A brilliant and heart breaking story of life during slavery, and the multilayered ways that it corrupted and devoured everyone that came in touch with it. Absolutely brilliant, including how the author used a non-linear time frame, that confused me a lot at the start but by half way into the book it really clicked.

Here is my review of this fantatsic novel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M43gq...

There’s irony that I read more than half of this wrenching, ugly, hopeful, stirring, and grievous book while holding a sleeping baby in my arms. Because there is a lot of life and death in this take on pre-Civil War Virginia.

I knew little about the book except that the author wrote it after reading about freed Black folks owning slaves. In delving into this issue, which in any modern conversation circle must bring dissonance, disbelief, and maybe even disgust, I became increasingly moved and disturbed.

A difficult book, both because it’s an unflinching look at slavery, but also because it’s written in a James Joyce-ish style — lots of asides and stream of consciousness text. The author careens from generation to generation and back again in often the same paragraph. Yet it worked for me. It reads like a memoir of an entire county’s 150-year history complete with dozens of families represented.

What results is simply, UNFORGETTABLE. There are characters whose faces I imagined while reading and characters whose stories I became invested in that will haunt me. Not in the truth of a fictional characterization but more because the ugliness of humanity was so blatantly on display and sadly remains real to this day.

As I bid farewell to the slaves, slaveowners, children of both and ministers, sheriffs and patrollers of this novel, I will not forget their names. And I can’t help but wonder who would I have been in Manchester County, Virginia?

Story of a Black slaveowner in Virginia shortly before the Civil War, his family, and his slaves. There is some beautiful writing here but I found it difficult to get pulled in due to the large cast of characters and wildly nonlinear storytelling. It’s so splintered that it’s hard to feel connected to the characters, and their depth doesn’t come into relief until rather late in the book.

Still, the payoff, while largely tragic, is worth it. By the last half of third of the book, a few characters emerge as protagonists — the Black slaveowner’s widow, Caldonia, who struggles to keep order on the farm after her husband dies; her overseer Moses, who makes some regrettable assumptions; the sheriff John Skiffington, whose faith in God and in the law clash as he fulfills his deeply racist duties, and whose desire to see the best in everyone has fatal consequences.

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

A knockout! Doesn't he have a new book coming out in the New Year? Soon I hope. He's a wonderful writer. Why hasn't Oprah made this into a film? What's she waiting for?

Basically - a book about slavery in the South. I enjoy those kind of thing, especially The Secret Lives of Bees, but with this one, it felt like the book had no point. While I was reading, I kept on going "what did I just read? Am I really reading/understanding this book?" and kept on referring to the back cover of the book. No. The story was simply what I read. O.......K! Then ugh. I HATE leaving a book unread, so I kept on forcing myself to read thru the whole book. Finally the misery I was putting myself through ended, and UGH! The storyline. The author kept on jumping around the timeline too much - and honestly - I would describe this book as a glimpse of the lives of slaves in the south, but with a blah storyline. However this book has won a pultizer prize. EH!? Anyone out there who has read this book? Your opinions??

However like always, we learn from books. What I got out of this book was a new knowledge I never came upon, that black people owned black slaves.They even buy their own family members, and the slaves were considered as properties, including family. Hmm... History is richier than we will ever know or think of.

Il mondo conosciuto è un romanzo aspro sugli ultimi vagiti di un mondo sull’orlo del cambiamento. Ambientato principalmente nel 1855, in Virginia, qualche anno prima dello scoppio della Guerra di Secessione, racconta da angolature inedite la crudeltà della schiavitù.
Le vite di schiavi, di schiavi affrancati e di neri nati liberi.
Dalla critica viene spesso paragonato a Via col vento, confermando quanto la critica comprenda poco alcuni testi. In particolare Il mondo conosciuto nasconde i perni narrativi moderni, esplicitando un timbro apparentemente classico, che classico non è.

Edward P. Jones gioca sull’ambiguità della narrazione, in pieno stile post moderno, parodiando il genere della narrativa storica. Per fare ciò, mette in atto gli stessi fallimenti della Storia, che è raccontata dai vincitori, attraverso la manipolazione del tempo e l’utilizzo di fonti.

Le citazioni che a volte compaiono nel testo in realtà sono finzioni, che fondono un presente storico immaginario, quello del narratore onnisciente, con un passato storico immaginario.

Gli schiavi di Jones sono trattati come proprietà, a cui oltre che l’identità e la libertà, è negato il futuro. Attraverso la manipolazione temporale Jones restituisce l’avvenire e insiste sull'umanità.
L’artificio letterario risulta nascosto in una visione angolata resa da un tono distaccato, ma che in realtà è profondamente cosciente di quello che sta narrando.

Very complex themes and characters. Historical fiction set in virginia, era 1800's. The tale of former slaves being slave owners. Learned some facts, very fascinating. Draw back: hard to remenber all the characters and how they are inter-relate.

The best book on race in America that I've read. Reading it made me feel and understand at least some of what slavery and race has done to America, more than any other book I've read has.

One passage stuck with me:

"So Patterson resigned, took himself back to that English town near the Scottish border where his people had lived for centuries. He spent all the rest of his years as a sheep farmer and became known as a good shepherd, 'a man born to it.'
... Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans."

The author of The Known World has created a world of people — slaves, whites and slave-owning free African Americans — in a fictional county in Virginia, in a time which takes place mostly before the Civil War. I say mostly then, because the stories of these people jump around in time. There are some linear elements to the stories, but the author sees the entire span of life of each character as the tales are told. In the creation of this world, the author has done an amazing thing because the reader feels like a true and authentic history is being told. The creation of this specific county in this specific time reminded me of Faulkner’s works.

There is some really good writing here and it confronts the reader with the thorny issues of the times and the circumstances of these lives. One example — if the Civil War or a slave uprising were to happen, the black slave owner says, “The only question for us, around this blessed table, is which side should we choose. I suppose that is what the pamphlets want me to do. Choose my side.”

In a similar way, when a white man is trying to tell the truth about a situation involving a free black man who was wronged by some whites, he is afraid people will think he is betraying his tribe of white people. He says, “A body should be able to stand under some…some kinda light and declare what he knows without retribution. There should be some kinda lantern, John, that we can stand under and say, ‘I know what I know and what I know is God’s truth,’ and then come from under the light and nobody make any big commotion bout what he said.” There is more to that speech, and when I was finished reading it, I was reminded of the speech that Tom Joad gives when leaving his mother at the end of The Grapes of Wrath.

I guess to be compared with Faulkner and Steinbeck is pretty high praise.

My reluctance to give this book a higher rating is sourced primarily in that I didn’t really feel all that connected to anyone in the novel, almost as though I was observing them from a great distance. But it was quite a fascinating view.

Slavery is often depicted as a single, monolithic institution. The Known World in its exploration of slavery, especially slaveholding by free middle-class Blacks, shortly before the start of the Civil War, blasts this misconception wide open. Edward P. Jones starts small; The Known World initially appeared to be a series of unrelated very short stories, together going nowhere. Soon, however, it became clear that his stories were "unrelated" in the same ways that the pieces of a mosaic are (i.e., not at all unrelated). One anecdote highlighted and clarified another.

The Known World, then, is a series of stories braided together. Alice's nonsense rhymes were reflected in Augustus' refusal to hear or speak. Saskia and Thorbecke appeared only to bring about Counsel's fall. Although Jones' characters often lacked insight – "She had thought all that day that the three [escaped enslaved people] would return before nightfall, finding it difficult to believe that two women and a boy would leave what she and Henry had made" (p. 317) – his contrasting stories deepened our (my) understanding of slavery and Black enslavers. Calvin, whose mother had owned Blacks (her "legacy"), was opposed to the institution, yet wrote his slave-holding sister that he was "trying to make myself as indispensable as possible and yet trying to stay out of the way, lest someone remember my history [living with enslaving people] and they cast me out" (p. 386).

The Known World often appears to avoid emotion, but that's part of its beauty. As Jones says, "I don't like to use a lot of emotions or what I call 'neon-lighting' because almost all the time whatever I'm writing about has enough emotion in it, and all I have to do is tell the story" (Ellis, 2004). I think adding in cheap emotions would have sapped the book's true emotional depth. We (I) would have felt manipulated and resisted Jones, instead of spontaneously being appalled or angry or wondering about the moral questions raised, as Jones clearly wanted. "Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?" (p. 9). Or as Peter Jennings, then anchor for ABC News, said about reporting of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11/01: "Throughout my entire career, I have always been conscious that there are times when some people on television talk too much. Silence or natural sound on occasion is infinitely more powerful and relevant" (Graff, 2019, p. 152).

Although some of Jones' characters were clearly good (Celeste or Augustus) or evil (Travis or Counsel), most – Black and white – were morally ambiguous, as were the situations they found themselves in. As Augustus said, "I’ve had a little experience with this freedom situation. It’s big and little, yes and no, up and down, all at the same time” (p. 49). I sometimes liked Moses and rooted for him, although often was yelling at him as he made one error followed by yet another. Similarly, "despite vowing never to own a slave, Skiffington had no trouble doing his job to keep the institution of slavery going, an institution even God himself had sanctioned throughout the Bible. …'Render your body unto them,' his father had taught, 'but know your soul belongs to God'” (p. 43).

It's rarely that easy – as Skiffington discovered.

Their known world was often small, confining, and prevented real communication across racial and class lines. After Minerva disappeared, Winifred, who saw herself as Minerva's mother, put posters all over Philadelphia, asking for her return. The poster included the line, “Will Answer To The Name Minnie.” "[Winifred] had meant only love with all the words, for she loved Minerva more than she loved any other human being in the world. But [she] had been fifteen years in the South, in Manchester County, Virginia, and people down there just talked that way." Minerva heard a very different message and didn't see Winifred again for a very long time" (p. 382).

Sherry Ellis' (2004) interview of Edward P. Jones: https://www.awpwriter.org/magazine_me...

A. O. Scott's (2024) interview with him: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/bo...

This is a novel about slavery in Manchester County, Virginia. This book comprises a series of linked short stories or vignettes and the writing style is quite unusual, with the author switching back and forth, not just with respect to characters and story threads, but also by making use of a non-linear time sequence. It makes the story to become quite fragmentary in some way.