The result is a novel of sweeping ambition in the tradition of Toni Morrison’s landmark neo-slave narrative, Beloved: an ornate ghost story about cultural memory, a parable for how history permeates the life of a community. On the other hand, the past suffuses the entire novel we can’t understand these events as anything other than the aftermath of earlier tragedies. On the one hand, its mother-son duo of protagonists, Leonie and her 13-year-old son, Jojo, speak almost entirely in the present tense, to the extent that sometimes they don’t seem to narrate the novel’s events so much as get swept along an inescapable current, captives rather than narrators. There’s a strange temporal disjunction at the heart of Jesmyn Ward’s new novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing.
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