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?

Bravo, Edward P. Jones - Bravo! Finished this masterpiece with about 20 minutes left to go in the year 2013. Looking forward to quite a few more great reads in 2014 but they'll need to be magnificent to share a bookshelf with this one. Reading The Known World put me one step closer to my goal of reading all of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction award winners - http://lineaday.blogspot.com/2009/03/...

Is the question "how (morally) could there have been black slave owners who were formerly slaves themselves?" a predecessor to "why is black on black crime so prevalent?" or "why do some black people (Michael Jackson being an especially well known example) seem to be trying to escape their blackness by cloaking it in what is commonly accepted as whiteness?" or "is the survival Darwin spoke of primarily achieved by looking out for yourself, even if the most effective method of ascension is using your own people to reach and remain at the top?"

Layers of excellence! I feel that I could immediately go back to the first page and read this book all over again! I have owned my first edition hardcover copy FOR SO LONG - including time spent boxed-up in a storage space. This has been the right time for me to finally read it.

Books can be difficult for various reasons, and this one is difficult for some quite unusual reasons. It is not linguistically oblique, there is nothing much that is mysterious about the nature of the plot, and for the most part the action of the story takes place in a straightforward and realistic manner. On a word by word basis, the thing makes sense. What complicates matters is the author’s remarkable sense of the novel as a complete artistic vision. This is one of those rare and special works in which everything starts out in a kind of mess but which, as you read on, slowly resolves itself into a picture with depth, colour, light and shade, and with remarkable internal consistency.

The novel is set in Manchester County, a fictional region in Virginia, sometime in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. More specifically, it is set in and around the world of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and ex-slave whose parents bought his freedom when he was a child. After learning a trade and making a little money, Townsend buys his own plantation and slaves; this might surprise modern readers, but we are given to understand that he was not unusual, and that he acted entirely according to the laws and culture of his times. However, Henry’s death comes quite early in the pages of this book, and so the main action comes in recalling the story of his youth and how he came to his position in life, then what happened after he died when his wife, Caldonia, came into possession of the farm and its property (human and otherwise).

At first I found all this quite difficult to follow. Within the first fifty or so pages, the author introduces a large number of different characters, and is not only fastidious about charting their relationships to one another but also in introducing elements of both their past and future stories in asides which often seem to have little relevance to immediate events. I read somewhere that there is no present tense in this book, which seems to me like a perfect way of describing it: for much of the first two thirds of the text, the writing is unhinged in time, jumping from moment to moment across years in a way which frequently seems inscrutable.

It’s not until relatively late in the book that the thing starts to cohere. Eventually, things settle down a little, and the true pattern of the author’s wizardry starts to form broad arcs across the pages. I can’t stop thinking of one particular moment, one really awful thing that happens in the story, that in any other book would perhaps seem like an unnecessary act of cruelty only perpetrated against an admirable character so that they have a chance to seem further ennobled. But such is the effort here on the part of the author to develop the history and motivations of both the victim and the perpetrator over the course of tens and hundreds of pages that when this horrible thing happens, it has the immediate, painful quality of lived experience: it somehow seems both inevitable (that such a person should do such a thing) and by chance (that it should happen to this person, at that moment, that night).

Leaps across the immediate chronology of a character’s life in the course of a plot are perhaps not all that strange for a historical novel, but what makes this book more unusual still is that it frequently describes the final fates of even the most insignificant people within its pages. Some of these descriptions are the length of a throwaway sentence — a kidnapped slave girl is casually mentioned as later becoming the first black woman to achieve a Phd in America, for example — while others are spelled out in details dropped like breadcrumbs across the breadth of the book. It’s a postmodern touch which never lets the reader forget that this is a novel framed with the ultimate benefit of educated hindsight, a kind of tacit acknowledgement of the godlike power with which the author determines the fates of these characters. That doesn’t mean that anyone is due a happy ending more than anyone else, and the slaves who eventually achieve emancipation and some kind of extra chance at life are rare compared to those who are killed or who die suddenly or who quietly, simply disappear. But almost everyone gets an ending of some kind, and it’s usually one which recognises that, rich or poor, free or otherwise, these were just human beings who were hated and feared and loved and missed in varying degrees.

One last thing that’s worth mentioning is the author’s own intrusions into the text in the form of historical references and citations. Often a detail regarding local law or a particularly intriguing set of statistics are presented as fact, and if it hadn’t been for the brief interview with Jones at the end of my edition, I would probably have accepted these as all being true. But they aren’t — as far as I know, they are all invented. Personally, I didn’t find this offensive, but I can understand how some might find it problematic given that we still live in times when people would still deny or underestimate the scale of the atrocity which formed the foundations of modern American society.

Could a person read this and accept its account as entirely truthful; and if they did, what would they think if they found out it was fiction? What else might they come to doubt? I don’t know that I can answer that. My own perspective is one of admiration at the craft involved to create something so utterly convincing. I don’t personally believe in moral or immoral books; to paraphrase Wilde, they’re either written well or poorly, and in any medium there can be no accounting for the vagaries of taste and prejudice. Perhaps it would do better to simply assume the best from our readers and our writers, and leave the rest open to interpretation.

Virgina in pre-Civil War, a story of white slaveholders, black slaves, black freemen, and black slaveholders. Fascinating novel, several characters introduced early in the book, who were sometimes hard to keep straight, who were never all good or all evil. I wanted to know more about some of the characters, but more of their natures was revealed slowly. I liked the way Jones sometimes gave snippets of the characters' future lives even while telling the stories of their current lives, as well as not always telling the story in chronological order. A great read.

Dear The Known World:

I'll be blunt. I'm breaking things off. This just isn't working. It's not you; it's me. Well, maybe it's you, too, a bit.

I really thought when we got together that we would have a brief but mutually satisfying relationship. I'd read you, you'd provide enlightenment or emotional catharsis or entertainment, maybe even all three. All the signs were there: the laudatory quotes on your jacket, a shocking and unexpected premise, high marks on goodreads. But something was just off by the end of the first chapter.

Maybe it was the masturbation scene right at the start. Or the characters that I just couldn't get into - I could hardly tell some of them apart. Or the way the narrative seemed to skip all over without any focus. Maybe I just didn't give you enough pages. I'm sure you got better as you went along. I mean, look at all the four- and five-star reviews you've gotten! But every time I picked you up my thoughts turned to the three other books on my bedside table that I'd rather be reading. I haven't actually been unfaithful, but that's just not a healthy basis for a relationship. So after 72 pages, I'm putting you down.

Don't feel too bad. Focus on all those other, good reviews and maybe we'll meet again someday when the stars all align just right. But probably not.

Emily

For more book reviews, come visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves.

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!

Addressing the novel “The Known World,” by Edward Jones, is tough. As a writer and voracious reader, while working my way through the story I found the structure of the novel quite unconventional and unsuccessful—and at times quite irritating—as a means of communicating what might otherwise have been a powerful story with which a reader could in some way connect. And yet when I put down the completed book, I felt I had experienced a compelling tale.

In less than 400 pages Jones attempted to tell the story of almost 50 characters; many author’s have trouble successfully spotlighting three or four characters. Jones had on average less than four pages of text to dedicate to each character: any more on any one, and the rest would suffer. (Jones must have understood this to some extent, as he added at the end of the novel a list of characters, including a brief description of each, to assist his readers.) So there already was a multitude of characters, and not much room to say a whole lot about any one of them. Then, it seems Jones took every person’s story, cut each into tiny pieces, mixed them up in a big box, then randomly pulled out fragments and added them to the novel, giving the reader a very disjointed storyline/timeline to follow. Trying to understand who was where, when and how, only detracted from the overall effect the story could have had on me as I read it—the very act of reading it became laborious.

Adding to this was Jones’s insistence on inserting so-called present day (for the reader) references. These additions ruined any sense of connection I might have felt existed between the narrator and the story, since it made it apparent that the narrator was here and now (2009, or whenever any reader might open the book) and not even remotely a part of the story or even the setting or era. These snippets only served to detract from the intimacy of the narrator with the story.

Hurting the story even further was Jones choice of third person omniscient point of view (POV). With no consistent POV, it was very hard for me to connect or identify with any one character through the entire text. While reading the story, I continued to be disappointed and even irritated at Jones’s method of presentation, right up to the last page.

Yet after completion, while still dissatisfied with the final product (I really wanted to KNOW many of the characters, and Jones left me wanting so much more), I found myself contemplating the many characters and plotlines, and realized that while the reading itself was not ‘fun,’ there was still something there.

“The Known World” was an intricate story through which Jones created a completely imaginary world. (Jones has stated in several subsequent interviews that he conducted absolutely no research, and that the entire story and every single character, other than actual historical figures, was “crafted in his head.”) And his characters were very consistent. The novel’s title was well chosen: each character acted within the confines of that individual’s known world; very few thought and acted beyond themselves. And yet, all those worlds continually collided—each character in some way was related to, interacted with, or somehow influenced one or more of the others. Jones creation of so many people, and their sometimes tenuous and at other times quite personal ties, was brilliant. Any attempt to plot the relationships and interactions would produce one huge and complex spider web.

While completely made up, the plotlines and characters are very believable, based upon what we know of the era, and even upsetting to some, and it all felt very real when I was “in the moment.” While today we know the evils and effects of slavery, Jones was able to present so many characters set perfectly in a time when slavery was both legal and accepted by so many people. Regardless of how any reader may personally feel now, at one time not everyone felt that way. There are many acts that currently are known to be appalling or just outright evil, but at one time were accepted as normal. Thankfully, perspectives change, and we have grown, building upon the knowledge and sentiments of our ancestors. Jones fiction is about such possible forebears, and how some accepted, some rebelled, some pretended and some ran away. Jones instigates numerous emotions through his characters: incredulousness, outrage, sympathy, fear and sadness, to name but a few.

In all, the novel grew on me as I was able to let the myriad of fragments come together in my mind well after closing the book. I do believe that the impact might have been greater—and more immediate—if Jones had chosen a more conventional method of storytelling, and limited the number of characters so that each could be more thoroughly developed.

Yeah. Pultizer Prize winning and I give it 2.5 stars (WHERE ARE THOSE HALF STAR RATINGS OTIS!?!??!) I found the story slow and it did not move me at all. It was, however, a wonderful cure for my insomnia.

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

Manchester County, Virginia doesn't exist. Never has. After reading The Known World, however, you'd be forgiven if you thought you could take a tour of it's plantations and slave cemetaries on your vacation to colonial Williamsburg. The complicated pre-civil war Southern society that Edward P. Jones creates feels as real and surreal as any factual history of slavery you've read. It was not so much the story of Henry Townsend, a black slave owner, and all the people that his death allows us to meet that engaged me. It was the world, a world where I could taste the soil I might till and the women I might marry and the terrible choices I might be faced with, that put it's claws in me and refused to let go.

It took me nearly 2 months to finish the book's 388 pages. It should've been a quick read. It is a fascinating place with peculiar problems and characters I cried for on more than one occasion. It should've been a quick read but I kept asking myself this question: who would I have been? The slave, toiling away in the field? The overseer, unable to see the world for what it truly was? The freed man, working desperately to free the rest of his family? The smart child, taken under the wing of the rich white slave owner and convinced that there was nothing wrong with owning another human being? The broken black man tortured by his family's wealth built on the backs of men and women that look just like me? The slave too proud, too strong, too powerful to let another take his freedom? Who would I have been?

Who am I now?

In matters of race, there is always that fool's point, usually made by a white person (though not always) that asks,"why aren't you over it, already? Can't we just let it go?" It is a way to end an uncomfortable conversation. The reasons don't matter. I know many a person for which the sticky tar baby of race in America is simply a discussion they can't stick their hands in. It is too difficult. Too raw. Too cloudy to be sure that people will remain friends after an honest chat. The way I feel when I read books like The Known World is my answer. No matter how well-adjusted, how integrated, how loving of my fellow man, how multiculti kumbayah I am, I'm not over it. I can't let it go.

This fictional world was very real not all that long ago. It's effects still ripple through our every day. The world I know doesn't exist without it.

Highly highly recommended.