Colson Whitehead

Originally published: New York: Doubledday, 2016.

The Underground Railroad

"Oprah's Book Club 2016 selection"--Sticker on jacket.

Ausrine Blazyte

All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

Prashanth Srivatsa

Cora escapes from a plantation farm in an attempt to seek freedom. With this rather simple premise, Whitehead has carved out a stunning journey through the mazes of slave-ridden America, exploring its ubiquitous and rebellious underground railroad network. What begins as an inspiring, fist-pumping escape quickly descends into a you're-damned-where-you-go narrative as Whitehead tests the meaning of absolute freedom, one American state at a time, and eventually allows the book to serve as a catalogue for racial abuse.

Stefanie  Uwah

Ya’ll. Go read this book.

 

I’ve read quite a few novels about The Underground Railroad. I’m used to the suspense of trying not to be sniffed out by a hound while hiding in trees. I’m used to the overwhelming pain. Many of those stories focus on the running, not the various destinations that an escapee can end up. In this book, however, you find out quite soon that the railroad is not a metaphor, it’s a physical structure moving passengers from place to place on its rickety tracks. The mysticism was taken out of the actual escape and I got to read about the black people and their experiences as they escaped the labyrinth of slavery. What an incredible read.

 

#BlackHistoREADS

Bahni Turpin

A Novel

Charlotte 

A book you borrowed or was given to you as a gift ✔

Brendan M

Colson Whitehead tells a fairytale of horror. His prose is fantastical in its imagery yet stark in its brutal realism. Magical realism works best when the fantasy illuminates the warped nature of the real. In exposing the madness of the institution of slavery, here Whitehead has demonstrated a mastery of the genre.

Sonja H

Sklaverei ist ein Thema, mit dem ich mich – bis auf ein paar Schullektüren – lesend wenig befasst habe. Vielleicht liegt es daran, dass ich in meinem Alltag keine Berührungspunkte damit habe oder dass ich sehr offen und tolerant erzogen wurde. Ich sehe zwar, dass Rassismus nach wie vor existiert und ich habe eine Meinung dazu, aber es fehlen mir auf diesem Gebiet Erfahrungswerte.

Daher war ich auch nicht verwundert, dass mich dieses hochgelobte Buch nicht wirklich angesprochen hat.
Erinnert mich der Anfang noch stark an „Onkel Toms Hütte“, so waren mir all die Szenen, die Cora nach ihrer Flucht von der Plantage durchlebt, völlig fremd.
Kaum hatte ich mich einigermaßen in das neue Umfeld eingelesen und mich an neue Charaktere gewöhnt, zog mich der Autor schon wieder ein weiteres unbekanntes Terrain mit weiteren Agierenden.
Zwischen all diesen Situationen gab es darüber hinaus „Großaufnahmen“ der Schlüsselfiguren des Romans, die mich wieder aus dem bisher Gelesenen rissen. Ich konnte mich nicht in Ruhe auf die Geschichte einlassen und mich damit gedanklich befassen.

Zudem störte mich das oberlehrerhafte Auftreten von Whitehead, das sich wie ein roter Faden durch die Story zieht. Immer wieder vermag er nicht, einige emotional geladene Situationen für sich im Raum stehen und dem Leser die moralische Bewertung zu lassen. Nein, er schiebt oft ein einem Satz eine unumstößliche Aussage dem Geschehen hinterher, die sagt: „So ist es und nicht anders“.

„The Underground Railroad“ ist sicherlich ein gutes und wichtiges Buch, aber ich konnte mich damit nicht anfreunden.

Celeste Richardson

I so wanted to like this book. I appreciate and respect it, but it left me cold.

The enslavement of African Americans in the United States and the horrific ways in which they were treated is one of the two most heinous sins (alongside our treatment of Native Americans) in our national past. I have never been able to fathom how people could treat others as less than human over such a minor difference as skin color. And the fact that these slave owners viewed themselves as good and kind and “Christian” is one of the most appalling and ludicrous things I’ve ever heard. The systematic oppression and abuse of any subset of humanity, whether they are set apart by gender or religion or sexuality or something as simple as a different pigmentation, is so opposed to the teachings of Jesus that I am baffled by how anyone who considers themselves to be one of His followers can possibly rationalize it.
“The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.”
Going into Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning novel, I was hoping to see some new facet of this dark past, some deep and powerful truth that I as a Caucasian woman in the American South might have missed in my research of the topic. I wanted a revelation, which I understand is way too much pressure to put on any work of fiction, but I was unable to rein in this hope. What I got instead was a lecture housed in novel form. Yes, the slave-owning South was shown in all its horror, and the lives of slaves and those who sought to escape their bonds were presented in a way that balanced the stark and the descriptive. There were instances where the treatment of slaves was unspeakably brutal, as it truly was in our history. Whitehead also showed how even the whites who claimed to be more civilized and caring still saw African Americans as less, and incapable of making decisions for themselves even if they were no longer technically enslaved.
“Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.” 
My problems with this book was my inability to empathize with any of the characters. Did I have sympathy for them? Absolutely. However, none of the characters felt real enough to truly care for. Everything I learned about them was told to me instead of shown. This resulted in cardboard characters with rich histories but no true personalities of their own. I was also incredibly frustrated by the ending, or lack thereof. It felt like Whitehead simply got tired of writing and decided to stop.
“Sometimes a useful delusion is better than a useless truth.” 
I’m glad I read The Underground Railroad, but I’m even more glad that it’s over and that I can move on. It's beautifully written, but I couldn't connect with it no matter how hard I tried. For me, it was like Lincoln in the Bardo in this regard. I felt that Octavia Butler’s Kindred presented this horrific time period in our history with so much more grace and depth. Those characters, from main protagonist to secondary characters to even the antagonists, felt so much more real to me, and evoked far stronger emotions. I truly cared about each on of them and was invested in the outcome. I think I’m in the minority on The Underground Railroad; I know plenty of readers who were blown away by it. But if you’re like me and find yourself disappointed, give Kindred a try instead.

You can find  this review and more at Novel Notions.

This is not a book it's hurt and it should.

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

This is not a book it's hurt and it should.

Fraser Simons

For the longest time I thought I had read this book already. I must have picked up a book with a similar title or cover though. I realized I hadn’t read it when I watched the TV show, which is actually substantially different than the book in some ways. 

In any case, I’m very glad to have gotten to it, since the voice has wonderful flow and a good balance between economy and description. It’s atmospheric, important, and adept at communicating historical information while not being entirely beholden to it. 

Of course, you can imagine it’s not an “easy” read and content warnings abound, particularly Sexual assault, which has multiple dimensions in this piece. But it is also capital a About the hard subject matter whenever it is introduced. 

I found this to be fantastic in every case, save for my reader kryptonite: psychic distance in the perspective always felt a bit removed. Which I think is fairly necessary, considering the subject matter. But it did curiously feel pretty difficult to feel grounded in place and person, despite it being atmospheric and rich in textured prose.

Bergen Anders Nelson Eickhoff

This novel was what finally allowed me, after five months of pondering, to admit that I hate America, even though I will likely remain a citizen of this thoroughly messed-up country until the day I die. This novel is unforgiving in its condemning depiction of antebellum America with fantastic twists that reveal just how similar America of the present is to the America ruled by slavery. It's terrifying, and caused me to lose more than a few hours of sleep pondering its plot and implications.

However, this novel also reminded me of how I love the potential of Americans. Not all Americans, mind you, for many characters (particularly white) commit such terrible atrocities that it caused me pain to read about them and recognize that while portrayed as fiction, most of the story likely has a historical basis. However, the ability of Cora to survive, the hope of the abolitionists and runaway slaves that drives them to work for a future where they can do more than survive, and the determination of so many characters to give up everything just so they can live as free human beings prevents this book from falling into a nihilistic despair. The book throws out the weak hope that claims that America will fix itself because it's always improving, and instead emphasizes the mature hope that America only improves when and because the oppressed and oppressors alike will it to change. This novel shows that this process isn't easy, and involves incredible suffering, but can be done. And more than anything else, it takes slavery out of the pages of bland historical texts and forces the brutal experience of slavery into our faces regardless of race or creed, and forces us to acknowledge what this abominable practice did and continues to do to the human condition. For this reason alone, "The Underground Railroad" is an absolutely essential read.

Cindy Lieberman

What if there really was a physical railroad that ran underground, helping former slaves to freedom? That bit of magical realism is used to loosely connect descriptions of life in the various states, from plantation life (and death) to medical experimentation on black men and women without informed consent, to Friday night lynching festivals in the town squares. Horrific. And Jan 6th 2021 we saw southerners under the thrall of an authoritarian and delusional president storm the U.S. Capitol building, waving confederate flags and hanging nooses from scaffolding. Horrifying. What a short distance we’ve come in all these years. #BLM

Shameera Nair Lin

Melissa Schwartz

Cora is a great main character, her journey was beautifully written

Avery Bostick

Whitehead writes beautifully... Descriptive and creative

Kathleen Mullins

I really enjoyed this book, especially the real but surreal way Cora's search for freedom is manifested--I am always here for a little surrealism/magical realism. Each new location felt like a place out of time representing the variations of oppression that Black people have faced in America.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North. In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates 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 the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.

Nick Bicko

1,5 Sterne. 
Regelrecht durchgequält und nach gut der Hälfte die Seiten gezählt, bis ich es endlich geschafft habe. 
Das hat mir nicht gut gefallen. 
Ich bin nie in einen Lesefluss gekommen. Grunde dafür sind vor allem das mühsame Backtracking bzw. die Achronologie der Erzählung und die eindimensionalen Figuren inkl. der Hauptfigur Cora, zu der ich nie Bezug gefunden habe und mir daher auch die Geschichte relativ "egal" war. 
Schade, ich hatte mich eigentlich so darauf gefreut.

Lori Handelman

Sometimes it doesn't really matter if you have complaints about the way a book is written; I've read others' reviews of this book that talk about flat characters, inelegant writing, clumsy transitions, and I just might agree with every one of them, and at the same time I'll insist that those points aren't the ones that matter. 

But as I think about it, what is it that matters about this book (and for me it did matter, a lot)? Is it just a fleshed-out fictional slave narrative, unbounded from fact just enough to allow the writer to combine truths for me, make the world of the story condensed and more potent? It is that, and that mattered. Is it just the magical realism of the varieties of train stations and engines and people running that railroad underground, and the inventiveness of that framework that let me into the scary experience that slaves might've had? Yeah, I really enjoyed that aspect. Is it that the last part of the story took me deep into the question of how a people moves forward -- taking everyone, or choosing only some in order to get to the new place? That's a question in season 4 of The Wire too, "coincidentally" focusing on black kids trapped in the drug-dealing world . . . with those deemed too far gone being removed from the regular classroom. As my husband and I re-watched those episodes, we were as torn as the educators. So we abandon those kids completely in order to give the others a chance? This was Mingo's argument in the last part of the book, and it was as hard to grapple with there as it was in The Wire. 

So for me, each of those three questions combined to answer why it didn't matter to me that the writing wasn't what it could be. It didn't matter to me that Caesar was a cut-out and Cora wasn't all that much rounder, that none of the characters were really all that round (except Ridgeway, maybe), it didn't matter to me that I highlighted very few sentences or passages because too often the writing was uninteresting in the prose itself, and when it reached for insight or beauty it fell flat, or even into cliche. That the transitions were clunky, the entry into flashbacks awkward. None of that really mattered because it gave me a condensed slave narrative that knocked me back, and the magical realism of the underground railroad gave me a new way to understand that experience, and it made me think hard about the question of who we try to save.

I look around and see today's world in a way Whitehead clearly intended me to do, with shame and horror. I think about the "All Lives Matter" response to the Black Lives Matter movement when I read that Frederick Douglass's memoir was met with this critique: “severity of judgment and a one-sidedness of view.” (from The Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany vol XLVII, 1849) This is an important book and an invaluable one (I started to say "especially now" but I guess that 'now' is always present, so "especially still"), and I believe it deserves the acclaim and prizes and awards it has received. I'm glad I read it.

Davina Noffke

I think the real strength of Whitehead's narrative was in portraying life in a slave nation, not just the brutality of slavery itself. Even when Cora managed to escape slavery, there was never really escape from subjugation and violence. I think that was a powerful disruption of a popular notion of the "happily ever after" life of a runaway slave.

To me the touch of magical realism with the literal "underground railroad" felt incongruous with the rest of the narrative.

Rowan Eva

Caroline Lewicki

It's difficult to say I enjoyed "The Underground Railroad" as it's a grueling tale that doesn't shy away from the horrors of slavery and the fear that lived in those that escaped, but I truly did enjoy this powerful story. I think the only reason I took it down a star was that it's lauded as a genre hybrid and I just didn't get that sense from it. The "horror" elements are horrifying in their truth, the "sci-fi" elements aren't that far from reality, and I felt it was mostly a historical fiction. Overall a powerful read and I'll definitely be picking up more by Whitehead.

Thought the premise is a good one this book was not a good one for me. The disjointed way of writing and the lack of character development were a sore point with me throughout the book. Every time I thought I was connecting with a character the story would change. The flow was not to my liking.

I did enjoy the idea of the story. However, having just read Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, I found this story lacking. Homegoing was a much better read of this genre and written extremely well with a better story and amazing connection to characters.

I finished this book solely because it was audio and I could listen while doing housework.

Not worth the time.

Lauren Attaway

The Power of the Right Book at the Right Time 

I am again so glad to have read the right book at the right time. I usually stay away from historical fiction because it makes me so angry. This book made me angry but there is power in remembering this country's history, even in fictional takes. I hope this book continues to find readers as I so want to share it. Excellent, excellent read.

Jan Jackson

I’d wanted to read this novel since I first heard of it. But - although it was obviously well researched, and written with skill and style - I didn’t engage with it. I thought the characters were not fully-formed, and lacking in any emotional purchase. It seemed to be all surface -which is strange for a book whose connective thread is an underground railway. And overall, it was too long; it needed better editing, I think. The start of Cora’s life, and her initial escape was riveting - as well as sickening - but the rest of the journey wasn’t really up to the same mark.

Emily Ruth Carter

Melody Izard

I kept thinking WHAT? There was a REAL underground Railroad? I thought it was just a way to describe the help all along the way to get escaped slaves to safety. I was bamboozled into thinking I had just not paid attention. Then googled and discovered Colson was having a little fun among all this nasty business.

The Underground Railroad

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