Nobody better than a writer usually fiction like Colson Whitehead to present a city that lives between the reality of being a universal city and the fiction of becoming a cinematographic city par excellence.
Colson's eyes are an incomparable tool for viewing the Big Apple as a city always to be discovered. All of us who have ever traveled to that Western Mecca return with unforgettable impressions and sensations. New York is a friendly city and at the same time an alienated unreal space where it is difficult to combine a family life in the old way.
New York is a city of young dreamers and rich capitalists, a contrast of opulence and scarcity, a rich amalgam of neighborhoods with their own cultural identity that erases everything that surrounds them as soon as you enter them. A Sunday in Harlem smells and tastes of a tribal city, a moment of relaxation in Central Park leads you to a strange jungle sensation in the heart of the big city, a night out in the bars of Chelsea brings you closer to people eager to forge new relationships ...
Colson Whitehead's story seems to be written by a traveling soul who has just landed in the city and who is outlining everything he discovers black on white. The Afro-American author leads us through a city full of music, a jazz capable of improvising before a mutable city from one day to the next and that, despite this, always surprises and magnetizes.
New York as the eternal new world; a city ready to welcome everyone but raw and whimsical for the seekers of its glory. A city where loneliness is erected among its skyscrapers, a city attacked by intense winters and punished by merciless summers, but which continues to maintain autumns that stain Central Park orange and make it bloom furiously with each new spring.
You can buy the book The colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead's guide to the big apple, here: