dnf.
I trieddddd but my time is precious and my tbr pile is high.
Anyone that writes chapters consistently over 20 pages long needs to be slapped - I’m a millennial gal that needs constant engagement and this just was not it. I literally slipped into a coma last night trying to give it one last go and I’ve only just recovered…

Another disappointing Pulizter choice. The narrative jumps from present to past to future which can be wonderful when there are characters one cares about but I found I didn't care much about any of them. There are almost no positive marital, sibling, or parental relationships. While the value systems of the time period are hard to understand today, no one in this book seemed to have real value system at all. The book may be revealing to many who were not aware of the practice of free African Americans owning other African Americans as slaves, but there was never a character sympathetic enought for me to get the slightest glimpse of how they could justify this behavior from the white or black perspective. The majority of the charcters lack any real introspection and their motivation is unclear. While this may be a literary puzzle for the reader in some cases, here it was just frustrating. This book does seem to fit the tendency I see in modern literature. The tragic flaw was the downfall of a hero, a person admirable excpet for some weakness that becomes their undoing. Today it is more likely for a writer to paint unadmirable characters with one redeeming quality that is suppossed to atone for their other breaches of morality. Or redeeming qualities are viewed as an impediment to getting what one truly wants. We seemed to be determined to create characters that are "real" or are they just easier to compare ourselves to and feel good about our moral superiority--no matter how low the standard.

What a brilliant read! It wasn't a particularly easy book. There are A LOT of characters and there are many threads to the story. It all weaves together in very interesting and unpredictable ways. In the end it was well worth the effort.

This is one of those books where every aspect of the writing clicked for me. I loved it. I made me reexamine what makes me who I am as a person and as an American. I think this book changed me a little for the better.

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. And while it's fictional, Jones based it on the real life, actual existence of free black people who owned slaves. And if that ain't a fascinating setup rife for complex character-building an story-telling, I don't know what is.

The most striking thing about this story is the narrative style. Master Henry was dead, to begin with (apologies to Dickens). This came as a surprise, as from the description, I assumed the black slave owner would be the main character. But no, this story is told in a non-linear way. We find out 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. From there 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 around which all the events and characters revolve, he's not precisely the main character.

In fact, there is no main character, save for Manchester County. The main character is an unusual set of circumstances that grows into a situation perfect for examining racial supremacy and degradation. For there are no simple, straightforward characters here. Even the most evil character has pathos and an underlying vulnerability that humanizes him even after he has done the unthinkable.

The repeated themes throughout the novel are just gorgeous. "The Known World" as a phrase refers both to various maps and the theme of discovery. But also to what we understand about the world we live in. And in this case, it isn't much. Beyond the known world lies the knowledge that slavery is morally unjustifiable, that race is a lie, that the future will be different.

Death and rebirth are also strong themes in the book. Both in the literal deaths of several characters, but also in the transition from slavery to freedom (and back again, sadly). Particularly poignant was the spiritual rebirth of Stamford, an enslaved man who goes from a womanizing blowhard with no ambition to, after a traumatic storm, a community leader and living saint.

Race in America is fucking complicated. To suggest otherwise is to be willfully ignorant of history and current events. The Known World is a petri dish to examine those complications. For contrary to the basic understanding of the slave-owning South of most of this country's long and bloody history, it is not literally black (slaves) and white (slave-owners).

One of the things I learned while reading White Trash is that the rich have a tradition of pitting the poor against each other in order to maintain class boundaries by exploiting racial boundaries. And this is painfully clear in Jones's book. For there are free black characters who are wealthy and educated and feel like they have more in common with white slave owners than black slaves. And there are white people who abhor the practice of slavery but literally work to uphold it because "it's the law." And there are poor white people who can't afford a slave and are absolutely vicious in their racist victimization of black people, both free and enslaved.

And all of these people form a tight-knit community. The cognitive dissonance of a former slave owning people is addressed head-on in the form of Henry's parents, who not only disown him and dress him down the minute he buys his first slave, but who are secret conductors on the underground railroad. I loved Henry's parents for how clearly they exemplified the "Where did we go wrong?" complaint of parents everywhere... in the darkest fucking way possible. Their horror at watching their son indoctrinated into the class system of slave ownership is so, so sad to read.

And indeed, it's hard to understand how a former slave could enslave others. Especially when we're talking about the racist chattel-slavery of the Antebellum South. But class is complicated, and property rights are complicated. And Henry was raised more by his owner than his parents: one of the more interesting characters in the book. Henry's former owner treats him as a protege, and has himself two children by a black woman. He's honorable and kind, a "good slave owner" if there is such a thing. Henry identifies with William more than with his parents and the enslaved, uneducated black people around him.

This review is jumbled, but so are my thoughts on this book. I fucking loved it. I loved the wandering narrative style and the time the author took to flesh out each and every character, from Moses to Minerva. I loved the view characters took on after death, and the meandering way in which all roads came together at the end.

The last impression I got from the story, though, is one of sweet despair. For the wicked get away with horrible crimes, and the righteous die in the dirt. Only the good die young, or no good deed goes unpunished, or a thousand other platitudes. But what it comes down to is this: there is great power in the person who believes they are right. And he will forgive himself for just about anything.

The Known World, Edward P. Jones
The Known World is a 2003 historical novel by Edward P. Jones. Set in Virginia during the antebellum era, it examines the issues regarding the ownership of black slaves by both white and black Americans.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز سوم ماه ژوئن سال 2017 میلادی
عنوان: دنیای آشنا؛ نویسنده: ادوارد پی. جونز؛ مترجم: شیرین معتمدی؛ تهران، شورآفرین، 1394؛ در 389 ص، شابک: 9786006955049؛ موضوع: درباره دنیای سیاهان امریکای سده نوزدهم میلادی از نویسندگان سده 21 م
داستان «دنیای آشنا»، درباره ی دنیای سیاهان، در آمریکای سده ی نوزدهم میلادی ست. داستان، در سال 1855 میلادی، در مزرعه ی مرد سیاه‌پوستی به نام: «هِنری تاونسند»، می‌گذرد. او یک برده به دنیا آمده، اما حالا یک ارباب است. اربابِ سیاه، به آینده ای با مزرعه ی پنجاه هکتاری، و با سی‌ و سه برده ی سیاه می‌اندیشد. او با برده‌ هایش، همان برخورد را دارد، که اربابِ سفیدپوستش «ویلیام رابینز» با خود او داشت. واژه های داستان با دو شخصیت می‌چرخند: «هنری تاونسند»، اربابِ سیاه، و برده ی سیاه او: «موسا»، هرچند شخصیت اصلی داستان را میتوان «هنری تاونسند» برشمرد، اما او قهرمان رمان نیست، زیرا ویژگی‌های یک قهرمان را ندارد، بلکه شخصیت محوری داستان است، که از زوایای مختلف، مورد کنکاش قرار می‌گیرد. در کنار زندگی «تاونسند»، قصه‌ های عاشقانه، و کمدی شخصیت‌های دیگر نیز، طی چند دهه، روایت می‌شود. «جان فریمن»، منتقد «ایندیپندنت»، درباره ی «جونز» و شاهکارش، می‌نویسد: «جونز در دنیایی آشنا از سبکی موجز بهره می‌گیرد، و هرچه داستان پیش می‌رود، ریتم آن نیز تندترمی‌شود، و لحن نویسنده نیز جان می‌گیرد. «جونز» چنان با زبان بازی می‌کند، و گاه در خلال داستان، گریزی پرشور به گذشته، و آینده‌ می‌زند، که به‌ گونه ای خیره‌ کننده، توان تسلط بر قلمش را به رخ خوانشگر می‌کشد. و چنان آگاهیش را، با شکیبایی درمی‌آمیزد، که به راستی چیزی کم از معجزه ندارد.». «هارپر پرننیال»، منتقد «گاردین» نیز، درباره این شاهکار می‌نویسد: «خواندن دنیای آشنا آسان نیست، اما یک تجربه قدرتمند و فراموش‌ ناشدنی است.». ا. شربیانی

there is that old adage that a good book will tell you how to read it. and i have no idea to whom that should be attributed, only that my undergrad professors seemed to have been born to quote that thought endlessly: in my gothic lit class, my enlightenment class, my victorian lit class... the african and irish lit professors mostly kept their mouths shut on the subject. but the rest - hoo boy - did they love to drag that old chestnut out...

and it makes sense, to a certain degree. but this book doesn't tell you how to read it so much as it presents itself to the reader, like a fat man in a speedo lolling around on an undersized towel saying, "look at me ladies, you like it?? this is what you get!!" it almost demands that you read it and like it.

but i was disobedient.

every sentence, every paragraph, seemed to be trying to contain multitudes. and i am a fan of "thick" writing, but the manner in which this book presented itself quickly soured on me. there were too many stories or episodes ending with, "years from now, when celia was on her deathbed, she would think back to her third year of marriage",in a scene where she has yet to even be married, or right after two characters are introduced to each other, "this would be the last time they would meet until the hailstorm of aught-six" - and i am making up all the names and situations here, but you get an idea of the shape of my complaints. it's constant foreshadowing and some of the foreshadowing is just teasing, as the events never come to pass in the novel itself. it's like sitting down to tea with a god in his dotage, rambling and making connections only he can understand; seeing the past and future simultaneously.

"hey, karen, didn't you really like that kjaerstaad trilogy, where he basically did what you are complaining about here??"

yeah, what? so? shut up - isn't it past your bedtime??

yeah, but sure, that's true. but for some reason, it bothered me here. all i wanted was a straightforward linear narrative about a fascinating subject matter: free black men and women who owned slaves. when i read roll of thunder, hear my cry last summer, the whole transition period between slavery and freedom really excited my brainparts. i dunno. and mister jones was a real sweetheart when he came for the new yorker festival and i waited in line to get a book signed for a friend and i really wanted to like it because it seems like a nice fat sprawling sweeping story the way i like, but i just got lost in the names and the timeline and my confusion turned into apathy.

it's like this guy you date who seems really perfect - he is smart and looks like gabriel byrne and he dotes on you and everything is fun and on paper it all looks great and you know you should really like him, but he just doesn't make you laugh so you run off and leave him for a rockstar. you know?

because i feel like i should like this one because it is award-winning, and my experience with the african-american novel is middling (although i love the african novel, the west indian novel and the afro-canadian novel - go figure) so i feel like as someone who appreciates literature in general, i should totally love this. but it wasn't there for me.

oh, chris wilson, i am sorry. now you are going to want full custody because your baby is being raised among heathens.

years from now, when my and chris wilson's book-baby became the mayor of littleton, he would read this review and a tear of sorrow would come to his eye at my short-sightedness.

come to my blog!

The Known World is a complex masterpiece about slavery and the moral complexities of slaves owning other slaves. Jones creates a world the reader can hear, smell, taste and know down to his marrow. Every one of the dozens of characters has a back story. Most characters have a future story as well, that may be revealed at any time regardless of the timeline of the story. Edward P. Jones, in an interview, said "...I, as the "god" of the people in the book, could see their first days and their last days and all that was in between, and those people did not have linear lives as I saw all that they had lived."

It is difficult to keep track of the many characters, so know that your book may come with a character list, as mine did at the conclusion of the novel. It would have been a great help to me had I found it before I had strained my memory skills to the limit.

The Known World has won several prizes, including The Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2004.

Glorious account that gets past cliches. The premise is that two slaves in 1840s Virginia bought their freedom, but their son stayed a little too long under the master's care. What does the family do when the son starts his own farm and buys his own slaves? The mastery of Jones' writing comes in the sense of history that he lends to minute objects, chance encounters, and incantatory reveries within a frought landscape.

Not content to write an unwritten history of forgotten people, Jones re-writes the histories that have been written, citing documents the purport to explain the historical phenomenon of free blacks who owned slaves. Passages that carry runaway characters to the north also tie in academic treatises from the next century, deeds and warrants and court decisions that attempted to justify white supremacy, and the momentoes that emancipated children carry to their deathbeds. Jones doesn't neglect to include tales of individual transformation, collective redemption, or international implications in this epic. Characters may come and go like fleeting ghosts, yet the marks they leave may remain. When the words of the plantation master and deeds of the escaped overseer have faded into ineffectual memory, we readers are left with both the sense that an institution has gone horribly wrong and that the people within it can be honorably right; even if the results remain unapparent, the promise of future change remains, along with the threat of complacency and neglect.

Jones didn't attempt to detail the national debate over slavery that was current at that time. That limitation on his project was probably a good one. It allows us to see the human effects that rhetoric had covered, and allowed him to devote his attentions to demonstrating the range of positions that people could occupy in relation to the institution. Yes, whether you're descended from a slave, a master, a freed man, a black woman passing as white, an unwilling overseer, a treacherous deputy, a conscientious drunk, or an immigrant Irishwoman sold into prostitution, there's something in this book for you - and I wish that I was only joking, but the irony is that there is no irony here, and sincerity is the least of what we have to do, and memory is only the start of making a history that hasn't stopped.

Ambitious, Interesting, Disorganized

In an interview, Edward P. Jones revealed that The Known World took shape around 1) when he heard that Black people had owned slaves and 2) when he read a thin paperback in high school about a Jewish man who decided to join the Nazi party, how he acted in opposition to how one would expect.

The Known World is an ambitious novel which aims to describe the world of 1855 where Henry Townsend has recently died. As a result of his death, a cloud of uncertainty hangs in the air as he leaves behind his widow, Caldonia, and the undetermined fate of the slaves he purchased to work his land.

Although the plot is interesting, this book is disorganized. It covers many different characters and rapidly shifts time periods. I would be reading along and then the text would say “and this person lived to be 93 years old and had 235 grandchildren.” (paraphrasing)

Countless times, I had to stop and reread because the storytelling was so clunky.

In The Known World, there are quite a few references to Adam and Eve, even references to Milton (Paradise Lost). My favorite author, Philip Pullman, loves to talk about this topic and how in his works he wanted his characters to find their way back to The Garden by taking the long way around.

So this quote on page 329 stood out:
“There was a long way around but he chose not to take it.”

There is a character in The Known World by the name of Anderson Frazier. He creates and distributes pamphlets and interviews Fern Elston. In my opinion, this pamphlet could have provided a framework to systematically organize the characters instead of the resulting jumbled and confusing soup of characters and timelines.

The Known World has some unforgettable moments, but the organization of the narrative reduces the enjoyment of the reading experience.

The Green Light at the End of the Dock (How much I spent):
Hardcover Text – $13.87 on Amazon
Audiobook – 1 Audible Credit (Audible Premium Plus Annual – 24 Credits Membership Plan $229.50 or roughly $9.56 per credit)

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I still cannot fathom why this book won awards. I wil grant that it is built around an interesting premise but for me there were just too many flaws. There are a lot of characters that are hard to keep track and not one did I care about and want to know what happened and in fact could not toil my way to the end of the book. When asked at my bookclub if I wanted to know what happened to various characters I actually found that I still didn't care and couldn't even remember them (and I had gone over 3/4 of the way through the book). The writing was choppy with differeng POVs that change too frequently. The lengthy recitations of family trees, population statistics and other historical fodder further interrupt the flow and did not add anything to the narrative and took me out of the story to think about the author and why he felt he needed to cram that in. Perhaps to show off his research?

I think there are much better books out there that deal with American slavery.

There was the odd pearl of a sentence that was well written and poignant but for me there was too much work to be done to harvest the pearls.

Although this is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, I feel that this work could have been so much more of an epic achievement in writing but failed on many fronts. The non-linear approach to the story and its unfolding events is a complete disaster. This was compounded by the fact that the transitions between time period jumps were sloppy or non-existent. In the end, it was difficult to keep track of the characters and their interactions with each other consistently with the author's writing style. Also, the unexpected "future historical" passages were unnecessary and distracting. Plus, I was just not a fan of his choppy prose or storytelling. Simply put, had the author kept the plot in a linear fashion as originally conceived (as disclosed by the author in a postscript interview, argh!) and certain passages removed, this novel would have been an absolute classic.

Disappointing. I so much wanted to like this. One star for disjointed writing and three for what I learned about the period* for an overall generous two considering how hard it was to follow. I don’t have to like the characters when I read a story but as the author is their creator I like to sense that at least s/he does. So many acclaimed modern authors seem preoccupied with power and domination rather than love. Presumably that is what they value... But can a preference for power ever substitute for genuine love? Isn’t the former like spiritual slavery, whereas latter akin to freedom in the fullest sense of the word?

*Blacks in the antebellum South who gained their freedom become slave holders themselves; because slavery was so entrenched in the economy it was almost (but not entirely) impossible to conduct business without ‘servants’, i.e., the euphemism for slaves. Most freed blacks depicted in this story tried—at least initially—to treat their slaves differently than they had been treated by whites. The honesty in the story was in their discovery that the slavery system itself made human decency more difficult than they ever thought it would be. This theme was not developed.