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.

Here is a book about black slave owners in the antebellum South! My interest was immediately piqued. On top of that, the book has won all sorts of prizes:
*Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2004)
*International Dublin Literary Award (2005)
*Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (2004)
*National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (2003)
* Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominee for Debut Fiction (/2004
*National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (2003)
I knew I had to give it a try.

I am glad I have read it, but to say I like it, would just not be true. It’s OK, so I am giving it two stars.

There is no real central character to the story, because he dies right off the bat. It is 1855 when Henry Townsend dies. He is black. He had been a slave, but his parents had bought him his freedom. He leaves behind no children but a wife, Caldonia, a twenty-eight-year-old educated black woman born free, and his property of thirty-three slaves and fifty acres in Manchester County, Virginia. The book is about the hell that breaks loose afterwards, but really what it is about is life in the South during the antebellum era, about the mindset of Blacks and Whites of this era.

The story is told by an omniscient narrator—who knows how each character thinks, what has happened to all of them in the past and what will happen to all of them in the future. It is this all-seeing narrator that shapes the entire feel of the story. This narrator knows everything, but he is not particularly adept at cogently telling a story. In one sentence you may switch form the present to the future and back again. In the next sentence you flip back to the past. It is easy to become confused. Character upon character is thrown at you, with little tidbits about their lives in the past, present and future. You are given an entire community of individuals—Whites and Blacks, a Native American or two, those who are free and those who are slaves, a sheriff and his deputy. The omniscient narrator is constantly restating who each one is, which is good in one sense, but the flow of the tale becomes jerky. Stop and start, backward and forward and often confusing. Use of the omniscient narrator is pushed to the extreme.

It is kind of nice to have a character or two to guide you through a story. You do not have that here. There are a whole group of characters, characters that are hard to attach yourself to. You do not get close to any one individual. In the afterword the author points out that he wanted to draw characters that were neither all good nor all bad, each one different in their own way. You do get that here, but you fail to feel anything for any of them. What you do get is a strong sense of being one of a large community. You are there, one among many, living in the antebellum South. This does give one a hands-on feeling of life then and there and how people were thinking.

Kevin Free narrates the audiobook. It is simple to follow, the speed is fine and he intonations are well done. The narration performance is good so I have given the narration three stars.

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.

Onvan : The Known World - Nevisande : Edward P. Jones - ISBN : 61159174 - ISBN13 : 9780061159176 - Dar 432 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2003

A very complex and beautiful, compelling book about Henry, a former slave who becomes a slave owner, & his wife Caldonia. But they're just the start - the book is really a series of stories & vignettes about the families, friends, neighbors & community surrounding Henry & Caldonia. It took me a really long time to get into the book, because there are so many characters, some important & some not, & the book jumps around in time, making it difficult to follow. Trust me, use the cast of characters at the end of this edition (why not place this at the beginning?!) & give up your expectations about traditional narrative format, & you'll LOVE this book as much as I did. In life, we have our own story kind of playing in our head, & at the same time we have all these other stories we're hearing - the story about your mother's great-uncle. The story about your brother in law's neighbor. The one about your sister's husband's aunt & her neighbor. the one about your coworker's mother. You know all those stories? That's what this book is like - some characters are more important than others, so you hear more of their stories, but minor characters have stories too, & they sort of appear out of nowhere, & you get to hear their story, & then they're gone. It's really very cool! I particularly loved the story of the womanizing slave who has a vision during a lightning storm/tornado - & becomes the founder of an orphanage. And the little tiny story about the family who don't want to give up their cow, & the woman goes into the barn to milk the cow & there's this lovely description of her squirting the cow's milk into a cat's mouth, & if you've ever seen a cat eat with true contentment you will recognize the cat body language that Jones describes. Toward the end of the book there's a very powerful scene where a character, who isn't a particularly "good" character, says there should be a lantern or light of truth in the world, an actual place where people can stand & tell the truth without fear of retribution, where one might be able to right a wrong. It's a moment where you think, yes this guy could right the wrong by speaking out, because his fear of having people think he's "on the negro's side" is...well, wrong! But that's his fear & in that moment of the book you understand it & you think, yeah, what if he could speak out under that light of truth & not have anyone judge him? How wonderful would that be? While the book depicts the horrors of slavery, & there are a few characters who are outright despicable, there are many shades of gray in Jones' vision as well. It's a book that will make you think about slavery, the myths & realities & tragedies of it all, & on top of that it'll make you think about your own life & all the people you've known & how complex & interesting we all are, really. It's beautifully written & the characters will stick in your head as if you'd known them too. Oddly, I think what I initially disliked most about this book - its multitude of characters & convoluted timeline - is what I ended up really enjoying! Another example of a book that made my head expand, with some creakiness, but I'm glad the expansion can still happen!

I think I can go for several years now without reading another novel about slavery.

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.

This was the final assigned reading for my Introduction to Fiction class and it was SO GOOD. The omniscient third-person narrator takes some adjustment, but once you get into the voice, the book is grand. So many incredible characters populate Jones’ fictitious Virginia county and the discussion I’ve had on this book in class has been incredible. When considering the “Great American Novel,” The Known World should absolutely be part of that discussion. — Chris Arnone


from The Best Books We Read In December: http://bookriot.com/2015/12/23/riot-r...

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.

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.

There is probably an important and interesting story in here somewhere (for example, if it were actually about the widow of a black slave owner trying to run a plantation after her husband's death, as claimed on the book jacket). However, any plot that might exist was buried so deep beneath the convoluted chronology and extraneous characters and details that I decided I didn't care to keep digging for it, and quit on page 198. The author seemed determined to insert every existing anecdote about slavery into one novel. This might have worked better as a compilation of essays or short stories.

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.