Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a complex, multidimensional story of the interrelationships among slaves, Indians, black and white masters, patrollers, husbands and wives in an antebellum setting in fictional Manchester County, Virginia. The catalyst of the story is the death of Henry Townsend, a former slave who is mentored by his former owner, William Robbins, the most powerful man in the county. William Robbins has a white wife and children as well as a black mistress and children with her. It is no secret to anyone in the county that he spends time with both but prefers the black family, even to the point of educating his black children and his favorite slave, Henry. Henry's father saves money for nearly fifteen years to purchase his own freedom, his wife's and eventually his son's. However, as the years pass, Robbins's influence over Henry is gripping. After his father's purchase of him, Henry reluctantly leaves Robbin's plantation to live with his parents, but returns to the plantation to visit often. He grows up into a headstrong young man only to purchase land near his former owner. Under Robbin's tutelage, Henry purchases slaves for his farm against the wishes of his outraged parents who detest human bondage regardless of the master's race. When Henry dies young, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to grief, and the "known world" of Manchester County begins to unravel. Henry's most "loyal" slaves run toward freedom and the black Caldonia must resort to hiring white and Indian patrollers to reclaim her property. The complexities are heightened by the affair that ensues between Caldonia and her black overseer, the illegal capture and sale of Henry's father back into slavery by roving "speculators," and the final outcome of all the key characters and Manchester County itself.
The author's storytelling style is interesting as he often reveals the entire history of a character including the trials, tribulations, and sometimes his/her untimely demise before the character acts in the present. Thus the reader can quickly surmise that particular character's insecurities, motivation, and vulnerabilities. The book is filled with numerous characters, many more than are mentioned in this review; all are similarly interesting and engaging as the aforementioned. For example, Jones also provides an excellent depiction of the interconnections and mindset of the slaves on Henry's plantation which are equally complex and intriguing as the other white character's relationships. The Known World is a worthwhile read of a world created by the institution of slavery.

Very close to 4, but as good as it is, there was a bit lacking in it for me, to give it with a clean conscious 4 stars, regardless how acclaimed it is. More in my video review.

This book was one of the most interesting that I've read. Personally, I haven't read (or seen movies of) many slave narratives. I know the history, of course (growing up in the US, it's a very prevalent subject, for good reason) but I don't really know many of the complexities that kept the system in place. What was especially surprising was the knowledge that black slaveholders did exist in that time. This came as a big surprise to me. In this regard, it's an excellent book in the way of atmosphere. You could feel the stink that came from the system of slavery rotting through every person. Another thing to note is the gigantic cast of characters. This also made this novel unique from the rest of the novels I read for this course. There are at least 15 distinct characters; most with their own backgrounds. I found that it's best to just let it all wash over you instead of trying to intensively map it out in your head. If you're good at memorizing characters (and you live of Agatha Christie novels with large casts), then this is your book. If you can barely keep four characters straight, proceed with caution. It's such a complete universe, though, which makes the title all the more appropriate.

The Final Verdict:
There's a whole world that's described and the people inside this world only know it and nothing else. It's a really cool feeling and a very expansive and immersive book if you really get into it. Be prepared for some mental gymnastics, though.
4 stars

This tells the tale of black slave owners in the pre-Civil War south. It is an ensemble cast of characters, beautifully drawn in rich language and told with respectful remembrance. The tale jumps back and forth in time, so we know ahead the fate of some, but not all the main characters. The endings, as there are many for the diverse characters tend towards the awful, but not all fit that description.

This is a book I wouldn't have gotten past page 50 of had I not been reading it for a book club. While the author clearly did his research and posed a fascinating premise--free blacks owning slaves in 1840s Virginia--there wasn't much of a story or a key character or set of characters for you to hang your hat on. As such, I found the book to be much more of a slog than I would have expected with such a fascinating premise. This is one of those books where I want to take the author--who is clearly talented--aside and remind him that the novel is primarily a storytelling medium, and that if you're not telling a story, you're breaking your basic contract with the reader.

Despite some luminous moments where the characters come alive in a special way, this novel about the lives of slaves in a fictional community in Virginia of the 1830s felt too hermetic and sealed off for me to enjoy it as thoroughly as others might.

The special hook that the story holds is its rendering of freed blacks who became slave owners themselves. The focus is on one such plantation with about 30 slaves which is struggling to adapt to the death of its black master, Henry Townsend. We get a plausible history along the way of how his father, Augustus, was so talented at furniture making that he bought his own freedom, and state legislative action allowed him to continue residing in the state and eventually bought the freedom of his son.

With other free blacks, such as the feisty, condescending teacher Fern, who came from the North, they form a small society of their own. While Augustus abhors slavery, his son tries to emulate the path taken by the whites to economic success by owning slaves. Despite an ambition to become a benevolent master, the corrupting influence of owning people as property is well portrayed. When his lonely widow takes up a love relationship with her plantation foreman, she is replicating the same abuse of power enacted by most other white plantation owners, and the consequences are tragic.

The “known world” of plantation life in this fictional county is like an island in time, and the characters themselves seem stuck in it like insects in amber. The omniscient narrator is god-like in passing into the thoughts and dreams of more than a dozen characters. Unfortunately, the reader gets distanced from emotionally connecting to them by the narrator breaking the flow to leap backward and forward in time to reveal some particular fact or person’s fate (for more see: D.D. Wood review). Ultimately, the human bonds holding people to each other came off as tenuous and unreal as beholding a ship in a bottle.

Unlike the romanticized lives portrayed in Hailey’s “Roots”, the characters have no sense of cultural history of their African origins (the word itself appears nowhere in the book), and there is no foreshadowing of plantation life as a doomed phase in history on the path to the Civil War. The idea of a slave revolt is unthinkable, and the one humane white character, Sheriff Skiffington, feels no compunction over diligently carrying out a big part of his job in organizing night patrols and retrieval efforts when “property” runs away. Though we get no sense of the reality of the “Underground Railroad”, we do get a brilliant vision at one point where Augustus ends up mailing a slave girl to Philadelphia in a crate along with a shipment of his hand-carved walking sticks.

In an interview with Jones appended to the audiobook version of the novel, he admits he did not do much research for the book and was not concerned about communicating any particular message to his readers about the history of slavery. As the creator of all the characters, he would not admit to favoring any one character over another. Still the reader can’t help but getting the message of how inhumane slavery was and how individuals trapped in it strived to achieve some form of dignity in their lives. Like other reviewers, I didn’t feel I got to know any of the characters well enough to get emotionally engaged with them. When not interrupted by invasions from the narrator, the prose is effective in evoking the place and time, an obvious factor in helping it gain a Pulitzer Prize. Here is a lovely example from the opening for the book:

The evening his master dies he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins. The young ones, his son among them, had been sent out of the fields an hour or so before the adults, to prepare the late supper and, if there was time enough, to play in a few minutes of sun that were left. When he, Moses, finally freed himself of the ancient and brittle harness that connected him to the oldest mule his master owned, all that was left of the sun was a five-inch long memory of red orange laid out in still waves across the horizon between two mountains on the left and one on the right. He had been in the fields for all of fourteen hours. He paused before leaving the fields as the evening quiet wrapped itself about him. The mule quivered, wanting home and rest. Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the soil and ate it with no more thought than if it were a spot of cornbread. …he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because eating it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life.

What an extraordinary work! Henry Townsend, once a slave but now a free man, has his own plantation, and nearly 50 slaves. The lives of whites, free blacks and slaves are interconnected on so many levels. Layers of nuance - expectation, reality, societal roles, how people adapt and adjust, justice and especially injustice. Beautifully written!

The writing style and extensive character list requires some work on the part of the reader, but it's well worth it. It reads much like an oral history, and that means that you may go off on a tangent for a while. It certainly treats slavery from a different perspective - Black owners of slaves.

I attended a workshop with some friends during which we all went around the room and recommended books that really moved us that year. I don't remember which book I suggested then, but I recall one woman in particular who really loved this book (or I believe she was more in love with Edward Jones' writing). At the end of the workshop we had a gift exchange raffle and she included this book as her contribution. I was the lucky recipient of this free copy.

I was interested in this historical novel set in a fictional place in Virginia during the antebellum era, about a former slave who ends up owning slaves. The strangeness of the story and the angle it takes as a slave narrative is intriguing. Also appealing is the way the omniscient narration allows the reader to approach the story without the moral judgement one reserves for this kind of story, since the distance of the narration allows one to realize quickly what the story tries to showcase: how slavery has already poisoned the integrity of all involved.

The framework of the novel is composed of anecdotal stories within stories, with pacing often interrupted for a mini scene or two, or an introduction of yet another character who may reappear later or simply disappear. Put another way, it is a book of puzzle pieces: one is added, taken away, another picked up, oh yes, there's the whole, whoops, maybe not, here goes another piece. So although I admired the writing and story setup in the beginning, I just was not in the right space to complete this novel. It has been a while since I added a book to my "did-not-finish" list; alas, this one has just made the list. This is not a failed attempt at reading this novel, however, because I remember not being able to finish Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow only to later fall in love with his novel, Petals of Blood. With that in mind, I look forward to reading Jones' Lost in the City.

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2004 and in my opinion, it was very well-deserved. The novel tells the story of the residents of the fictional Manchester County, Virginia in the years prior to the Civil War. The author, however, makes the fictional county and its populace very real and by the time you finish this exceptional novel, you believe it to be so. The crux of the story revolves around a plantation in the county owned by a free black who is also a slave-owner. This is something I had never heard about nor considered as part of the vile history of slavery. (I did look this up on Google and there were indeed free blacks in the South who owned slaves.) When the owner of the plantation, Henry Townsend, dies, his widow is left to try to cope with its continuation and dealing with the slaves as well as the local non-black citizenry. The novel is filled with vivid characters including Moses, the overseer on the plantation and Henry's first slave; Alice, a slave who was rumored to have been kicked in the head by a mule and who wanders around the county most every night singing songs and talking nonsense; Fern Elston, a free black woman who could pass for white and who is also a teacher of black children; John Skiffington, the sheriff of the county; William Robbins, a wealthy white land-owner who encouraged Henry to own his own plantation and slaves; and Harvey Travis, Oden Peoples, and Barnum Kinsey, slave patrollers who don't always abide by the law.

This was not an easy novel to read. The language was sometimes dense and the author had a tendency to skip around in time and tell what happens to some of the characters years into the future. There were also a lot of characters to keep track of that made it somewhat confusing at times (about half way through the book I discovered a listing of the main characters in the back of the book making it easier to keep them straight). But it was well worth the effort to read and it provided some insights into slavery that I had not really thought about before. These included black slave owners and how it would be conceivable. Also the issue of free blacks in the South and the safety of them. Their only safeguard was a written paper saying they are free but was that enough to protect them from being sold back into slavery? Not necessarily! One incident in the novel reminded me of n  12 Years a Slaven an excellent film and memoir about a free black who was kidnapped in D.C. and sold into slavery.

Overall, I would highly recommend this one to anyone who wants to learn more about the condition of slavey in the pre-Civil War South. Wonderful read. Excellent!

This book was INCREDIBLY disappointing and I could not bring myself to finish it, as I have a strict rule against self-hazing. The Known World had such an interesting premise: the South just before civil war divides the country, former slaves owning slaves. This should have been an amazing book, but unfortunately, the author simply could not pull off amazing... or even moderately acceptable for that matter.

My primary problem with The Known World was that Jones literally threw characters into the story; I lost count after about two dozen cropped up within the first hundred pages. Each introduction was more hurried then the next, as new characters were strew across the page during incredibly-early points in the plot. It became impossible to distinguish one individual from another, and whatever story the author attempted to tell quickly unraveled as the identities of the plot’s participants muddled together.

Secondary to the character deluge was Jones' writing, which jumped from past, present and future events, often within the same sentence or paragraph. For example, the author would launch (another!) new character into the novel, and then portray how that character would die, decades later, all in the same sentence. If I had not been so confused and annoyed, I might have been impressed!

I suppose it was entirely possible that beneath the character inundation and convoluted time lines, The Known World contained a decent story. I simply could not torture myself by attempting to dig it out after every other page.

I know this is a critically acclaimed book, a Pulitzer winner, and a book tackling a difficult and complex stain on America history: slavery and black slave owners. There are moments when the book does say some interesting things or reveal some unsavory and uncomfortable truths, but it was so hard to engage with as a reader. I mean, I hung in with DFW through the first 600 pages of Infinite Jest where nothing happens -- but because I was fascinated by Hal, Orin, Marathe, Steeply, and Mario and Madame Psychosis who all fascinated me. There were literally dozens of other characters but these all pulled me in. In The Known World, there are also dozens of characters but none that I grew any attachment too. It was as if the author Jones was using a hand-held camera and no stabilizer so that the images were jumpy and out of focus. It reminded me sometimes of how the world seems to my myopic eyes between taking off my glasses in the morning and putting in my contact lenses.

The narration also highly annoyed me. All the parenthetical "in 60 years so and so will do such as such" were meaningless because I was given neither enough time nor enough detail to give a shit. Further, there is this reference to "years later they would all turn into human torches in front of the dry foods store", but no mention afterwards of to what this referred. But the most annoying bit was in using the Canadian journalist frame at about page 130 or so (which then only briefly appears in the narrative 200 pages later in a parenthetical throwaway comment, it is said that the journalist would never marry his heart's desire yet 3 pages later, they marry and that coming to talk to Fern that there was some incomprehensible stuff that happens off-screen that morning (also never adequately explained) and so she was not going to open up to the journalist and yet we still find her filling in details about Henry, Moses and Caledonia 30 pages later. Too much inconsistency - was the editor asleep or stoned and missed these?

So, despite taking on a complex subject, Jones is no Faulkner as his South does not eve approach that of the Great William. He is not as good as Pynchon or DFW is manipulating time and space in a narrative that was 100 or 150 pages too long and felt it, and he is not Alice Walker or Toni Morrison who brought us the most amazing, poignant, and powerful images of slavery and its residual impacts generations later that I have ever read. So, read Beloved or Absalom, Absalom if you want to hear about the South and I expect you will be less frustrated, but every bit enraged at this deplorable institution that is a cancer on the American past.

Should be considered an instant classic, a book to put next to Invisible Man, Beloved, and Light in August.