Colin Whitehead:  The Underground Railroad, Little Brown UK, 978-0708898406, paperback
Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction 2017,

German edition:  Underground Railroad, 978-3446256552, Hanser Verlag, gebunden
 

Colin Whitehead is a new discovery for me and what an exquisite book he has written with “The Underground Railroad", one of the finest I read all year. Do not miss reading this novel.  

I have to confess I was very reluctant to read this Pulitzer Prize winner at first as descriptions of cruelty usually stay with me for days.  A book dealing with slavery in 19^th century America I knew would contain scenes  I would find difficult to Digest. But for some reason Whitehead’s writing did not affect me this way. The cruelty committed by the white population and American Southern plantation owners towards their black slaves were truly incomprehensible.  One of the sentences in this book that really stuck with me is that “evil soaks into the earth”, an explanation for why many countries and former colonies that have treated some of their citizens in the most brutal manner have been unable to shed this bloody heritage, racism and hate still sticking in people’s behavior and minds.  As one of the critics I read said so correctly, Colin Whitehead perfectly portraits “a road movie into the heart of America’s darkness”.

 

“The Underground Railroad” is a literary but highly accessible novel telling the story of Cora, a slave runaway and the history of the American Underground Railroad aiding slaves on their way into freedom up North or into Canada. Cora’s odyssey and her journey from inhuman plantation life in George in the mid-19^th century and her escape with Cesar , a fellow slave, left me often almost in tears and despair for their plight. The journey she undertakes trying to stay ahead of Ridgeway, a slave catcher, experiencing passages of utter misery and many throwbacks but also encountering selfless abolitionists and members of the Underground Railroad risking their own lives to help others, make for unputdownable reading. The cruelty and brutality human beings can inflict on others in this novel are sometimes unimaginable including other slaves telling on their own kind, behavior we encounter worldwide into the present when victims side with their oppressors.  “The Underground Railway” and all the characters in this book captured my heart and mind until the very last word, particularly that of Cora’s fate.