The Water Dancer von Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Novel

Kategorie: Bücher
Seiten / Format: 432 S
Erscheinungsjahr: 2020
Verlag: Penguin Random HouseOne World
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN: 9780399590610

Nearly every paragraph is laced through with dense, gorgeously evocative descriptions of a vanished world and steeped in its own vivid vocabulary.Entertainment Weekly<br><br>Coates balances the horrors of slavery against the fantastical. He extends the idea of the gifts of the disenfranchised to include a kind of superpower. But The Water Dancer is very much its own book, and its gestures toward otherworldliness remain grounded. In the end, it is a novel interested in the psychological effects of slavery, a grief that Coates is especially adept at parsing. . . . In Coates s world, an embrace can be a revelation, rare and astonishing.Esi Edugyan,The New York Times Book Review<br><br>The most surprising thing about The Water Dancer may be its unambiguous narrative ambition. This isn t a typical first novel. . . .The Water Dancer is a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. . . . It is flecked with forms of wonder-working that push at the boundaries of what we still seem to be calling magical realism.Dwight Garner,The New York Times<br><br>  While neither polemical nor wholly fantastical, the story draws on skills [Coates] developed in those other genres. . . . The story s bracing realism is periodically overcome by the mist of fantasy. The result is a budding superhero discovering the dimensions of his power within the confines of ahistorical novel that critiques the function of racial oppression. . . . Coates isn t dropping supernatural garnish onto The Water Dancer any more than Toni Morrison sends a ghost whooshing through Beloved for cheap thrills. Instead, Coates s fantastical elements are deeply integral to his novel, a way of representing something larger and more profound than the confines of realism could contain.The Washington Post<br><br>Mythic language pervades the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates. . . . With The Water Dancer. . . we pay witness to a writer unchained . . . a writer finally able to marry novelistic tendencies to the form. . . . The fistfuls of firmament Coates is able to bring back to us are a wonder to behold. . . . The horrors depicted never felt rote or part of any genre rulebook. In highlighting families, Coates made his characters individuals. . . . Elements of the adventure novel, of the heist novel, of the romance are all there. But Coates expertly subverts the expectations each of those labels carries. . . . The book does not lack for scene-stealers. . . . Who is he talking to when he demands remembering? He s talking to us. All of us.Tochi Onyebuchi, Tordotcom<br><br>Studied and meticulous, the novel is a slave narrative that depicts the quotidian horrors of family separation. Even so, it s remarkably tender: The Water Danceris also a romance.The Atlantic<br><br>An experience in taking [Toni] Morrison s chances for liberation literally: What if memory had the power to transport enslaved people to freedom? . . . The most moving part ofThe Water Dancer[is] the possibility it offers of an alternate history. . . . The book s most poignant and painful gift is the temporary fantasy that all the people who leaped off slave ships and into the Atlantic were not drowning themselves in terror and anguish, but going home.NPR<br><br>An electrifying, inventive novel . . . [Coates] loses none of his mastery for conveying complex ideas and blending a deep knowledge of American history with scintillating wordsmanship. . . . His craft shows on every page. He gives this story and these men and women the care and space they demand and deserve. . . . A haunting adventure story told through the tough lens of history, The Water Dancer is a quintessentially American story of self-creation, doubt, and elevation.The Boston Globe<br><br>The best writers the best storytellers, in particular possess the enchanting, irresistible power to take the reader somewhere else. Ta-Nehisi Coates imagines the furthest reach of that power as a means to transcend borders and bondage in The Water Dancer, a spellbinding look at the impact of slavery that uses meticulously researched history and hard-won magic to further illuminate this country s original sin. . . . Exploring the loaded issues of race and slavery has become yet more fuel for today s culture wars, but an underlying message of liberation through the embrace of history forms the true subject of The Water Dancer. . . . Coates envisions the transcendent potential in acknowledging and retelling stories of trauma from the past as a means out of darkness. With recent family separations at the U.S. border, this message feels all the more timely.Los Angeles TimesAnd I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life, and though there were other bridges spanning the river Goose, they would have bound her and brought her across this one, because this was the bridge that fed into the turnpike that twisted its way through the green hills and down the valley before bending in one direction, and that direction was south.<br><br>I had always avoided that bridge, for it was stained with the remembrance of the mothers, uncles, and cousins gone Natchez-way. But knowing now the awesome power of memory, how it can open a blue door from one world to another, how it can move us from mountains to meadows, from green woods to fields caked in snow, knowing now that memory can fold the land like cloth, and knowing, too, how I had pushed my memory of her into the down there of my mind, how I forgot, but did not forget, I know now that this story, this Conduction, had to begin there on that fantastic bridge between the land of the living and the land of the lost.<br><br>And she was patting juba on the bridge, an earthen jar on her head, a great mist rising from the river below nipping at her bare heels, which pounded the cobblestones, causing her necklace of shells to shake. The earthen jar did not move; it seemed almost a part of her, so that no matter her high knees, no matter her dips and bends, her splaying arms, the jar stayed fixed on her head like a crown. And seeing this incredible feat, I knew that the woman patting juba, wreathed in ghostly blue, was my mother.<br><br>No one else saw her not Maynard, who was then in the back of the new Millennium chaise, not the fancy girl who held him rapt with her wiles, and, most strange, not the horse, though I had been told that horses had a nose for things that stray out from other worlds and stumble into ours. No, only I saw her from the driver s seat of the chaise, and she was just as they d described her, just as they d said she d been in the olden days when she would leap into a circle of all my people Aunt Emma, Young P, Honas, and Uncle John and they would clap, pound their chests, and slap their knees, urging her on in double time, and she would stomp the dirt floor hard, as if crushing a crawling thing under her heel, and bend at the hips and bow, then twist and wind her bent knees in union with her hands, the earthen jar still on her head. My mother was the best dancer at Lockless, that is what they told me, and I remembered this because she d gifted me with none of it, but more I remembered because it was dancing that brought her to the attention of my father, and thus had brought me to be. And more than that, I remembered because I remembered everything everything, it seemed, except her.<br><br>It was autumn, now, the season when the races came south. That afternoon Maynard had scored on a long-shot thoroughbred, and thought this might, at last, win the esteem of Virginia Quality he sought. But when he made the circuit around the great town square, leaning back, way back in the chaise and grinning large, the men of society turned their back to him and puffed on their cigars. There were no salutes. He was what he would always be Maynard the Goof, Maynard the Lame, Maynard the Fool, the rotten apple who d fallen many miles from the tree. He fumed and had me drive to the old house at the edge of our town, Starfall, where he purchased himself a night with a fancy, and had the bright notion to bring her back to the big house at Lockless, and, most fatefully, in a sudden bout of shame, insisted on leaving the back way out of town, down Dumb Silk Road, until it connected to that old turnpike, which led us back to the bank of the river Goose.<br><br>A cold steady rain fell as I drove, the water#1NEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER OPRAH S BOOK CLUB PICKFrom the National Book Award winning author ofBetween the World and Me,a boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom.<br><br>This potent book about America s most disgraceful sin establishes [Ta-Nehisi Coates] as a first-rate novelist.San Francisco Chronicle<br><br>IN DEVELOPMENT AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Adapted by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamilah Forbes, directed by Nia DaCosta, and produced by MGM, Plan B, and Oprah Winfrey s Harpo Films<br><br>NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD NAMED ONE OFPASTES BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYTimeNPRThe Washington PostChicago TribuneVanity FairEsquireGood HousekeepingPasteTown&CountryThe New York Public LibraryKirkus ReviewsLibrary Journal<br><br>Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he s ever known.<br><br>So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and theenslaved, Hiram s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.<br><br>This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children the violent and capricious separation of families and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today s most exciting thinkers and writers,The Water Dancerisa propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.<br><br>Praise forThe Water Dancer<br><br>Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir,Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations and then proceeds to exceed them.The Water Dancer. . . is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. . . . What s most powerful is the way Coates enlists his notions of the fantastic, as well as his fluid prose, to probe a wound that never seems to heal. . . . Timeless and instantly canon-worthy.Rolling Stone1USTa-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently the Sterling Brown endowed chair at Howard University in the English department.

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