The Known World | 
 enlarge | Author: Edward P. Jones
Publisher: Amistad
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $4.80
You Save: $20.15 (81%)
New (6) Used (11) from $4.54
Rating:  295 reviews
Sales Rank: 270212
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 400
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.3
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
ASIN: B001C2DEBW
Publication Date: September 1, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Set in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned from former master about the proper distance to keep from one's property. After his death, his slaves wonder if Caldonia will free them. When she fails to do so, but instead breaches the code that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day. --Regina Marler
Product Description
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 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 at their plantation: 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 known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of 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, whites, and Indians -- and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 290 more reviews...
 Dull October 16, 2008
Cosmoetica (New York, USA)
Edward P. Jones wrote a terrific book of short stories in 1991, Lost In The City, that was justifiably critically praised, for nine of its fourteen tales are great, but it was forgotten until his 2003 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning novel, The Known World, came out. Then his publisher, Amistad Press, rushed to reprint the earlier work, to cash in on the publicity, after years of pulping old copies. It is ironic, because in this edition of the novel, the best writing in the whole book comes from an epilogue that reprints perhaps the best of those tales, The Girl Who Raised Pigeons, and it stands in sharp contrast to the jumbled, muddied work that is the bulk of Jones' novel. Even its very title is muddied, as it primarily refers to the extant world of bondage it portrays, and a host of lesser oblique meanings- such as its primary setting.
That said, the book is not really a bad work of fiction, on the level of a T.C. Boyle, Joyce Carol Oates, or, Heaven forfend!, Dave Eggers or David Foster Wallace, merely an overrated and mediocre one. On a 1-100 scale I'd say it's a solid 70 or so, but clearly Jones' is at his artistic height in his excellent short stories, where his poetic lines do not smear over into drab run-on sentences that can mix up tenses and lose the narrative push. Unfortunately, this book's critical and popular success probably means Jones will kowtow and start publishing novels exclusively because, as the self-fulfilling prophecy goes, `short stories do not sell', nor do they get optioned into films. This would be a shame, literarily speaking, because Jones' tendency to overdescribe and toss so much at a reader so quickly works well in short bursts, especially in the spatial limitations of his short stories, for they lend a richness and heft to those works that the `airy' and banal short stories of most current fictionists lack, besides also lacking narrative and any real characterization skills. But, in the novel, this tendency lets Jones linger far too long on minutia that never serves a later purpose in the book. Characters and things and incidents are detailed, then dropped totally. And they do not serve even a purpose of clarifying a later action nor the character they involve.
Far too much of this 388 page novel is devoted to the repeated going back to the death of one of its main characters, the black, thirty-one year old Henry Townsend, who owns fifty acres of land and thirty plus slaves. This is, in itself, not bad, were each return to the era that the event occurs somehow skewed or heightened by a different perspective. Instead, we just lazily troll through the dying, death, funeral, and aftermath, even as the narrative bounces around through the decades of the 19th Century. It's not that, as many readers have complained, the tale is difficult to follow, as it is simply dull....Similarly, a muddled story is not necessarily a complex one. Finnegans Wake proved that, and this book does too, although it is far superior to Joyce's syphilitic rant. Yet, it is also a story with no emotional center. Its anomic structure and haphazard characterization result in the reader not wanting to ever go back and reread a passage to get some import they may have missed, or are fuzzy on. And unlike its review in the New York Times, this book is not epic in the least, unless that term now means `padded'. Traditionally, the word implies a grand scale, and this book is the very antithesis of that notion. It is personal in the extreme. It just doesn't make up its mind about which person nor thing it is really about, and thus there is no payoff for the reader, just several hours lost in an intriguing premise that never fulfills itself. That the book won so many awards is doubtlessly due to its subject matter, not its text. This is the new standard in literature, though, and we all suffer for it. At least Jones' Known World is dead. This one, I fear, has a ways to go before the grave.
 Gorgeous October 7, 2008
Katharine (Brooklyn, NY)
"The Known World" is one of the most beautifully written novels I've read. I savored it as as I do Nabokov or Garcia Marquez. If you appreciate a flawlessly structured narrative written with sublime economy of words; if you delight in reading a good story with deep philosophical undercurrents; if you live in pursuit of fine literature--- well, then, read this book. By the way, saying: "this book is too difficult for me to get into," isn't *exactly* levelling criticism at the book.
Riveting! You'll never forget it. September 1, 2008
Eliza Doolittle (Honolulu, HI USA)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Edward P. Jones's "The Known World": A Study Guide from Gale's "Novels for Students" (Volume 26, Chapter 4)
Gripping June 19, 2008
E. McFarland (Texas)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
What an awesome story. It is not a simple linear story rather rich in detail and circuitous. The time jumps around quite a bit and so do the many stories within the story.I was hooked from the beginning. Fascinating read. I read his on vacation but it is a deep and entertaining read. I think it would also be a great piece to read for a high school o college history class.
Difficult to read but well worth it June 14, 2008
Liesl Mcquillan (Dallas, TX)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I, too, found this book difficult to read, but not because of the prose; it was difficult to read because the subject matter was so viscerally presented and articulately explored. To confront the idea of people being worth money and nothing more was almost too much to bear. I applaud Mr. Jones for his ability to dig into this subject and to display it in a way that forces us to face such a legacy.
I was afraid that there would not be any redemptive value in the book but found that redemption was offered in the smallest, most subtle ways. Stop reading now if you don't want a spoiler. The knowledge after the fact that Moses had not killed his wife and child, that the man who would lead to his maiming knew it, saw it on him was powerfully felt because of its subtlety. The way Jones presents the final assault on Moses, the cutting of his Achilles tendon was remarkable. Knowing that the man who casually enacted such violence would never do so again after being forced to bear the suffering he had created, almost through the barrel of his body, for miles and while literally being hugged by that suffering was simply sublime. Clearly, this book is well worth the pain it may cause and the sadness in may imprint.
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