داستان برده‌ای سیاه‌پوست به نام هنری تونسند که حالا ارباب شده و دوباره با برده‌های سیاه پوست همان رفتاری دارد که ارباب خودش با او داشته.
یکی از زیباترین کتاب‌های ادبیات امریکا در مورد برده داری بود.
برنده‌ی جایزه‌ی پولیتزر سال 2004
جایزه‌ی ایمپک دوبلین سال 2005
برنده‌ی جایزه‌ی حلقه‌ی منتقدین کتاب آمریکا سال 2003

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 Pulitzer Prize won by this novel in 2004 makes one thing clear: Political correctness trumps bad writing, even very bad writing.

As a work of imaginative politics, this would be five-star all the way. The operative word here is imaginative. For a while as I read, I figured that at least I was getting a powerful education into a little known aspect of the most shameful aspect of U.S. history, not just slavery per se (bad enough), but free blacks also being slave owners, and not insignificant slave owners at that – genuine plantations and not necessarily with good intentions toward their slaves. Henry Townsend, the novel’s protagonist (sort of – his early death is an important driver of the story line) shows kindness to a recaptured runaway slave by cutting off only a third of an ear instead of the whole thing. And by the way, his mother was so repulsed by the idea of her husband wanting to free his slaves, she gradually poisoned him by adding arsenic to his food. Yeah, this is multidimensional; it’s not just the whites who are bad. And actually, as white plantation owners go, William Robbins, the big shot of the county, is as decent a sort as slave-owners can be, although he never calls slaves “slaves;” he goes out of his way to call them “property;” like he’s trying to prove a point.

The writing, oh my, it’s awful. Really, really awful. In the first half, the major irritant consists of peeks into the future, like the author’s asides that show he knows what’s going to happen to the characters in the distant future. Example: Years later, when so-and-so was in her nineties, she’d do this and such. And some episodes are presented by having characters interviewed years later by a historian doing research. So artistic! Z-z-z-z-z. OK. I could live with that. Seen it before. It’s irritating but some authors can’t resist the urge to show what they learned in writing workshops. But the second half, the plotting – it’s almost comically dreadful. And the character development, when it’s done at all (not often), it’s about as satisfying as instant coffee. If you plod through, you’ll see what I mean.

In a way, though, this should not come as a surprise. After reading, I looked up a bit on Jones. Turns out he’s not an accomplished novelist. Actually, he published his first short story collection in 1992 at the age of 41. It was about African Americans in Washington DC. Then came “The Known World” in 2003 followed by the explosion of publicity. And then in 2006, he does another short story collection about African Americans in Washington DC. So essentially, “The Known World” is a first novel. So one should not be surprised that it comes off as a first novel. Jones was not an experienced novelist.

But at least he’s a dedicated historian; a lot of time passed between his fiorst story collection and “The Known World.” He was obviously researching the daylights out of this powerful topic. Or not. Consider this, from a 2003 review:

* * *

So little was known about the subject of black slave owners, and so little had been written about it, that Jones’s novel about Henry Townsend’s plantation and its slaves was taken as a feat of historiographic revelation. “Jones has clearly done a tremendous amount of research to bring this time and place to life,” wrote John Freeman in the Boston Globe; the USA Today critic expressed gratitude that his “historical novel” didn’t “become a tedious showcase for the author’s research.” As Jones irritably pointed out in later interviews, including one appended to the novel’s paperback edition, there was one problem with this interpretation: he had done almost no research whatsoever. “I started out thinking I would read a whole bunch of books about slavery,” said Jones. “But I never got around to doing that.”

In fairness to his critics, Jones works hard to camouflage his lack of research by including gratuitous details that, though invented, give the novel a patina of verisimilitude. He notes exact dollar amounts for each slave purchase; census information for Manchester, the fictional Virginian county where the novel takes place; references to (invented) contemporary works of scholarship; and historical anecdotes about the intricacies of slave law. Jones is not trying to be duplicitous; detail is the essential clothing of all good fiction, historical or not. But the apparent superfluity of some of these details can be unsteadying. Like the premise of black slave owners, the torrent of pseudo-factual information forces readers to question what they know about slavery and race, and to wonder which stories are too horrible to have been made up.

* * *

So much for historical education. Were any of the things I thought I learned true? Who the heck knows?

So as noted, for imaginative politics, this is five star. How could it be otherwise: The Pulitzer committee swooned. But as a novel, I’m sorry. This is a one-star effort by a minor writer who in the ten years between this and his prior work “never got around to” reading the bunch of books on slavery he thought he’d have to do.

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."

Three books into a career, and I’ve only read two them, it would be ridiculous to declare this Jones’ masterpiece. Still one is tempted to hyperbole. And it’s a very, very good book. The Known World describes the plantation world of Henry Townsend, a freed black who owns a score or so of slaves in a fictional county in antebellum Virginia (with some foreshadowing to the years after the Civil War). Townsend had his freedom bought by his father, Augustus, who first bought his own, then his wife’s and lastly his son’s freedom. The other major plantation owner in the novel is William Robbins, a white man who owned the three Townsends and who also has a black mistress with whom he has children who he is raising as his own, though not as whites. He embraces slavery and can brutally support the institution’s well-being, even as he supports Augustus, a skilled carpenter in buying his freedom and becomes a near father figure to Henry, who is nearly disowned by his own father when he begins to buy slaves. It is a complex novel with a great diversity of characters, few without redeeming or compromising traits—Darcy, the slave speculator who lives off the profits from selling kidnapped freemen and women and hijacked slaves, is without any shades of gray, just a dark, reprehensible soul top to bottom; so too is Harvey Travis, the slave patroller and Counsel Skiffington, a plantation owner whose life is destroyed by a smallpox epidemic that kills his family and all his slaves. The other primary characters: Augustus Townsend, Henry Townsend, Robbins, Moses, Henry’s widow, Fern Elston, John Skiffington, Barnum Kinsey, and Alice Night, are fully rounded individuals who live in the world they live in, one totally compromised by the institution of slavery and all the complex implications of such a fundamental immorality (where racist beliefs excuse behavior that is otherwise unfathomable). It wreaks havoc with nearly everyone’s soul, yet also affords opportunities for surprising acts of heroism, kindness, and accomplishment that inspire in part because they occur on a landscape as bleak as any the world has known. Jones’ novel makes a mockery of the simplicities of Gone with the Wind and, alas, Roots, and warrants a neighborly place to the best of Twain, Johnson, Faulkner, Murray, and Mathiessen. Jones is a writer of the first rank and who knows what lies ahead for him but the culture is already richer for what he’s contributed thus far.

To be honest, when I picked up this book and read the back cover (knowing absolutely nothing about it other than it had appeared on a list of best books of the century so far), my first reaction was "Oh, hell, no." When the first sentences of the blurb were about Black slaveowners, I don't think I'm wrong to have the reaction of "What the hell?" and "no," because that just seems like it could far too easily be a book about how "Black people were responsible for slavery too!" and just...no. Just no.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

This is a book I wouldn't have gotten past page 50 of had I not been reading it for a book club. While the author clearly did his research and posed a fascinating premise--free blacks owning slaves in 1840s Virginia--there wasn't much of a story or a key character or set of characters for you to hang your hat on. As such, I found the book to be much more of a slog than I would have expected with such a fascinating premise. This is one of those books where I want to take the author--who is clearly talented--aside and remind him that the novel is primarily a storytelling medium, and that if you're not telling a story, you're breaking your basic contract with the reader.

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.

The Known World does this weird thing: it cites its sources. And it's weird because they don't exist. There are passages like this:

[Manchester, VA] went through a period of years and years of what University of Virginia historian Roberta Murphy in a 1948 book would call 'peace and prosperity'.

Jones goes on to tell you the publication history of that book, and a few more things about what was in it, and to imply that Roberta Murphy was a little racist. But there is no Roberta Murphy, there is no book, there is no Manchester, VA. What is Jones up to?

Wyatt Mason notes:

What research on the subject Jones undertook was, in fact, quickly derailed after he happened upon an account of a white slave owner who spent her days abusing one of her black slaves, a little girl, by beating her head against a wall. “If I had wanted to tell the whole story of slavery, Americans couldn’t have taken that,” Jones told an interviewer. “People want to think that there was slavery, and then we got beyond it. People don’t want to hear that a woman would take a child and bang her head against the wall day after day. It’s nice that I didn’t read all those books. What I would have had to put down is far, far harsher and bleaker.

Too much of a bummer? It's not that The Known World is a feel-good novel. Ears and Achilles tendons will be sliced. It follows the rules of slavery books: slave narratives always had happy endings; later, fictional slave narratives always have sad endings. But Toni Morrison has a different opinion about what Americans can and can't take. Shit, so does Harriet Jacobs. And Jones knows this, so he's being disingenuous.

And you notice that he's talking about books he didn't actually read. NPR says,

Jones collected two shelves of books about slavery, but never got around to reading them. Still, the author was able to use his imagination, and stories he had heard growing up, to make his characters come alive. "I decided the people I'd created were real enough and I had just accumulated enough information about what the world was like in the South before 1865 to allow me to lie and get away with it," he says.

Look, I don't mean to say Jones isn't telling the truth. I don't know if he is, and neither does he; neither of us read those two shelves of books about slavery. But the citation of imaginary sources in the book itself serves to either add authenticity that's undeserved, or - if you follow up on those sources - underline its lack of authenticity. I'm puzzled by it.

This sort of meta-sourcing has been done before - by Nabokov in Pale Fire, by Cervantes, and in its closest parallel by Borges in his first collection, Universal History of Iniquity, which also confused me. It's especially jarring here, maybe just because I find the truth of slavery a fraught subject, and maybe because the layers go so deep - even in interviews about his lack of authenticity, he appears to be consciously inauthentic. I don't know, man, I don't get it.

But anyway: is it a good made-up story about made-up people? Yeah, sure, totally. Eventually. The first half is a little annoying. There's a lot of chronological foofarah - skipping all over the place for no pressing reason - and a ginormous cast it's hard to keep track of, and our super-omniscient narrator often takes time out to tell you some trivial character's entire life story, which you didn't really need. But the second half ratchets up the tension to pure shit-your-pantsville, as that sprawling cast all meet their assorted fates. It makes up for some irritation in the first half.

So yeah, as a novel it's excellent. The authenticity issue, I bring up mostly because we take this book seriously; it won a Pulitzer. It deserves to be looked carefully at. I looked carefully and I was confused by its truth.

So much has been said about this novel

At a certain point, I wonder about what I can say in a Goodreads review that will add something for friends who find and read these words. At this point, Jones has won the Pulitzer. Between Amazon and Goodreads, this particular novel is nearing 50,000 ratings. I also find that I'm far from the first among my friends and colleagues to "weigh in." My journalistic colleague Neely Tucker already has so eloquently lauded the praises of Jones' work that Neely is quoted near the top of Jones' Wikipedia page.

So, what else is there to say?

Well, one thing I can point out to friends is that I've often, over the years, explained that "a book is a community between two covers" and that a novel in particular "summons us to step into a real world." And this book powerfully illustrates both of those points I always teach in writing classes.

I also am chastened when I read this novel, which I have read and then re-read in passages where I have turned down page corners. I am discouraged sometimes, when I wake up to find myself going through some minor physical hardship in the course of a day—from a cut to a back pain from overwork the day before. In this novel, Jones reminds us that life in this era of slavery in the South was defined by pain. Life was short and discomfort and disability was a part of everyday life. From thorn-scraped skin to painful toothaches to the results of beatings or sickness—life was short and often brutal.

That also makes moments of pleasure or, more importantly in Jones' world, moments of wonderment all the more precious. There's a scene deep in the book in which one character feels driven to pick blueberries in a thunderstorm and he encounters lightning destroying a huge tree. I find myself returning again and again to that passage as an example of astonishing narration. Page after page, we find ourselves so close to this man that we feel his rain-soaked agony—and then the glorious, terrifying wonderment of a huge tree transformed into a lightning-ignited, full-scale blaze. There are details in that whole sequence that I can hardly imagine how Jones "saw" and laid down on paper these details that we can experience with his character.

Lots has been said about the moral complexity of this novel as it explores the world of American slavery and that's all certainly true. But I see and cherish other moments of visionary grace in Jones's writing that transcend even the evils of that world.

I loved this book. Very well written and well handled treatment of a difficult subject.
The time jumps confused me at first. This novel is told in a very different, non linear style. Peripheral characters have whole backgrounds and sometimes even what will happen to them in the future and sometimes even their descendants. It helped to balance some of the visceral horrors of chattel slavery. It adds depth, texture and richness to this novel. Also I like the exploration of a black, ex slave owning a plantation with slaves. I never really like or understand Henry, Caldonia and Fern who are the main black slave owning characters. I never really try to. I also like the way the white characters are handled.

"...encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me for the previous four years by the racial laws-- to live in an unrealistic world of my own...) Primo Levi "Survival in Auschwitz

All while reading The Known World, I kept thinking of Nazi concentration camps, and the way the Nazis frequently made use of Polish prisoners to enforce their system. Henry Townsend, a central figure in the novel although he is dead for most of it, is a slave bought and freed by his parents who decides to pursue the wealth and power that comes with being a slave-owner in the south. He is not the only black character to own slaves, and during the course of the narrative, they all must confront what it means to perpetuate a morally corrupt system that oppresses people who look exactly like themselves. And, *spolier alert*, they all fail to respond to that challenge in ways that readers are likely to find heroic. The world they inhabit seems isolated, unrealistic, and unsustainable; yet they always seem surprised when it is disrupted.

Jones ambles along behind characters with a rather detached eye, so the characters become allegorical in a way. Henry's former master represents the big money; Sheriff Skiffington- the law; his cousin- tradition, etc. In this way, Jones can explore how a complex, free society perpetuated one of the largest crimes against humanity the world has seen. The free women in particular seem doubly trapped. Despite their educations, they remain inert--holding on to grief, or anger, or just protecting personal interests. When changes in character occur, they occur through the slaves--in moments of forgiveness or near Biblical acts of grace.

The book is dense and, for the most part, beautifully written. Although some readers (my mom, for example) found the storytelling dry, I thought Jones was at his best when most detached. He gives the reader the power to witness and respond in her own way.