Books can be difficult for various reasons, and this one is difficult for some quite unusual reasons. It is not linguistically oblique, there is nothing much that is mysterious about the nature of the plot, and for the most part the action of the story takes place in a straightforward and realistic manner. On a word by word basis, the thing makes sense. What complicates matters is the author’s remarkable sense of the novel as a complete artistic vision. This is one of those rare and special works in which everything starts out in a kind of mess but which, as you read on, slowly resolves itself into a picture with depth, colour, light and shade, and with remarkable internal consistency. The novel is set in Manchester County, a fictional region in Virginia, sometime in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. More specifically, it is set in and around the world of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and ex-slave whose parents bought his freedom when he was a child. After learning a trade and making a little money, Townsend buys his own plantation and slaves; this might surprise modern readers, but we are given to understand that he was not unusual, and that he acted entirely according to the laws and culture of his times. However, Henry’s death comes quite early in the pages of this book, and so the main action comes in recalling the story of his youth and how he came to his position in life, then what happened after he died when his wife, Caldonia, came into possession of the farm and its property (human and otherwise).At first I found all this quite difficult to follow. Within the first fifty or so pages, the author introduces a large number of different characters, and is not only fastidious about charting their relationships to one another but also in introducing elements of both their past and future stories in asides which often seem to have little relevance to immediate events. I read somewhere that there is no present tense in this book, which seems to me like a perfect way of describing it: for much of the first two thirds of the text, the writing is unhinged in time, jumping from moment to moment across years in a way which frequently seems inscrutable.It’s not until relatively late in the book that the thing starts to cohere. Eventually, things settle down a little, and the true pattern of the author’s wizardry starts to form broad arcs across the pages. I can’t stop thinking of one particular moment, one really awful thing that happens in the story, that in any other book would perhaps seem like an unnecessary act of cruelty only perpetrated against an admirable character so that they have a chance to seem further ennobled. But such is the effort here on the part of the author to develop the history and motivations of both the victim and the perpetrator over the course of tens and hundreds of pages that when this horrible thing happens, it has the immediate, painful quality of lived experience: it somehow seems both inevitable (that such a person should do such a thing) and by chance (that it should happen to this person, at that moment, that night).Leaps across the immediate chronology of a character’s life in the course of a plot are perhaps not all that strange for a historical novel, but what makes this book more unusual still is that it frequently describes the final fates of even the most insignificant people within its pages. Some of these descriptions are the length of a throwaway sentence — a kidnapped slave girl is casually mentioned as later becoming the first black woman to achieve a Phd in America, for example — while others are spelled out in details dropped like breadcrumbs across the breadth of the book. It’s a postmodern touch which never lets the reader forget that this is a novel framed with the ultimate benefit of educated hindsight, a kind of tacit acknowledgement of the godlike power with which the author determines the fates of these characters. That doesn’t mean that anyone is due a happy ending more than anyone else, and the slaves who eventually achieve emancipation and some kind of extra chance at life are rare compared to those who are killed or who die suddenly or who quietly, simply disappear. But almost everyone gets an ending of some kind, and it’s usually one which recognises that, rich or poor, free or otherwise, these were just human beings who were hated and feared and loved and missed in varying degrees.One last thing that’s worth mentioning is the author’s own intrusions into the text in the form of historical references and citations. Often a detail regarding local law or a particularly intriguing set of statistics are presented as fact, and if it hadn’t been for the brief interview with Jones at the end of my edition, I would probably have accepted these as all being true. But they aren’t — as far as I know, they are all invented. Personally, I didn’t find this offensive, but I can understand how some might find it problematic given that we still live in times when people would still deny or underestimate the scale of the atrocity which formed the foundations of modern American society. Could a person read this and accept its account as entirely truthful; and if they did, what would they think if they found out it was fiction? What else might they come to doubt? I don’t know that I can answer that. My own perspective is one of admiration at the craft involved to create something so utterly convincing. I don’t personally believe in moral or immoral books; to paraphrase Wilde, they’re either written well or poorly, and in any medium there can be no accounting for the vagaries of taste and prejudice. Perhaps it would do better to simply assume the best from our readers and our writers, and leave the rest open to interpretation.
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.
What do You think about The Known World (2006)?
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.
—Catherine
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.
—Michael
Edward P. Jones' Bold Vision of "The Known World"This story would have been exciting enough based only on the fact that Edward P. Jones so boldly took the antebellum novel to a place it has never gone before; namely, to black slave-owner Henry Townsend's plantation in Manchester, Virginia. There, the "Known World" is wholly different from what one might expect. But this seemingly obviously absurd anomaly of U.S. history, wherein black masters owned black slaves, doesn’t stop with that rarely discussed fact. It is further illuminated by Jones' flights into the fantastic with observations of sentient lightning, children with the personalities of bitter grandparents, and, comically enough, freak chickens. Mixed within this potent literary brew are some of the most original and dynamic characters, male and female, ever to step into the pages of American fiction. In fact, one of the more remarkable features of Jones’ amazing novel is his portrayal of how specific individuals sometimes managed to exploit the institution of slavery in order to indulge their own private needs, quirks, or agendas.It's true that the alternating biblical density and epic expansiveness of details and events with which Jones builds his narrative can at times prove challenging. However, this same aesthetic ultimately delivers a triumphant satisfaction. Jones' Pulitzer--and any other awards received for this novel--was well earned and deserved. by Author-Poet Aberjhani author of "Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance" (Facts on File Library of American History) and "The Wisdom Of W.E.B. Du Bois" (Wisdom Library)
—Aberjhani
