Monday, April 23, 2018

Sing, Unburied, Sing

This novel by Jesmyn Ward is a wonderful blend of reality and Lincoln-in-the-Bardo-ish spirituality.  The story is about families: the daughter of a black family is involved with the son of a white family in modern day Mississippi, and between the two of them they make a third family.  The language is beautiful, "...life-giving flowers, ushering forth sweetness from fruit," and evocative, "He's been orbiting her [his dying wife] like a moon, sleeping on the sofa with his back to the door, searching the yard and woods for pens and bins and machines to fix so he can repair in the face of what he cannot."

There is a lot of sorrow and ugliness in the story, but the end is so unexpected, so full of imagery, that I ended up feeling a lightness (as well as thinking, so THAT'S what the title means).


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