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Title: The Known World by Edward P. Jones ISBN: 0-06-055754-0 Publisher: Amistad Press Pub. Date: 14 August, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.08 (53 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Intelligent, thoughtful, and utterly compelling
Comment: Edward P. Jones tackles a difficult subject with depth and courage. Unlike other reviews listed here, I did not find his prose difficult, but enjoyed its richness and color, and found "The Known World" filled with flawed and genuine people of all races who grapple with slavery-America's "peculiar institution"-in a way that will surprise and compel readers.
Mourners come to Manchester County, Virginia to bury Henry Townsend and comfort his widow Caldonia. Henry was only 31 years old, a successful landowner and the owner of 33 slaves. He was also black, and a former slave himself. His human property learned from the start that working for a black master was no different from working for a white-or an Indian, for that matter. But they hold out the tiniest shred of hope that Caldonia, who was born free, will free them.
Henry's father Augustus bought his own freedom from his owner, Bill Robbins. He then worked to buy his wife, and then his son. But Henry always felt more affinity with Robbins than he did with his own family, shocking his parents when he buys his first slave. There are a number of black and Cherokee slave owners in the area who look on slaves with perhaps even more dispassionate eyes than do their white neighbors. "The legacy," Henry's mother-in-law calls his slaves when Caldonia briefly considers manumitting them. "Don't throw away the legacy."
I have never found a book that looks at slavery like "The Known World" does. Throw your preconceived notions out the window and be prepared to be completely pulled into a world where, no matter the characters' race, nothing is black and white.
Rating: 4
Summary: beautiful at times but strangely removed
Comment: The Known World has at its center the wonderfully complex question of who is master and who is slave among the various range of characters that make up this intricate novel--free blacks who own slaves, free blacks who do not, black slaves, poor whites, rich slave-owning whites, Native American slave "patrollers", light-skinned blacks who can pass for white, husband or wife, etc. The complexity of the situation is matched by the complexity of the presentation, as the novel moves freely and often seamlessly between time and place. This is not a book to read, therefore, while you "multi-task" or as you nod off to sleep--it requires the reader's full attention. The story will frequently spin away from the main narrative, sometimes for a few lines, sometimes for several pages, sometimes even longer in the one section I thought overly digressive. While I thought at times the author switched time and place too often too closely, for the most part this was a highly effective and haunting structure.
This is a beautifully written book, with carefully crafted sentences and characters revealed as often through slight, small acts as through more lengthy poetic descriptions. At times, as with the digressions, the reader might wish for less full language, but such times quickly pass.
The characters themselves are vividly portrayed and fully so--there are no easy or cheaply shallow characterizations. Good and bad are not, forgive the construction, as clearly black and white as one might have seen in a less skillful, less ambitious work. Sympathies can often shift for the reader, which some may find disconcerting but which I found more true to life and much more interesting.
My one complaint about the novel is that is is strangely, for its subject matter and its events, lacking in emotive impact. Part of it is probably that the fluid back-and-forth structure, together with the multitude of characters and settings, combine to frequently remove the reader from a real sense of intimacy with the characters, despite the poignant situations they encounter. And the closing few pages, while horribly tragic, have been telegraphed in tone if not in deed for so long that they are somewhat anti-climatic in terms of their emotional impact on the reader. This may be a single flaw, but it is a major one and perhaps even one that will cause some readers to not bother past the first third of the book. I went back and forth myself as to whether the short-term impact of the many flash-forwards or backwards (which was often lingeringly sad) was worth sacrificing a greater, more powerful sense of emotional connection. In the end I decided yes, though just, perhaps mostly because it's so refreshing to come across something different. The imposed sense of distance can make the book seem slow going, but anyone who reads it will find it ultimately if somewhat palely rewarding.
Rating: 5
Summary: Deserving of the Pulitzer
Comment: It is a weighty subject. Still, Edward Jones tackles the issue of black-owned slaves in pre-Civil War Virginia in thoughtful, immensely readable prose. This book is a true page-turner.
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Title: Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones ISBN: 0060566280 Publisher: Amistad Press Pub. Date: 14 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Namesake : A Novel by Jhumpa Lahiri ISBN: 0395927218 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Great Fire: A Novel by Shirley Hazzard ISBN: 0374166447 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Brick Lane: A Novel by Monica Ali ISBN: 0743243307 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Today Show Book Club #13) by Mark Haddon ISBN: 0385512104 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 31 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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