The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead

The African American Author Colson Whitehead apparently abandons his tendency to the fantastic, addressed in recent works such as Zone one, to fully immerse yourself in a story about freedom, survival, human cruelty and the struggle to overcome all limits.

Of course, the baggage of every writer always weighs. So in this book The underground railway, Colson cannot escape a certain fantastic aspect that surrounds everything, although in this case as a tool to present a perverse world, the one in which every human being repudiated by any condition falls to live.

The aforementioned railroad is an old fantasy anchored in the imaginary of the slaves of the American cotton fields, although it really did translate into an abolitionist social movement that helped free many slaves through routes and "stations" such as private homes. overturned with the cause.

Cora wants, needs to reach that train to escape death or the madness to which she is led through abuse and humiliation.

Young woman, orphan and slave. Cora knows that her destiny is a dark reality, a tortuous path that can only lead her like an abused animal at the hands of a master who pays with her for all his hatred.

Given this perspective, only fiction can become a glimpse of a happy world. But at the same time it can be a firm hold to which Cora clings to stay alive and to escape everything known in its reduced reality of violence and contempt.

Cora embarks on the journey from the first station of the underground railway, with stops throughout an underworld where she will seldom find humanity, beyond those who give her welcome and shelter in the first place. But it is clear that when everything is ignominious, the small sample of that humanity that at least allows you to continue living, flashes like a dazzling hope that can continue to keep you alive, at least someone with the inner strength of Cora.

What Cora suffers, and what Cora can achieve is something that moves the plot and that moves the reader, in that play of shadows and some lights. The lyrics of hope, between evil and fantasy, make up a disturbing and certainly very human novel, where Cora reaches our hearts from the general filth.

You can buy the book The underground railway, Colson Whitehead's new novel, repeatedly awarded in the US, here: