The Known World : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: A thought-provoking book
Review: Around page 100 of The Known World, the author jumps forward in time. Had it not been for a review of this book by Bobby-Ray that I read on Amazon.com (1/27/05), I might have put the book back on a shelf. I am so grateful to Ray because The Known World is an amazing and thought-provoking book. It addresses the human frailty of not respecting the dignity of others. While the surface story is about slavery under Black owners, it is about so much more. I highly recommend this book. Just remember to "imagine yourself as a leaf tumbling down a stream." You won't be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Politically correct--overrated
Review: As the selection for my book club this month, I read the book and am not sorry that I did. However, considering its numerous accolades, I was somewhat disappointed. The author skipped around with the characters a lot and used poor grammar many times. I suspect that, if not for the subject matter, this book would not have been given the attention it has.



Rating:
Summary: Worthy of all its praise...
Review: Edward P. Jones' first novel "The Known World" is a landmark in American literature. I do not say that lightly. It has a difficult, yet entertaining and understandable writing style, handles its subject matter with historical accuracy and human relateability, and has some of the most genuine and authentic dialogue I have ever read. For once a contemporary American novel is worth the hype. The success of the book is largely due to how successfully it defies the typical novel structure. There is a thin central storyline here, acting as the nucleus of Jones' myriad of slave folk stories and dozens of characters wrapped around it. There are many names in the book, but Jones always informs and re-informs the reader of just who is who and their importance to the overall piece. Also, the book is so beautifully written you'll find it difficult to put down. This is definitely one that will stay with you long after you've finished it, and I don't think I'd be wrong if I said it's one of the best books of at least the last decade.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting and thought provoking
Review: I am not particularly interested in historical literature set in the pre-Civil War South, but picked this book up based upon some of the Amazon reviews. I'm not sorry I did. It is interesting and thought provoking and provides a unique view of the world known to those living in that time and place.

I agree somewhat that the author's writing style was difficult at times and several times I had to reread sentences. Also, the huge number of characters is confusing especially if one is not able to read the book in a short time period. There is a list of characters in the back which I did use as a reference several times. However, the theme, the characters, and the description of the setting far outweigh these "annoyances."

I liked Jones' way to hinting what would happen to the characters later and I, like another reviewer, liked the chapter headings and I felt the title was so appropriate.

In short, an interesting book which portrays another view of slavery and its effect on the slaves and the owners. Those of us in the current century can be quick to judge those people that lived in that time, but we must remember that Manchester County was the only world known to the characters. For those readers that want another perspective of our country's history, I would suggest this book.

Rating:
Summary: complicated book but worth it
Review: It was a little hard to follow but I got a lot out of the book.

Rating:
Summary: reader beware
Review: Many of the characters in this book are unlettered, and unaccustomed to the niceties of punctuation and grammar; but there's no excuse for the writer and editor to be likewise.
Consider: "The mule followed him, and after he had prepared the animal for the night and came out, Moses smelled the coming of rain." Why are people calling this beautiful writing? When you read it out loud, don't you trip over the change of tenses? (In fact, every page I tried failed the reading-aloud test.)
Or this:"The 1840 U.S. census contained an enormous amount of facts,..." Um, no, in standard English, that's 'number of facts' (or some such); or 'amount of information'.

A bit later: "Fern Elston had chosen not to follow her siblings and many of her cousins into a life of being white." The paragraph goes on to explain why this was a good choice. The next paragraph begins, "But it had never crossed Fern's mind to pass as white." Well, which is it? If the second is true, the first should not be there, and vice versa.
The plot is no tighter than the prose, meandering through time in both preview and flashback, as if there's no point in reading from page one to the end--as indeed there may not be. The material is potentially interesting, but it's so carelessly presented, I wouldn't bother.

Rating:
Summary: This I know
Review: Much has already been said about the basic plot of this book, so I'd like to address the non-linear writing style...imagine yourself as a leaf tumbling down a stream, sometimes hurtling forward, yet frequently caught in little swirling eddies along the edges. If you relax and 'go with the flow' rather than expecting this book to read as you would wish, you will find it to be an astounding and seductive experience on several levels. The viewpoint of this book is equally fluid; through some magic, Jones has you seeing life through the eyes of whatever character he's currently focused upon. There are terrible, ugly, beautiful, sad, heartwarming things that happen constantly throughout this book and somehow, you are always identifying through the protagonist of the moment, whether this be a slave or a slave patroller, frightening as that might be. There is no melodrama here. Somehow, everything is just taken for granted, assumed...it is, after all, their known world. And, for a brief time, ours as well. We eventually come to take it for granted. We can look back with the smugness of time and condemn slavery and its consequential perverse social structurings. Yet a book like this makes one question our own 'known world,' the social structures and cultural practices we take for granted and assume we are powerless to change. I wonder what our descendents will find equally perverse here...probably our oil addiction which forces us to attempt to control countries half-way around the world rather than simply learning to make do with less here at home. Another great Amazon pick would be Jackson McCrae's THE CHILDREN'S CORNER which is not a book for children, but rather a collection of fantastic stories about being human.

Rating:
Summary: Judging the sins of the past, in pitch-perfect prose
Review: One of the many remarkable aspects of Edward P. Jones's remarkable novel is its style of storytelling. Set in the fictional county of Manchester, Virginia, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, the core of "The Known World" traces the plight of the thirty-three slaves belonging to Henry Townsend, a free black man who dies at the opening of the narrative, and his widow's attempt to keep together Henry's "legacy." But this central plot is surrounded, punctuated, and jumbled by dozens of other stories, past and future, regarding Henry's former owner, his teacher, his neighbors, and his parents.

Adopting a voice suggestive of Faulkner or Welty--but still uniquely his own--Jones sometimes sounds like an elderly man reminiscing about the old days while sitting on the porch--interrupting himself with scattered and random tangents, incapable of sticking to the main story but always fascinating his listeners. Often morsels from three or four different tales will be interwoven within the same paragraph. At other times, the author's phrasing recalls the cadence of the best Old Testament chronicles, especially the captivity narrative in the book of Exodus.

And in still other places, Jones adopts the impassive tone of a modern-day historian, referring to wholly invented academic sources or commenting on the descendants of the book's characters decades later. "It was in the South that Anderson came upon material he would later put together in a new series of pamphlets he called Curiosities and Oddities about Our Southern Neighbors. . . . Only seven of those particular pamphlets survived until the late twentieth century. Five of them were in the Library of Congress in 1994. . ." (I confess: This passage fooled me into investigating whether or not such a series was ever written. Like other sources and documents referred to in the book, it's entirely the figment of the author's marvelously meticulous imagination.) Throughout, Jones's prose--whether bookish, mythical, or Southern colloquial--is pitch-perfect; not a word or expression wasted or out of place.

Jones's Manchester County is populated by dozens of plantation owners, slaves, poor folk, freedmen, and children, and his writing animates each and every one of them. There are at least forty characters in his novel (and I didn't find it difficult to keep track of them), but the book's several interlaced stories focus especially on the (dead) Henry Townsend, his widow Caldonia, his overseer Moses, his father Augustus, the local sheriff John Skiffington, and William Robbins, the former owner of the Townsends who allows Augustus to purchase his family's liberty. That Henry blemished his own freedom by purchasing slaves is a source of profound sadness to his mother and father: "Why trouble ourselves with you bein free, Henry? You could not have hurt me more if you had cut off my arms and legs." "I ain't done that any white man wouldn't do. I ain't broke no law."

Such passages highlight the moral bankruptcy that affected the judgments of everyone affected by slaveholding. Without minimizing the overwhelming destruction to the lives of African Americans, Jones recalls that even freedom, when granted to blacks, remained the whim of white men and, against the evidence of their own experiences, a few freed blacks sometimes fruitlessly and irrationally aspired to "be like white folk." And the whites--both men and women, rich and poor--were themselves hardly worthy of emulation: morally compromised by their dehumanizing authority, sexually obsessed with their "property," and ultimately unable even to enjoy or exploit the massive amounts of leisure time that slavery allowed them. (A theme that recurs in this book is the appalling immaturity and pampered slothfulness of slave-owners.) "The Known World" reminds us forcefully what we've known all along: that slavery poisoned everything and everyone it touched.

Rating:
Summary: Edward P. Jones Creates a World
Review: The Known World is the best novel I have read in a long time. It easily mixes astounding facts into a heart-felt story and makes you care deeply about a huge cast of characters.

Rating:
Summary: Exploring an Unknown World
Review: This beautifully crafted work gives a startling view of the institute of slavery as it existed in the first half of the nineteenth century in the United States.

Henry Townsend is a free black who owns other blacks along with his spouse on a fifty acre plantation in Virginia. The relationships among the Blacks and the Whites is unflinchingly told.

The story opens with the death of Henry. From here the story is told with flashbacks and fast forwards and much exploring of the lives of perhaps too many characters along the way. At times the subplots lead the reader from the main thrust of the story but the overall effect is to give the reader a feel for the lives of the people at this stage of our nation's history.