The Song of the Living and the Dead, by Jesmyn Ward

The Song of the Living and the Dead, by Jesmyn Ward
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An interesting Afro-American literary and critical trend extends since the XNUMXs Toni Morrison was recognized as the brilliant storyteller that she is, in that hybrid of fiction and realism that welcomes fictionalized lives in highly recognizable social settings and environments where notions of discrimination, xenophobia and that old shadow of the most destructive fear of coexistence still survive with intensity.

Colson Whitehead He is one of the most prominent young successors of this Afro-American current more grouped by the theme of his works than by his own racial condition. Although Whitehead's incursions are more sporadic and with a more intense incursion into fictional approaches.

And in the third generation it now arrives in Spain Jesmyn ward, a young author but with the same desire to continue leaving testimony of recent horrors of discrimination and hatred for the color of the skin. Because all the work toward equality is not yet done in the dullest minds in deep america or anywhere else.

In this story with the evocative title "The song of the living and the dead", we find a road novel that has all the ingredients to enter one of those initiation journeys for all the characters and for ourselves. When a writer manages to make us sit in the same car as the characters, raising the same doubts and sharing those times of silence contemplating the changing landscape, the victory of his message is assured.

Jojo and Kayla, two mulatto teenagers travel with their mother Leonie to the jail where their father has been imprisoned. Leonie has never been the perfect mother as she has always lived between melancholy and a vague hope of glory, like the delirium of a frustrated blues star.

The three women go in search of the white man who must be a father and husband. Meanwhile, the closeness will outline a first attempt at a family between the three, until now separated by maternal grandparents in charge of raising the girls at the mouth of the Mississippi. The arrival of new characters on that trip to the old prison of Parchman Farm, on which one of the blues that most echoes in the area was written, brings new tones to a novel that sounds like that attempt at composition between lives for a A final symphony that may sound like new life, old racial debts, or disappointment and death.

You can now buy the novel The Song of the Living and the Dead, the new book by Jesmyn Ward, here:

The Song of the Living and the Dead, by Jesmyn Ward
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