If you enjoy American stories, you'll have noticed that quite a few of them take place on the road. The United States is a vast country whose long highways connect very distant places. Many famous American novels and films are about stories that occur while their characters are traveling along these highways. These novels are often celebrations of American life.
Jesmyn Ward's National Book Award winner Sing, Unburied, Sing is a road novel, but not a celebration. The road journey here is through Mississippi as an African-American mother and her two children travel to collect her white husband -the children's father -as he's released from jail.
Neither the mother Leonie, nor the father Michael, are ideal parents. Leonie in particular is so full of anger and regret that she takes out her unhappiness on her children, the 13-year-old Jojo and his little sister Kayla. And the pain of lacking proper financial support makes the journey even harder.
The telling of the story is divided between various narrators. Jojo, the boy, is the most sympathetic of them. But it is worrying to read about how he experiences the world. Even though he's young. he's already experienced the dark side of life. The opening sentence of the book gives a sense of Jojo's unnatural maturity. "I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that I could look at it straight. "This maturity is tested when a white policeman pulls a gun on him when Jojo puts his hand in his pocket.
But who, or what, is to blame for these sad circumstances? For Ward, it's clearly the past. She admires the work of fellow novelist William Faulkner. When she thinks about the past, she's of the same mind as him.
Faulkner famously wrote: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” At one point. Ward says that her characters are “pulling the past with them,” like a too-heavy trailer coupled to the car as they journey on through Mississippi to the jailhouse. The biggest part of this past, of course, is racism -the remains of slavery -which is always there, and ruining life.
This is probably why The Washington Post listed Sing, Unburied, Sing as one of its 10 choices of 2017's Best Books. “The plight of this one family is tired to crimes that stretch over decades.” wrote the newspaper. “These are people pulling all the weight of history.”
【小题1】What can we learn about Sing, Unburied, Sing from the article?| A．It was recently adapted as a film. | B．It's a celebration of American life |
| C．It's one of 2017's best-selling American novels. | D．It is a story of a road trip through Mississippi. |
| A．is the main narrator of the novel | B．is the youngest child in the family |
| C．fights with a white policeman on the road | D．shows an unusually mature mind of a child |
| A．The unhappy marriage of the parents | B．The lack of educational opportunities |
| C．The remaining slavery and racism. | D．The lack of financial support from the government. |
