[:en]Fantastic Reading Room: Subway 27.11.2017. House of Youth

Fantastic Reading Room: Subway, Monday at 07 pm/ 09 pm

Colson Whitehead is an interesting person. He is awarded the Makartur Scholarship, the Guggenheim Foundation Prize, and the author of six novels. The first novel The Intuitionist of 1999 begins the study of racial problems using mild fantasy motives. Next, John Henry Days of 2001 is a historical novel about John Henry and his auction to the death of exhaustion against the steam icing machine, and the construction of the railroad; he received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Apex Hides the Hurt from 2006 approaches the unusual problem: changing the name of a city and the process that brings it. Sag Harbor 2009 deals with racial and class issues of growing up in the city of the same name. Zone One of 2011 is an unusual zombie postapocalypse, praised for its originality.

Roman Underground Railway (2016) and brought to the Whitehead “Pulitzer”, as well as the Artur T Award. Clark for the best science fiction novel published in the UK. Žanrovski can be accurately determined as an alternative history but you will find it on the shelf with historical novels, although the departure from both the technological reach of the epoch and the established historical events are not. It connects much of what we have seen in previous novels into an impressive whole: racial thematic, class conflicts, a fanatic motif that functions as a metaphor and as a catalyst of action that leads to divergence from historical events.

Roman has recently published “Laguna”:

Bora is a slave in cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell with all slaves, but it’s particularly difficult for Cory. Rejected even by its Africans, it is at the threshold of maturity, where even more troubles are waiting. When Caesar, recently arrived from Virginia, told the subway, the two of them decided to expose themselves to terrible danger and escape. Do not do everything according to plan – Bark kills a white boy who is trying to catch her. Although they manage to find the station and go to the north, they chase them.
According to Whitehead’s ingenious idea, the subway is not just a metaphor – engineers and conductors work in a secret network of railroads and tunnels under the southern hemisphere. Korina and Caesar’s first station are in South Carolina, in the city that at first seems like a safe harbor. But under a quiet surface, a crumbling plan for black inhabitants was hiding. Worse still, Rihway is a notorious and irresistible slave hunter. Being forced to flee again, Bora moves on a painful journey from one country to another in search of real freedom. Like the main character of Guliver’s travels, Kora encounters different parts of the world on every part of the road – and her odyssey is through space and time.
Whitehead has mastered the saga of America from the brutal bringing of Africans on her soil to the unfulfilled promises of today, brilliantly conveying the inexpressible horror of the Negroes from the time before the Civil War. The subway is at the same time a story of a woman of insoluble willedness to escape the dread of slavery and a painful, powerful reflection on the past to a common all-Americans.

You can read the excerpt on the Laguna website:
https://www.laguna.rs/n3569_knjiga_podzemna_zeleznica_laguna.html

Moderator: Bojan Butković