The Known World

by Edward P. Jones, Kevin R. Free (Reading)

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart:slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend estate, the know world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into slavery, and rumor os slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges seamlessly between the past and future and back again to the present, The Known World weaves together the lives of freed and enslaved blacks, white, and Indians -- and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery.

Read by Kevin Free.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Book Club, African American, Historical, Literary Fiction, Literature

Audio Cassette

First published September 1, 2003

About the author

Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award for his 2003 novel The Known World.

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

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!

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know this is a critically acclaimed book, a Pulitzer winner, and a book tackling a difficult and complex stain on America history: slavery and black slave owners. There are moments when the book does say some interesting things or reveal some unsavory and uncomfortable truths, but it was so hard to engage with as a reader. I mean, I hung in with DFW through the first 600 pages of Infinite Jest where nothing happens -- but because I was fascinated by Hal, Orin, Marathe, Steeply, and Mario and Madame Psychosis who all fascinated me. There were literally dozens of other characters but these all pulled me in. In The Known World, there are also dozens of characters but none that I grew any attachment too. It was as if the author Jones was using a hand-held camera and no stabilizer so that the images were jumpy and out of focus. It reminded me sometimes of how the world seems to my myopic eyes between taking off my glasses in the morning and putting in my contact lenses.

The narration also highly annoyed me. All the parenthetical "in 60 years so and so will do such as such" were meaningless because I was given neither enough time nor enough detail to give a shit. Further, there is this reference to "years later they would all turn into human torches in front of the dry foods store", but no mention afterwards of to what this referred. But the most annoying bit was in using the Canadian journalist frame at about page 130 or so (which then only briefly appears in the narrative 200 pages later in a parenthetical throwaway comment, it is said that the journalist would never marry his heart's desire yet 3 pages later, they marry and that coming to talk to Fern that there was some incomprehensible stuff that happens off-screen that morning (also never adequately explained) and so she was not going to open up to the journalist and yet we still find her filling in details about Henry, Moses and Caledonia 30 pages later. Too much inconsistency - was the editor asleep or stoned and missed these?

So, despite taking on a complex subject, Jones is no Faulkner as his South does not eve approach that of the Great William. He is not as good as Pynchon or DFW is manipulating time and space in a narrative that was 100 or 150 pages too long and felt it, and he is not Alice Walker or Toni Morrison who brought us the most amazing, poignant, and powerful images of slavery and its residual impacts generations later that I have ever read. So, read Beloved or Absalom, Absalom if you want to hear about the South and I expect you will be less frustrated, but every bit enraged at this deplorable institution that is a cancer on the American past.

[Lisa of Troy · Rating 3 out of 5]

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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[Candi · Rating 4 out of 5]

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."

[Emily Geddes · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Heidi (on slight hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s irony that I read more than half of this wrenching, ugly, hopeful, stirring, and grievous book while holding a sleeping baby in my arms. Because there is a lot of life and death in this take on pre-Civil War Virginia.

I knew little about the book except that the author wrote it after reading about freed Black folks owning slaves. In delving into this issue, which in any modern conversation circle must bring dissonance, disbelief, and maybe even disgust, I became increasingly moved and disturbed.

A difficult book, both because it’s an unflinching look at slavery, but also because it’s written in a James Joyce-ish style — lots of asides and stream of consciousness text. The author careens from generation to generation and back again in often the same paragraph. Yet it worked for me. It reads like a memoir of an entire county’s 150-year history complete with dozens of families represented.

What results is simply, UNFORGETTABLE. There are characters whose faces I imagined while reading and characters whose stories I became invested in that will haunt me. Not in the truth of a fictional characterization but more because the ugliness of humanity was so blatantly on display and sadly remains real to this day.

As I bid farewell to the slaves, slaveowners, children of both and ministers, sheriffs and patrollers of this novel, I will not forget their names. And I can’t help but wonder who would I have been in Manchester County, Virginia?

(Reviewed 2/12/25)

[Pia G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

slavery did not begin with a chain alone..

first, one person looked at another and believed they had the right to claim authority over that life. then came the word mine ; chains, sales, whips, families torn apart and freedoms created by a piece of paper only to be erased just as easily multiplied around it. because once the idea that one human being could belong to another was accepted, the limits of what could be done to them began to fade.

i was that first sentence.

the mouths that spoke me, the hands that carried me and the seals that gave me the force of law changed, but the meaning i carried did not.

in the mouth of a white man, i turned henry into property; in henry’s mouth, i did the same to moses. i slipped into the compassion of caldonia, who had been born free, and into moses’s dream of freedom. whoever spoke me, whatever suffering they had endured, whatever the colour of their skin, the meaning of possession remained the same as long as a human name stood after me.

henry had once been the name that followed this word. then he gained his freedom and, instead of stepping outside the sentence, moved to its other side. he was no longer the person being called mine, but the one speaking the word. the chain had been removed from his wrist, yet the language it left behind continued to live inside him.

then henry spoke me with a human name for the first time.

when he bought moses, he did not acquire only a pair of hands, a body that understood the fields, or one more piece for his growing plantation. he placed upon another person the word that had once defined him. only yesterday he had stood where robbins said my henry; now, within the same sentence, he was deciding moses’s place.

after henry, i settled into caldonia’s voice, where i was almost mistaken for compassion.

she chose not to harm the people left to her, yet never questioned the belief that they belonged to her. moses, meanwhile, did not dream of escaping the sound of me directed at him, but of one day speaking me himself. and so i hid inside one person’s mercy while taking the shape of another person’s dream of freedom.

moses believed every road led to the main house.

he thought he would be free once he could sit at the table he had watched from afar for years, once he could move closer to the place henry had left beside caldonia. because of this, he did not see where priscilla and jamie might end up after he abandoned them, or what the wound he opened in celeste’s body would become. he believed that the closer he came to mastery, the closer he came to freedom. in truth, he was only walking towards the centre of the world that had wounded him.

however, in some lives, i could never fully take root.

when augustus freed another person, he understood that he was not losing them, but returning them to themselves. alice did not bow before me; she took her name and carried it beyond the known world. there was no place for me between celeste and elias either, because their love did not ask one of them to belong to the other, only that they might remain beside one another. the world had been built in my language; within that same world, they found ways to remain human differently.

i was the smallest and most terrible story one human being could tell another.

sometimes i could be heard in the sound of chains; sometimes i became almost invisible, mingling with love, inheritance, or promises of protection. the past, the suffering and the skin colour of the person who spoke me changed; what did not change was the way the life before me became less its own.

and yet this novel did not make me the final word of an entire world. some people loved without possessing, remained beside one another without ruling and took their names back from me.

●

kölelik yalnızca bir zincirle başlamadı..

önce bir insan başka bir insana baktı ve onun hayatı üzerinde hak sahibi olabileceğine inandı.   ardından benim kelimesi geldi; zincirler, satışlar, kırbaçlar, birbirinden koparılan aileler ve bir kâğıt parçasıyla var edilip yine aynı kolaylıkla yok edilen özgürlükler onun çevresinde çoğaldı. çünkü bir insanın başka bir insana ait olabileceği düşüncesi kabul edildiğinde, ona yapılabileceklerin sınırı da giderek silikleşiyordu.

ben o ilk cümleydim. 

beni söyleyen ağızlar, taşıyan eller ve bana yasallık kazandıran mühürler değişti fakat taşıdığım anlam değişmedi.

beyaz bir adamın ağzında henry’yi mülke çevirdim, henry’nin ağzında moses’ı. özgür doğmuş caldonia’nın şefkatine karıştım, moses’ın özgürlük hayaline sızdım. kim söyledi beni, hangi acıdan geçmişti, teni ne renkti; önümde bir insanın adı durduğu sürece, sahipliğin anlamı değişmedi.

henry bir zamanlar bu kelimenin ardından gelen isimdi. sonra özgürlüğüne kavuştu ve cümlenin dışına çıkmak yerine öteki tarafına geçti. artık kendisine benim denilen kişi değil, bu sözü söyleyen kişiydi. zincir bileğinden çözülmüş fakat bıraktığı dil henry’nin içinde yaşamaya devam etmişti.

sonra henry beni ilk kez bir insanın adıyla birlikte söyledi.

moses’ı satın aldığında yalnızca bir çift el, tarlayı bilen bir beden ya da büyüyen çiftliğine yeni bir parça edinmedi. bir zamanlar kendisini tanımlayan kelimeyi başka bir insanın üzerine bıraktı. dün robbins’in benim henry’m dediği yerde durmuştu, şimdi aynı cümlede moses’ın yerini belirliyordu.

henry’den sonra caldonia’nın sesine yerleştim ve orada neredeyse şefkat sanıldım.

o, kendisine kalan insanları incitmemeyi seçti, ne var ki onların kendisine ait olduğu düşüncesini sorgulamadı. moses ise beni karşısında duymaktan kurtulmayı değil, bir gün kendi ağzında söyleyebilmeyi düşledi. böylece ben, birinin merhametinde saklanırken diğerinin özgürlük hayalinin biçimini aldım.

moses bütün yolların ana eve çıktığını sanıyordu.

yıllarca uzaktan baktığı masaya oturabildiğinde, caldonia’nın yanında henry’den boşalan yere yaklaşınca özgürleşeceğine inandı. bu yüzden geride bıraktığı priscilla ile jamie’nin nereye varacağını, celeste’nin bedeninde açtığı yaranın neye dönüşeceğini görmedi. efendiliğe yaklaştıkça özgürlüğe de yaklaştığını düşündü. oysa yalnızca kendisini yaralayan dünyanın merkezine doğru yürüyordu.

bazı insanların hayatında ise bütünüyle yerleşemedim.

augustus bir insanı özgür bıraktığında onu kaybettiğini değil, kendisine geri verdiğini biliyordu. alice önümde eğilmedi, adını alıp bilinen dünyanın dışına taşıdı. celeste ile elias’ın arasında da bana yer yoktu çünkü onların sevgisi birinin diğerine ait olmasını değil, ikisinin de birbirinin yanında kalabilmesini istiyordu.  dünya benim dilimle kurulmuştu; onlar aynı dünyanın içinde başka türlü insan kalmanın yollarını buldular.

ben bir insanın başka bir insana söyleyebildiği en küçük ve en korkunç hikâyeydim.

bazen zincirlerin sesinde duyuldum, bazen sevgiye, mirasa ya da korunma sözüne karışarak neredeyse görünmez oldum. beni söyleyen kişinin geçmişi, acıları ve teni değişti; önümde duran hayatın kendisine ait olmaktan eksilmesi değişmedi. 

yine de bu roman beni bütün bir dünyanın son sözü yapmadı. bazı insanlar sahip olmadan sevdiler, hükmetmeden yan yana kaldılar ve adlarını benden geri aldılar.

[Anne Sanow · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to have to rave a bit, because this is one of the best books I've read in the past ten years.

Jones packs in all the historical detail you could want, and of course he's hit on a subject--black slaveowners--that in and of itself is tabloid-sensational. Where lesser writers might lean too hard on the sensational aspect (or rely on it to bolster an otherwise weak narrative), Jones works it into a compelling and powerful story.

What makes it so powerful is a mix of fascinating characters who are woven into a series of overlapping plotlines. For me it's the structuring that is so brilliant (geek alert: I actually diagrammed the time shifts in the chapters as an exercise, to see when and how Jones yoked the whole thing together). This less than linear approach might be frustrating to those who just want things to be straightforward, but stick with it: the shifts provide suspense as well as texture, and they propel more than one storyline at once. They do all come together, trust me.

I also admire the overarching authorial voice in the novel, which certainly leans toward the formal, but also comes across as aware of the history it's grappling with: here and there Jones projects his voice forward for a moment, or seemingly digresses with factual material and research. Again it's all part of the tapestry and the mix, and I also think that the level of narrative awareness (which never disengages long enough to derail anything) adds another layer to the very idea of history--making the whole historical and contemporary both.

And for those of you who can do without all of the above writerly blather (a thousand pardons), you'll find in this book characters who are engaging, ignorant, cruel, earnest, sympathetic, tragic, hopeful, flawed--in short, complicated. Halfway through you'll be fighting off the impulse to skip ahead to learn everyone's fate.

Finally, I'll say that this book isn't perfect--there are aspects of what I've described above that sometimes don't work: narrative turns that do seem pointless digressions, a character or two a bit stereotypical or annoying. No matter. This book aims high, as brilliant works of art do, and the result is nothing short of amazing.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book demands that you read it slowly and intently. Like eating a huge Thanksgiving dinner, you need to pause and digest before you have the next course. At the outset, the plot seems to be all over the place, bouncing from character to character, telling too many stories, not telling enough and then seeming to tell too much. Ah, but then, you make a little progress and the rhythm begins to assert itself, the stories begin to weave together, the minute details begin to become a diorama, the picture stops being a blur and comes into sharp focus. This isn’t one man’s story, or even the story of one place, this is the story of all men and this is the tale of a world.

This book is not so much about race as it is about the abject insanity and evil of the institution of slavery, wherever it is found, whoever is practicing it. In this system, there are free black masters holding black slaves, some of them well-meaning, but it does not make the practice any less immoral. There are white men who love their black mistresses and the children they bear, but it does not remove the fact that they hold a dominion over them that is not borne of love in any of its guises. There are also individuals who are victims of the system and others who refuse to be victims of the system, even at the cost of their lives.

I loved many of Jones’ characters, notably Augustus and Mildred Townsend. They exemplify what is the best in us. I felt sorry for some of them, like Sheriff John Skiffington, who would like to be better than this society allows him to be, and Caldonia Townsend’s brother, Calvin, who wishes to go to New York so that he will not have to bear witness to the cruelties around him, cruelties he must realized have escaped him only because of a trick of fortune. I despised some of them, and I recognized most of them. The petty and jealous, who must have dominion over someone to feel they have worth; the ungrateful and traitorous, who would turn upon a friend to put some silver in their own pockets; the meek and hopeless, who bow to the yoke and try simply to find a corner in which they are allowed to exist; the defiant and strong-minded, who fight with their last breath because to do otherwise is to prop up the indefensible; all are here.

What I loved most about this novel is its genuineness, its lack of exaggeration or hyperbole, where surely none is needed, its emphasis on the day-to-day injustice of an institution that is accepted as insurmountable or even correct only because it is what is. Edward P. Jones has leveled an attack at the heart of mankind and defied one to imagine what they would have done, what they would have dared to do, in such a place and time.

[Marigold · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[K.D. Absolutely · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book I learned that there used to be black slaveholders in the US. I thought that only white people were allowed to own slaves during the time that owning slaves were like owning properties. During that pre-Abolition time. During those sad dark days in the American history.

Black Edward P. Jones (born 1951) wrote this historical epic novel, The Known World based on the not well known fact that there were some black slaveholders (black people owning black slaves) in the state of Virginia during the time in the US when owning slave is legal. Wikipedia has this to say:

"Slavery in the United States was a form of unfree labor which existed as a legal institution in North America for more than a century before the founding of the United States in 1776, and continued mostly in the South until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865.[1] The first English colony in North America, Virginia, first imported Africans in 1619, a practice earlier established in the Spanish colonies as early as the 1560s.[2] Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there were a small number of white slaves as well.[3]"

Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Award for Fiction, The Known World is one of the most memorable reads I had this year. It is not an easy book to read. This 388-page novel left me with a heavy chest each time I closed the book. Each page is gloomy and sad. The novel is well-told with lyrical prose creating a big canvas of imagery in one's mind while reading. In that big canvas are memorable and three-dimensional numerous characters most of them black slaves. No character is downright bad or good. The detailed description of the sceneries of a fictional county called Manchester and the true depictions of the characters are exceptionally striking that I had to slow down in my reading to savor the story and hold on *tugging to them, cheering them on* to each characters. Reading the last page left me with a heavy heart. I would not want to let go of that image of Manchester and say goodbye Please don't go yet to the characters that I already became part of my literary world. The world that resides in the recesses of my brain. The world that is known only to me populated by people who I met only in my readings.

In terms of writing, Jones extensively use the technique called prolepsis that I first encountered reading Muriel Sparks' The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Jones explained this in the interview (appendix of the book) saying that he is the God of those characters so he knows what happened in the life of each characters from the time he/she was born up to the time his/her death. The most moving example of this use was with the character of the child Tessie. One fine day of September 1855, their mistress Caldonia saw the 5-y/o Tessie playing with a wooden toy horse. Caldonia says to the child: That is very nice, Tessie to which Tessie responded, My papa did this for me. In January 2002, on her deathbed, the old Tessie asked her caretaker to get the wooden toy horse from the attic. While holding the toy, she breathed her last saying the same thing: My papa did this for me.

My heart stopped beating. Tears welled up in my eyes. That scene is just one of the many moving scenes about those slaves in that time of the history in Virginia when black people were traded like they were not human but properties.

I can make this review very long. There are just too many good things I would like to say here but I am afraid that no review can make justice to a book as good as this.

[Catherine · Rating 1 out of 5]

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.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jar Of Death Pick #28

3.5 Stars

Most people probably believe that the only people who owned slaves were white people. But that's actually not the truth. Free blacks owned other black people. Some free blacks bought their family members and others just wanted the slave labor. Native Americans owned slaves for much of the same reasons.
The Known World introduces us to some of those people.

The Known World has won a whole gang of awards, so we know its an important book and the writing is top notch. My only problems with the book were the fact that there were too many characters. You know this is a pet peeve of mine and I lost track of all the characters in this book. My other problem was that it jumped backwards and forwards in time way too much. Most of the time jumps were super confusing.

I liked The Known World but I think I might not be smart enough to read this book. I'll probably reread it sometime in the future and I do recommend to others because its a brilliant book.

[Rosey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Basically - a book about slavery in the South. I enjoy those kind of thing, especially The Secret Lives of Bees, but with this one, it felt like the book had no point. While I was reading, I kept on going "what did I just read? Am I really reading/understanding this book?" and kept on referring to the back cover of the book. No. The story was simply what I read. O.......K! Then ugh. I HATE leaving a book unread, so I kept on forcing myself to read thru the whole book. Finally the misery I was putting myself through ended, and UGH! The storyline. The author kept on jumping around the timeline too much - and honestly - I would describe this book as a glimpse of the lives of slaves in the south, but with a blah storyline. However this book has won a pultizer prize. EH!? Anyone out there who has read this book? Your opinions??

However like always, we learn from books. What I got out of this book was a new knowledge I never came upon, that black people owned black slaves.They even buy their own family members, and the slaves were considered as properties, including family. Hmm... History is richier than we will ever know or think of.

[sAmAnE · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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?

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Nathanial · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in antebellum Virginia, a former slave, Henry Townsend, owns fifty acres of land and thirty-three slaves. As the story opens, Townsend is dying. The novel chronicles his life, the lives of his family members, and the lives of people he encountered in the community.

The main characters are three-dimensional and feel like real people, with both admirable traits and flaws. Jones employs an omniscient narrator and non-linear storytelling. He weaves together overlapping stories of past and present events, such that the reader knows what happens to these people in the future before knowing what has happened to them in the book’s “present.” There are a great many characters in this book and the list of Dramatis Personae is helpful in keeping them all straight.

This novel is based on a lesser known historical fact. While it was not common, it did happen that some free blacks owned slaves. It lends a complexity to the slavery narrative – showing how people can be impacted by society’s strictures and how victims of exploitation could become perpetrators of the same system.

This is not a quick and easy read. It feels like being immersed in the life and times of Manchester County, Virginia, in the 1850s. It is an eloquently written condemnation of oppression in any form. This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004.

[Juniper · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5-stars, really.

here is a perfect example of a books i should love, and yet.... i didn't. the book was a lot of work and, for me, very little reward. i think most of my issues are because of the style/structure of the novel:

* the third-person, omniscient narrator - this was distracting from very early on in the read. i held off judging it. i wanted to trust jones and his choice.
* non-linear narrative - i don't tend to have problems with this at all, but i found it super-clunky here. also distracting.
* the made-up references - jones would cite sources and details that seemed to lend such an air of gravitas, but none of it is actually real. (i know, i know. this is fiction. a novel. get over it. but it was just kinda weird to me. social commentary inserted into fiction happens. steinbeck did it. teju cole does it. many writers do this. i felt like jones did a crap-ton of research for this book. but then i read this NPR piece. in it, he notes he collected 2 shelves worth of books on slavery... "but never got around to reading them". so this just added to my 'what the?' on the references in the novel and jones' research.)
* all of this combined for a really awkward flow, and convoluted storytelling. i felt like it could lose 50-100 pages and be a tighter, better story.

in case you think maybe i am a lazy reader - i'm not, i swear! i love nothing more than a meaty, tough read. jones' story is definitely both of these things. he explores the issue of free black people owning slaves in virginia, and he gives us a large cast of active characters. but it all felt so... surface-y. we get the actions and reactions, but we don't really get the motivations or emotions. jones is navigating a morally dodgy landscape, one i would have loved to have gone into more deeply. we are given the horrors and the heartbreaks, but it all felt so detached. and, you know, maybe that is totally on purpose. maybe, for some people, detachment is the only way through such a horrible time in history.

jones has collected some serious critical acclaim and recognition over his career. to name a few: he's won the pulitzer, the national book critic's circle award, the PEN/Hemingway award, a MacArthur genius grant, and the International IMPAC dublin literary award. he's won nearly $1 million in literary awards alone. the man knows what he's doing, and the respect he's earned is fairly universal. the known world is an important story. but is just shining the light on the issues jones raises enough? so now i am back to the should. i should love this book. (it was just okay for me.) people should read this book. (indeed. but this is not a book i will blanket recommend to all.)

so, i don't know you guys. i am bummed over this one. and this is a terrible review/collection of thoughts. maybe i'll become more coherent with some distance and fix this up a bit - but for now i wanted to note down something here.

(aside #1 (going to be a bit spoiler-y here): moses confused me. or, rather, his turn to all-of-a-sudden being an asshole was weird. we're going along with moses. he seems like a lovely man. then, halfway into the book, he's a wife-beater, jerkface? where did that come from, and why was he presented like that? the reveal of moses being a not nice man was sudden and odd.)

(aside #2: worth noting (was hugely interesting to me) - the cover photo of this edition is © Eudora Welty! i had no idea about her photographic prowess.)

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully paced novel that inverts every cliche about institution of slavery. While not exactly removing race from the issue of slavery, Jones is able to show that even among African-Americans the perniciousness of slavery could damn a generation. The best summary of this idea came from a NYTimes review:

'There are few certified villains in this novel, white or black, because slavery poisons moral judgments at the root. As Jones shows, slavery corrupts good intentions and underwrites bad ones, yet allows decency the odd occasion -- but only by creating such an enormous need for it.'

The pacing and structure of this novel could be a little challenging to some, but I found that it fit the narrative perfectly. This isn't a novel that burns you with its quotable sentences, but it scars you with its images. There were periods in it where I thought I was reading a Cormac McCarthy novel. That alone is high praise.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Toni Morrison began her research for "Beloved," she discovered a trove of ghastly instruments. She knew, of course, that slaves were routinely whipped, starved, raped, and hanged, but the existence of specially forged tools was a surprise: metal bits forced down the throat, iron masks locked across the face, spiked collars clasped around the neck. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel reintroduced those horrors into the national memory and did much to demonstrate that the cruelties of slavery extended far beyond hard labor and physical deprivation.

"The Known World," by Edward Jones, reclaims another peculiarity of American slavery and in the process illustrates yet again that we can't under- estimate its perverse contortions of the human spirit. Bizarre as it sounds, in Louisiana, Virginia, and South Carolina, a small number of free blacks owned their own plantations - and their own slaves. It was a precarious arrangement, to be sure. Blacks who were freed or managed to buy their own freedom had little incentive to tarry in the South. The laws governing their status and their right to hold property were ambiguous and easy for any white person to shred.

Jones uses this fragile situation as the setting for a novel about a group of black and white Virginians who tried - sometimes nobly, often viciously - to maintain their world in the face of inevitable collapse. To the extent that Morrison spun a surreal tale of American slavery into mythic proportions, Jones has carved a companion series of stark anecdotes into national legends. In a measured voice that never rises to reflect the agonies and absurdities he describes, he moves back and forth through decades and across state lines, assembling an apparently random collection of brief scenes that gradually fuse into a stunning portrait of moral confusion.

The story revolves around Henry Townsend, a black man who, with the indulgence of his former owner, managed to buy his own farm and his own slaves - eventually 29 adults and a collection of children. Henry's parents, who labored tirelessly to free him as a child, are horrified by his participation in the flesh market, but Henry is ambitious, and, what's more, he learned from his master that "once you own even one, you will never be alone." As a protection against loneliness and a way to wealth, Henry can't imagine anything more successful, and he's convinced he can be "a better master than any white man he had ever known." Indeed, he attains that dubious goal, creating a plantation with forced labor that's largely free of physical beatings, but it's an insidious gentility that only camouflages the humiliations of Southern slavery.

Nevertheless, his untimely death frightens most of his slaves, who know just how delicate their relative comfort is. Only the brooding overseer, Moses, the first slave Henry ever bought, sees his master's demise as an opportunity - not for freedom, but for taking his place. Indeed, what interests Jones most in this complex novel is the way slavery distorts judgment, not just of those who oppress, but of those who are oppressed.

Henry's widow, Caldonia, quickly decides against freeing "her legacy," choosing instead to maintain the plantation in the spirit of Henry's gentle example. "Her husband had done the best he could," she thinks, "and on Judgment Day his slaves would stand before God and testify to that fact." Occasionally, a child is worked to death or a pregnant woman labors in the field till she miscarries, but Caldonia sheds sincere tears, comforts the parents, and considers whether she should buy insurance against further losses of her property.

As a single woman with a large business to run, she's encouraged by a collection of family and friends, other free blacks, some of whom own their own slaves, too. One of the most troubling is Fern, Caldonia's prim teacher of literature and etiquette. Together, they keep the irony of their position well buried, while socializing in a kind of racial terrarium maintained by William Robbins, the county's wealthiest white farmer. Estranged from his own wife but protected by his political power, he loves a black woman in town and openly adores his two mulatto children. The Townsend plantation with its little coterie of free slave-owning blacks gives his favorites a place to play and refine themselves.

In one of several shifts to the late 19th century, a Canadian historian interviews Fern, Caldonia's teacher, about those days on the plantation. "All of us do only what the law and God tell us we can do," she says without any hint of guilt or remorse. "We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did." Jones uses that same tone of historical distance throughout, a tone that amplifies the grotesque mingling of affection and cruelty that infected these people, black and white.

In the center of this moral kaleidoscope stands the sheriff, John Skiffington, an earnest Christian, dedicated to the objective application of law and convinced that "the law always cares" for everyone equally. It's a doomed endeavor, of course, but as Caldonia's plantation begins to collapse, Skiffington fails to realize that the legal system he's sworn to uphold is not objective and that he cannot remain clean within it.

The scrambled collection of events and characters makes this a difficult story to enter, but that structure eventually accounts for much of the novel's evocative power. Jones has a kind of biblical style that suggests whole lives in a few stark details from a perspective that's alternately microscopic and telescopic. It's a technique that resists our efforts to keep these events in some unrecoverable past. The troubling implications of his story leach in through hairline cracks all over the twin shells of antebellum nostalgia and Northern piety. Every time Caldonia cheerfully reminds her friends, "We are all worthy of one another," the legacy of slavery sounds more complex and unresolved.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0814/p1...

[Cheryl]

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.

[Celeste Ng]

People kept telling me how amazing this book was, and I didn't think it would live up to the hype. But it absolutely did. It's amazing.

[Ava Cairns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met a dead man layin in Massa lane
Ask that dead man what his name
He raised he bony head and took off his hat
He told me this, he told me that
I once read from another person reviewing this book that there are so many characters in this book to emulate the windiness and complexity of a map---the people in the story are like roads of a map---they don't have a clear path, and they intertwine with each other when you least expect it.
The first map makers were living under the illusion that they knew the world, but really, they were only seeing the map through their narrow perspective, they could not make out the true proportions, the true landscape, no matter how sure they were of themselves that they could.
In this sense, the characters in the book who think that they own people are like these first map makers; they are painstakingly lost in their own illusion.
They think, for example, that they, as "masters" have control over whether they will give the person they enslaved "a good life or bad life." They think that they are deciding whether or not to be moral, but in reality, all morals have gone out the window and what has taken its place is a devilish energy the moment one decides to own another human being. Deciding whether or not they are moral has no weight, no meaning, as they have already lost that morality.
Is the true map ever realized? Or will they remain under the hold of evil? Will there be lasting freedom, or will freedom come and go?

[Chrissie · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Will Byrnes · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.