This is one of those books that, despite my recognition of some skillful and impressive writing, falls into the category of not-for-me.

The writer cites Faulkner as one of his influences, and indeed, something in Jones' style does remind me of that author, who admittedly is not a favorite of mine.

The Known World is set in pre-Civil War Virginia, in the fictional county of Manchester. Jones weaves in faux census data and snippets of history to bring this setting to life.

It begins in July of 1855 at the farm of Henry Townsend, a black man who was born a slave but is now himself a slave owner. This is an unlikely scenario, as Jones himself admits in an interview at the end of the book. In fact, as he alludes to in the novel, Virginia law didn't allow a freed slave to remain longer than a year in the state, and any who did were subject to being returned to slavery. However, this premise does give Jones the scope to examine the emotional, social, and moral complexities of slavery, so I was willing to give him some latitude.

Ultimately, it was the style that defeated me. His book is non-linear and meandering, jumping back and forth through time and different characters, with touches of magical realism. I think, particularly in a novel dealing with such a dark subject, it was fatal that I never felt settled or grounded by my sympathy with any one character (and in fact, almost every character was repellant in some way). Reading this became more and more of a slog, especially since I found the prose style less than graceful. It's the kind of book where, right from the first sentence, you have to read and read again, trying to parse the meaning.

This work should truly be regarded as an instant classic. It holds a position of such significance that it can be rightfully placed beside renowned literary masterpieces like "Invisible Man," "Beloved," and "Light in August."

Its profound themes, masterful storytelling, and unique literary style combine to create a reading experience that is both captivating and thought-provoking.

The author has skillfully crafted a narrative that delves deep into the human condition, exploring complex emotions, social issues, and the search for identity.

With its engaging characters and vivid descriptions, this book has the power to transport readers to another world and make them reflect on their own lives and the world around them.

It is a work that will undoubtedly stand the test of time and continue to be cherished by generations of readers to come.

I'm giving up on this, hence the one star.

I read about 150 pages and then set it down. I really don't want to undermine Jones' efforts to uncover the subtleties of slavery, specifically regarding black slave owners. However, this book simply bored me to tears.

I felt a sense of guilt, especially because I was reading it during Black History Month and it had won a Pulitzer. But then Marie Kondo's book came along and liberated me from that guilt.

It's just not the right book for me. Maybe others will find it engaging and enlightening, but for now, I'm moving on to something else.

I hope that Jones' work still reaches those who can truly appreciate and learn from it. As for me, I'll keep searching for that perfect read that will capture my attention and expand my knowledge.

I've never heard of this book by Edward P. Jones, nor of Manchester Country. The latter makes sense as Manchester Country, Virginia is a fictional place. However, the other two are very real, and it's a pity I'm learning about them so late.

At first, I thought this book would be a huge challenge to get through as I found Jones' writing terse and dry. But a few chapters in, it really grew on me. Jones has a unique style that projects clarity and intimacy, along with a cold, calm evaluation of the effect of time. It's like reading a 400-page epitaph carved in marble by the most loving hand.

I got this edition at my local used bookstore. I was looking for something to pass the week when a cranky old guy working there told me someone just left a Pulitzer Prize winner on his counter and he'd give it to me at a bargain price. I skimmed through the first chapter, read the synopsis on the back, and was intrigued by the premise. A slave becoming a slave owner is captivating, and it didn't disappoint.

The Known World is a stupendous book. It's not a simple story of slavery with clear good and bad. Instead, Jones gives us a perturbing layer cake of all shades of evil and compassion, which feels more real due to the nuance. I'm not American and don't share their obsession with race. I find it vexing and pathetic. For me, as an outsider, "getting ahead" is the essential American aspiration, even if there are casualties, and their ambitions can often be color blind. I felt Jones shared my sentiment. I loved the moral complexity. There are black slave owners and white abolitionists whose welfare depends on slavery. Jones doesn't take the easy way out, and there are no easy answers. Characters behave admirably in some situations and abhorrently in others, but always with purpose. In other words, this novel is not one-dimensional. There's a tremendous richness of character throughout.

Virginia in pre-Civil War was a complex and captivating setting. It was a place where the lives of white slaveholders, black slaves, black freemen, and even black slaveholders intertwined. This fascinating novel delved into this world, introducing several characters early on. At times, it was challenging to keep them all straight, as they were not simply all good or all evil. The author, Jones, had a unique way of revealing the characters' natures slowly, which made me eager to know more about them. I particularly liked how Jones would sometimes give snippets of the characters' future lives while still telling the stories of their current ones. Additionally, the non-chronological order of the storytelling added an element of intrigue. Overall, it was a great read that offered a rich and detailed exploration of a bygone era.

Great great book.

One of the characters early on makes a profound statement, as strange as a world that forces him to be a slave to a white man. He says, "God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people owning their own kind."

There's not much I can add that hasn't already been said by numerous other reviewers and perhaps even the Pulitzer Prize committee. However, this is a clear-eyed and brutally honest book about slavery in the 1850s. It delves into the moral bankruptcy that not only allowed slavery to occur but also the consequences it engendered.

This novel is not a typical page-turner. You would be doing yourself a great disservice if you didn't take the time to savor every sentence, every nuance of the dialogue. It's also an architectural wonder, seemingly flowing seamlessly from one story to another, a result of meticulous crafting.

Even though the setting is slavery, the novel explores much more. It's about the things that divide us and unite us, whether constrained by the artificiality of slavery or not. The themes are epic, including tragedy within the larger tragedy, betrayal, ambition, unwarranted brutality, the striving for a better life or to be a better person, grace emerging from adapting to circumstances, disappointment in children, true love, and forgiveness.

Each character is fully developed and inhabited. I only need to look at the cover of the book, which I cherish and don't want to part with, and they and their fates, which the author has carefully crafted for each one, immediately rush back to my mind. Read this book!

This is a remarkable novel that delves into the complex and often overlooked topic of slavery in Manchester County, Virginia.

The book is composed of a sequence of interconnected short stories or vignettes, which gives it a unique and engaging structure.

The author's writing style is truly extraordinary, as they skillfully switch back and forth between different characters and story threads.

Moreover, the use of a non-linear time sequence adds an additional layer of complexity to the narrative.

This unconventional approach makes the story somewhat fragmentary, but in a way that actually enhances the overall reading experience.

It forces the reader to piece together the different elements and makes them more actively involved in the story.

Overall, this novel is a powerful and thought-provoking exploration of slavery and its impact on the lives of those who lived through it.

It offers a fresh perspective on a dark chapter in American history and is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the past.

When one's husband tells one, "That's one of my favorite books of all time," one must read said book.

And I have absolutely zero regrets.

The Known World is the story of a slave-owning black (yes, really) family in the South some time before the Civil War. It's fictional, yet Jones based it on the real life existence of free black people who owned slaves. If that isn't a fascinating setup for complex character-building and story-telling, I don't know what is.

The narrative style is the most striking thing. Master Henry was dead, to begin with (apologies to Dickens). I assumed the black slave owner would be the main character, but no. The story is told non-linearly. We learn almost immediately that Henry Townsend, a black man freed as a teenager who grew up to keep other black people as slaves, is on his death bed. Then we jump back and forward in time, focusing on Henry, his parents, his former master, and all their relatives, neighbors, and friends in Manchester County, Virginia. While Henry is the fixed point, he's not precisely the main character.

In fact, there is no main character, save for Manchester County. It's an unusual set of circumstances perfect for examining racial supremacy and degradation. There are no simple characters here. Even the most evil has pathos and vulnerability.

The repeated themes are gorgeous. "The Known World" refers to maps, discovery, and what we understand about the world. Beyond it lies the knowledge that slavery is unjust, race is a lie, and the future will be different.

Death and rebirth are also strong themes. Both literal deaths and the transition from slavery to freedom (and back) are explored. Stamford's spiritual rebirth is particularly poignant.

Race in America is complicated. The Known World is a petri dish to examine those complications. It shows that the slave-owning South wasn't simply black and white.

I learned from White Trash that the rich pit the poor against each other. This is clear in Jones's book. There are free black characters who identify with white slave owners, white people who uphold slavery despite abhorring it, and poor white people who are viciously racist.

All these people form a tight-knit community. The cognitive dissonance of a former slave owning people is addressed through Henry's parents. They disown him and are secret conductors on the underground railroad. Their horror at their son's indoctrination is sad to read.

It's hard to understand how a former slave could enslave others, especially in the Antebellum South. But class and property rights are complicated. Henry was raised more by his owner than his parents. His former owner treats him as a protege and has children with a black woman. Henry identifies more with his owner.

This review is jumbled, like my thoughts on the book. I loved it. I loved the narrative style, the fleshed-out characters, and the view after death. The last impression is one of sweet despair. The wicked get away with crimes, and the righteous die. But the person who believes they are right has great power and will forgive themselves.

What an extraordinary work!

Henry Townsend, who was once a slave but is now a free man, has managed to own his own plantation and nearly 50 slaves. The lives of whites, free blacks, and slaves are intricately interconnected on numerous levels. There are layers of nuance, including expectations, reality, societal roles, how people adapt and adjust, justice, and especially injustice. The writing is beautifully crafted.

The writing style and the extensive character list do require some effort on the part of the reader, but it is well worth it. It reads very much like an oral history, which means that you may digress for a while. It definitely presents slavery from a different perspective - that of black owners of slaves. This unique vantage point offers a fresh and thought-provoking look at a dark chapter in American history.

Overall, this work is a captivating and important exploration of the complex relationships and power dynamics that existed during the era of slavery. It challenges our preconceived notions and forces us to confront the uncomfortable truths of the past.

The Pulitzer Prize won by this novel in 2004 makes one thing abundantly clear: Political correctness trumps bad writing, even very bad writing.

As a work of imaginative politics, this would be five-star all the way. The operative word here is imaginative. For a while as I read, I believed that at least I was receiving a powerful education into a little known aspect of the most shameful aspect of U.S. history. It's not just slavery per se (which is bad enough), but the fact that free blacks also were slave owners, and not insignificant ones at that – with genuine plantations and not necessarily with good intentions toward their slaves. Henry Townsend, the novel's protagonist (sort of – his early death is a crucial driver of the story line), shows kindness to a recaptured runaway slave by cutting off only a third of an ear instead of the whole thing. And by the way, his mother was so repulsed by the idea of her husband wanting to free his slaves that she gradually poisoned him by adding arsenic to his food. Yes, this is multidimensional; it's not just the whites who are bad. And actually, as white plantation owners go, William Robbins, the big shot of the county, is as decent a sort as slave-owners can be, although he never calls slaves “slaves;” he goes out of his way to call them “property;” as if he's trying to prove a point.

The writing, oh my, it's truly awful. Really, really awful. In the first half, the major irritant consists of peeks into the future, like the author's asides that show he knows what's going to happen to the characters in the distant future. For example: Years later, when so-and-so was in her nineties, she'd do this and such. And some episodes are presented by having characters interviewed years later by a historian doing research. So artistic! Z-z-z-z-z. OK. I could live with that. I've seen it before. It's irritating but some authors can't resist the urge to show what they learned in writing workshops. But the second half, the plotting – it's almost comically dreadful. And the character development, when it's done at all (which isn't often), it's about as satisfying as instant coffee. If you plod through, you'll understand what I mean.

In a way, though, this should not come as a surprise. After reading, I looked up a bit on Jones. Turns out he's not an accomplished novelist. Actually, he published his first short story collection in 1992 at the age of 41. It was about African Americans in Washington DC. Then came “The Known World” in 2003 followed by the explosion of publicity. And then in 2006, he does another short story collection about African Americans in Washington DC. So essentially, “The Known World” is a first novel. So one should not be surprised that it comes off as a first novel. Jones was not an experienced novelist.

But at least he's a dedicated historian; a lot of time passed between his first story collection and “The Known World.” He was obviously researching the daylights out of this powerful topic. Or not. Consider this, from a 2003 review:

* * *

So little was known about the subject of black slave owners, and so little had been written about it, that Jones's novel about Henry Townsend's plantation and its slaves was taken as a feat of historiographic revelation. “Jones has clearly done a tremendous amount of research to bring this time and place to life,” wrote John Freeman in the Boston Globe; the USA Today critic expressed gratitude that his “historical novel” didn't “become a tedious showcase for the author's research.” As Jones irritably pointed out in later interviews, including one appended to the novel's paperback edition, there was one problem with this interpretation: he had done almost no research whatsoever. “I started out thinking I would read a whole bunch of books about slavery,” said Jones. “But I never got around to doing that.”

In fairness to his critics, Jones works hard to camouflage his lack of research by including gratuitous details that, though invented, give the novel a patina of verisimilitude. He notes exact dollar amounts for each slave purchase; census information for Manchester, the fictional Virginian county where the novel takes place; references to (invented) contemporary works of scholarship; and historical anecdotes about the intricacies of slave law. Jones is not trying to be duplicitous; detail is the essential clothing of all good fiction, historical or not. But the apparent superfluity of some of these details can be unsteadying. Like the premise of black slave owners, the torrent of pseudo-factual information forces readers to question what they know about slavery and race, and to wonder which stories are too horrible to have been made up.

* * *

So much for historical education. Were any of the things I thought I learned true? Who the heck knows?

So as noted, for imaginative politics, this is five star. How could it be otherwise: The Pulitzer committee swooned. But as a novel, I'm sorry. This is a one-star effort by a minor writer who in the ten years between this and his prior work “never got around to” reading the bunch of books on slavery he thought he'd have to do.

Shortly before the Civil War in Virginia, there was a story about a Black slaveowner, his family, and his slaves. The writing in this story is quite beautiful, yet it was difficult for me to get fully engaged due to the large number of characters and the extremely nonlinear way of storytelling. It is so fragmented that it's hard to feel a connection with the characters. Their true depth doesn't become clear until rather late in the book.

Nevertheless, the payoff, although mostly tragic, is worthwhile. By the last third of the book, several characters emerge as protagonists. There is Caldonia, the widow of the Black slaveowner, who struggles to maintain order on the farm after her husband's death. Her overseer, Moses, makes some regrettable assumptions. Then there is Sheriff John Skiffington, whose faith in God and in the law conflict as he fulfills his deeply racist duties, and his desire to see the best in everyone has fatal consequences.

The deep entanglement among all these stories is astonishing and is part of what gives the book its power. The tiniest event or encounter sets off chains of events that run through the story like delicate filigree threads. Lives and deaths are interconnected across plantations, across states, and across time. This is as true in real life as it is in fiction, but I believe we don't always face it in our daily lives. "The Known World" (such an evocative title in hindsight, the best kind of title) points it out and makes you think about it.

The best book on race in America that I've ever read truly opened my eyes. It made me feel and understand, at least to some extent, the profound impact that slavery and race have had on this nation, more so than any other book I've come across.

One particular passage from the book has remained etched in my mind. It goes like this: "So Patterson resigned and returned to that English town near the Scottish border where his ancestors had resided for centuries. He dedicated the rest of his life to being a sheep farmer and gained a reputation as a skilled shepherd, 'a man born to it.' Whenever people in that region inquired of Patterson about the wonders of America, its possibilities and hopes, Patterson would respond that it was a good and fine place. However, he would also assert that all the Americans were ruining it and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans."

This passage not only provides a vivid image of Patterson's life but also offers a thought-provoking perspective on America's complex relationship with race. It makes me wonder about the true nature of America and the role that race has played in shaping its history and present.