This is a complex novel, with dense writing, a non-linear structure, and an abundance of characters. It reads much like a true historical account of a place, Manchester County, Virginia, and time, pre-Civil War 1800s. This could very nearly have passed for a non-fiction book; each character feels so real, their personal stories and histories so authentic. The author even goes so far as to tell us what happens to many of them ten, twenty or even fifty years in the future. And yet, Edward P. Jones himself states: "The county and town of Manchester, Virginia, and every human being in those places, are products of my imagination… The census records I made up for Manchester were, again, simply to make the reader feel that the town and the county and the people lived and breathed in central Virginia once upon a time…" Well, consider me duped. At first I really thought such a county existed and the data presented were genuine facts. As my son passed through the living room, I even shouted out some sort of statistic or another and asked if he had ever read about such a thing in his history classes. He couldn’t recall, but it sounded ‘familiar’. Right, because much of this could have been true, yet it wasn’t. The institution of slavery of course was all too real and cruel, and that’s what this book is about, and this is the truth. Slavery in all its forms is evil.

Henry Townsend is a black farmer. He is a former slave that with the purchase of freedom and some land becomes a slave owner himself. Henry and his wife Caldonia own a small plantation near the border of his former master’s much larger one. I could not wrap my head around why on earth a freed man would ever want to enslave another human being. Henry and other black slave owners like him justify their actions: "Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master." Well, as the old saying goes, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ When Henry dies, all hell breaks loose, and we begin to see the ill-fated consequences of an institution that is immoral and corrupt.

A narrative that seems to jump around in time and between characters eventually comes together into a whole as consequences and events snowball out of control. Lives are permanently changed. Some for the worst, others (we hope) for the better. They all become woven together much like the massive tapestry hanging on the wall of another place in another time. Each is part of the story. Everyone is responsible for the events which passed, were allowed to pass despite the huge injustice to humanity.

This book is not easy to read. The structure is challenging and the topic is gloomy, albeit important. What happens to the people we grow to care for is often horrifying and heartbreaking. But it is well-written and extremely impactful. An important novel which is well worth your time and attention if you are up for the challenge. It won't suit everyone, but if you are at all interested, I encourage you to pick this one up.

"What I feared most at that moment is what I still fear: that they would remember my history, that I, no matter what I had always said to the contrary, owned people of our Race."

Here is my video review: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC325...

On the surface, this novel is the story of a short period of time after black slave owner Henry Townsend has died. He was thirty-one, married to a free woman named Caldonia, and they owned thirty-three slaves at the time of his death. Henry was born a slave, but his parents, Augustus and Mildred, worked hard to buy their own freedom and then Henry's freedom several years later. While they were free and Henry was not, he endeared himself to his owner, a man who had two families, one white and one with the love of his life, a slave. After Henry dies, there is unrest and some slaves disappear. This is the barest plot summary possible, because in actuality, the novel contains multitudes.

If you're looking for a novel that will make you care deeply for the characters, be enraged at the untenable practice of slavery, and think about the parallels of hypocrisy then and now to justify the unjustifiable, this might be the novel you need.

2.5-stars, really.

here is a perfect example of a books i should love, and yet.... i didn't. the book was a lot of work and, for me, very little reward. i think most of my issues are because of the style/structure of the novel:

* the third-person, omniscient narrator - this was distracting from very early on in the read. i held off judging it. i wanted to trust jones and his choice.
* non-linear narrative - i don't tend to have problems with this at all, but i found it super-clunky here. also distracting.
* the made-up references - jones would cite sources and details that seemed to lend such an air of gravitas, but none of it is actually real. (i know, i know. this is fiction. a novel. get over it. but it was just kinda weird to me. social commentary inserted into fiction happens. steinbeck did it. teju cole does it. many writers do this. i felt like jones did a crap-ton of research for this book. but then i read this NPR piece. in it, he notes he collected 2 shelves worth of books on slavery... "but never got around to reading them". so this just added to my 'what the?' on the references in the novel and jones' research.)
* all of this combined for a really awkward flow, and convoluted storytelling. i felt like it could lose 50-100 pages and be a tighter, better story.

in case you think maybe i am a lazy reader - i'm not, i swear! i love nothing more than a meaty, tough read. jones' story is definitely both of these things. he explores the issue of free black people owning slaves in virginia, and he gives us a large cast of active characters. but it all felt so... surface-y. we get the actions and reactions, but we don't really get the motivations or emotions. jones is navigating a morally dodgy landscape, one i would have loved to have gone into more deeply. we are given the horrors and the heartbreaks, but it all felt so detached. and, you know, maybe that is totally on purpose. maybe, for some people, detachment is the only way through such a horrible time in history.

jones has collected some serious critical acclaim and recognition over his career. to name a few: he's won the pulitzer, the national book critic's circle award, the PEN/Hemingway award, a MacArthur genius grant, and the International IMPAC dublin literary award. he's won nearly $1 million in literary awards alone. the man knows what he's doing, and the respect he's earned is fairly universal. the known world is an important story. but is just shining the light on the issues jones raises enough? so now i am back to the should. i should love this book. (it was just okay for me.) people should read this book. (indeed. but this is not a book i will blanket recommend to all.)

so, i don't know you guys. i am bummed over this one. and this is a terrible review/collection of thoughts. maybe i'll become more coherent with some distance and fix this up a bit - but for now i wanted to note down something here.

(aside #1 (going to be a bit spoiler-y here): moses confused me. or, rather, his turn to all-of-a-sudden being an asshole was weird. we're going along with moses. he seems like a lovely man. then, halfway into the book, he's a wife-beater, jerkface? where did that come from, and why was he presented like that? the reveal of moses being a not nice man was sudden and odd.)

(aside #2: worth noting (was hugely interesting to me) - the cover photo of this edition is © Eudora Welty! i had no idea about her photographic prowess.)

Fino a circa la metà di questo libro sono stata costantemente sull’orlo dell’abbandono, ho proseguito per puro spirito di abnegazione.
Il problema principale è stata la mia incapacità di distinguere tra la miriade di personaggi presenti fin da subito, e che per altro non vengono minimamente diversificati tra loro con descrizioni di sorta, e i continui balzi temporali (anche di molti decenni) all’interno dello stesso paragrafo.
Tutto ciò contribuiva a rendere la narrazione caotica, confusionaria, frammentata e di conseguenza il mio interesse pari a zero per le sorti della vicenda e di tutti i protagonisti coinvolti.

A un certo punto però sono riuscita (non so se per mio merito o per intento preciso dell’autore - propendo per la seconda-) a districarmi in questo mare magnum di persone ed eventi e il libro è divenuto sorprendentemente e del tutto inaspettatamente gradevole, tanto che ci ho messo 19 giorni a leggere le prima 250 pagine e 2 giorni le restanti 250.

Credo che alla fine l’obiettivo di Jones fosse quello di presentarti questa moltitudine di schiavi come una massa indistinguibile ed invisibile, come le mucche, le vanghe, i secchi: oggetti (con i quali è impossibile empatizzare) per poi lentamente presentarteli come persone uguali a te e a quel punto l’effetto è duplice; infatti non solo ho empatizzato parecchio (soprattutto la storyline che coinvolge Augustus mi ha inumidito gli occhi) ma mi sono anche sentita in colpa per come ho disprezzato tutti quanti e mi ero annoiata fino a dieci pagine prima.

Mi piace pensare che tutto questo sia voluto e che qui risiedano i motivi di un Pulitzer a un libro che a parte questo, a conti fatti, non regge però il confronto con quasi tutti i libri che lo hanno vinto prima.

Le tre stelle per onestà intellettuale sono una media ponderata del mio personale gradimento tra la prima e la seconda parte.

Reading this novel of a small rural Virginian community in the decade before the Civil War was like watching a tango. The way the narrative spun into the future, lightly touching characters, before swinging back to the present, looped back around to lasso in someone or something lurking in the shadows was like a perfectly choreographed dance. This book explored the tensions between black and white, black slave and black slave owner, private and public morality, survival and longing, love and fear. The language was so smooth, not a false step.

DNF at 27%.

In this book I learned that there used to be black slaveholders in the US. I thought that only white people were allowed to own slaves during the time that owning slaves were like owning properties. During that pre-Abolition time. During those sad dark days in the American history.

Black Edward P. Jones (born 1951) wrote this historical epic novel, The Known World based on the not well known fact that there were some black slaveholders (black people owning black slaves) in the state of Virginia during the time in the US when owning slave is legal. Wikipedia has this to say:

n  "Slavery in the United States was a form of unfree labor which existed as a legal institution in North America for more than a century before the founding of the United States in 1776, and continued mostly in the South until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865.[1] The first English colony in North America, Virginia, first imported Africans in 1619, a practice earlier established in the Spanish colonies as early as the 1560s.[2] Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there were a small number of white slaves as well.[3]"n

Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Award for Fiction, The Known World is one of the most memorable reads I had this year. It is not an easy book to read. This 388-page novel left me with a heavy chest each time I closed the book. Each page is gloomy and sad. The novel is well-told with lyrical prose creating a big canvas of imagery in one's mind while reading. In that big canvas are memorable and three-dimensional numerous characters most of them black slaves. No character is downright bad or good. The detailed description of the sceneries of a fictional county called Manchester and the true depictions of the characters are exceptionally striking that I had to slow down in my reading to savor the story and hold on *tugging to them, cheering them on* to each characters. Reading the last page left me with a heavy heart. I would not want to let go of that image of Manchester and say goodbye Please don't go yet to the characters that I already became part of my literary world. The world that resides in the recesses of my brain. The world that is known only to me populated by people who I met only in my readings.

In terms of writing, Jones extensively use the technique called prolepsis that I first encountered reading Muriel Sparks' The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Jones explained this in the interview (appendix of the book) saying that he is the God of those characters so he knows what happened in the life of each characters from the time he/she was born up to the time his/her death. The most moving example of this use was with the character of the child Tessie. One fine day of September 1855, their mistress Caldonia saw the 5-y/o Tessie playing with a wooden toy horse. Caldonia says to the child: That is very nice, Tessie to which Tessie responded, My papa did this for me. In January 2002, on her deathbed, the old Tessie asked her caretaker to get the wooden toy horse from the attic. While holding the toy, she breathed her last saying the same thing: My papa did this for me.

My heart stopped beating. Tears welled up in my eyes. That scene is just one of the many moving scenes about those slaves in that time of the history in Virginia when black people were traded like they were not human but properties.

I can make this review very long. There are just too many good things I would like to say here but I am afraid that no review can make justice to a book as good as this.

Bello molto faulkneriano crudo sudista ps quando i padroni di schiavi sono stati schiavi a loro volta... Da leggere

So if you ever want to read about a fictional town in Virginia taking place after the Civil War with more characters you can shake a fist at, this is your book. If you want a streamlined story with characters that are not flat, and a plot that is not all over the place, this is not the book for you.

I don't know what else to really say besides this book has so many characters it is pretty hard to sit down and point at one and say that's the main protagonist. The book synopsis for The Known World tells you that this is the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia.

Well it is also the story of Henry's parents, his wife, his slaves, his former slave owner William's family, the county sheriff and his family, etc. At one point I pretty much gave up keeping track of everyone.

Though Henry is in the story for a small part, Jones will reference him throughout the entire book when he goes from past to present and back again. I never got a feeling one way or the other about Henry. I thought he was an odd character who decided that after being born into slavery, he was going to go out and then buy slaves himself. He and his wife Caldonia saw themselves as better than the slaves they owned, but in the end, the book pretty much showed that they were not. This book could have been an interesting look at free blacks who went and then owned slaves themselves, but instead it felt more like a soap opera that I was watching on tv, or in this case, reading.

The other characters seem to be mere caricatures here and there and with the meandering story-line it was hard to even care about someone one way or the other. You would be reading and then Jones would drop that the person had died three years and two months later and then go on with his story.

The writing was really not that great. There was too much information being forced into paragraphs for me as a reader to even begin to settle while I was reading this. For example:

“The power of the state would crush them to dust,” Louis said.
He spoke, as always, not because he had any well-considered views on an issue, but to impress the women around him, and he was now at a point where the woman he most wanted to impress was Caldonia.
He had come to Fern’s classes after Caldonia had completed several years of her education, so she had not had much time to learn who he was.
And Calvin had said little about him to her, so in many ways they were still strangers to one another. “The Commonwealth would put an end to it right quick.”

I mean why put that part of going to Fern's classes. It takes away the entire rhythm of that paragraph.

Here's another example. We read about this Broussard character for a while during the book and it jumps around so much about his end and then would go back to his family who was not missing him in France.

"Perhaps it was just as well that Jean Broussard came to the end that he did in America.
His family would never have separated from the lover; he would have had to come with them, or they would not have come at all.
No, it was over for him in France.
Someone had even accidentally broken Broussard’s favorite mug.
His family could have done worse than the man his wife took up with.
The lover was, in his fashion, quite a religious man.
And he was handy with a knife.
He could carve out a man’s heart in the time it took for that human machine to go from one beat to another; and with that same knife the lover was able to peel an apple, without sacrificing any of the apple meat, and present it fresh and whole to a waiting child."

I don't know what else to say besides the entire book was set up just like this. Way too much information squeezed into paragraphs. The flow of the entire book was off. We started with an end. And instead of working our way back chronological with the beginning, the story goes back and forth and goes back and forth to other characters.

The setting of Manchester County Virginia, where The Known World takes place does not feel like a real live place at all. There was no real life imbued in the place since we skip around so much.

At the almost ending of the book, the entire plotting becomes a mess and the book kind of stutters to the end. I am glad that I read a book that was on the books every African American should read. However, i doubt I will seek this book out to read again in the future.

This kind of swung between 4-star material and 2-star material.

It was a really interesting subject matter (if kind of horrific to read about)(which, lbr, a novel about slavery is never going to be fun) and parts of the novel were really gripping and informative and thought-provoking.
But there were parts of the narrative that were just confusing. I could cope pretty well with the jumping back and forth in time, but sometimes it was too much and you'd cover at least 3 different periods of people's lives on one page (all in the form of something like: "there was a day 3 years before X died when Y was walking down the street with her then husband") and tbh it could get a little confusing. And sometimes it was just irritating.
Also there were a lot of characters and it was pretty hard for me to keep up with who was whom.

But overall it is a good book and I'm glad I read it. It was pretty brutal and didn't give you any kind of happy ending (which is a much more realistic ending for a novel which focuses on the enslavement of black people in the States). It covered a whole load of themes, including white and black slaveowners, slaves earning "freedom", racism, internalised racism, free black people being kidnapped and sold into slavery, and more. Fun stuff.

Beautiful, interesting, and haunting.

This novel was a revelation to me. It is entirely scene and I owe the book itself a debt. My essay about The Known World was part of the application materials that got me into my MFA program. (That I read it immediately before reading Gilead, which has a precisely opposite narrative strategy was one of those sparkling moments of synchronicity.)

Free Black men owned slaves in the south. Jones learned this early in college and that fact sat in the back of his mind, waiting to become a novel. What we will do to be counted successful!

I wish I could open that essay I wrote about this novel in 2005, but the file is 12 years old and in a format no longer supported by anything on my computer. Suffice it to say, Jones's was an astonishing read.