singing around their cabins with their owners again. You'll never see a Confederate flag and look on it as a gentle reminder of the old South again. You will walk in the shoes of slaves and it will change you.