Colson Whitehead's Top 3 Books

Downloading from your bibliography of fiction towards his incursions between the essayistic and the informative, Colson Whitehead he has made a place for himself among the great American writers.

For an author like Colson, who soon shows that love for literature with its component of social commitment, the chronicle acquires relevance in many of his works. It is about capturing that always subjective part (whether by noveling or meditating) with a view to contributing in such a necessary area of ​​reflection towards common consensuses and common sense.

But under the intention we also find the juice of the good stories that brought him to the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in the same year 2017.

And it is that looking for good stories with sediment to develop, Colson Whitehead also knows how to balance it all with characters loaded with powerful truth. and actions endowed with the most precise narrative tension filled with even fantastic aspects.

3 best Colson Whitehead books

The underground railway

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.

Zone One

The biological threat, whether as a predesigned attack or as an uncontrolled pandemic, continues to be a subject that, to be glimpsed with certain certainty and regret, sustains so many apocalyptic stories in literature or in the cinema.

But put into fiction, for a plot of this nature to stand out among many others, it must contribute something different, escape the typical infection - battle - extreme solution format.

In the case of this book Zone One, with its tendency towards the zombie genre, it achieves that point of terror with which to season the plot with that chill of fear.

But also, in the reading surprises, mysteries, twists are predicted. A kind of black premonition accompanies us as we move through Manhattan with Mark Spitz and his brigade.

In extreme cases, the value of life is very relative. It all depends on whether you are infected or not. What it is about is to eradicate the evil that yearns to take over the entire species with the blow of bacteria.

So far the typical thing in these stories of infections and the living dead. Zone One is the epicenter, the defensive bulwark of evil, the mother cell of the pandemic protected by its zombies like stubborn ants. What can hide there is something that Spitz and his people could never have imagined. And that's where the story surprises and fascinates, where you appreciate having immersed yourself in one more zombie story that becomes a unique zombie story.

The breaking point with so many previous novels and films has to do with a kind of double visualization of history.

What happens on the streets of Manhattan and what the zombies, turned into symbols, can come to mean in a consumer society and largely deformed on principles and reality. It may sound transcendent, but there is something of this sociological approach between the living dead and those who are in charge of making it disappear ...

The colossus of New York

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 build new relationships ...

Colson Whitehead's story seems to have been 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 receive 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.