The Known World | Edward P. Jones | The Art of the Narrative

The Known World | Edward P. Jones | Beautifully written

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The Known World

	The Known World Edward P. Jones Amistad, 2003 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 296 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Art of the Narrative

The many reviews here will give you a good summary of what the book is about. I want to highlight the wonderful narrative ability of Edward Jones. He is above all a good story teller - in the finest tradition of Southern writers like Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner. It is an ambitious book that is fun to read. Ambitious in that there are many stories told, although they are all related. Fun for all the reasons that make good literature enjoyable. Jones draws us into his created world with language that accurately portrays the reality of the period and most significantly, the mindset of the people who lived in that time. It is a realistic book with touches of the supernatural and with an omniscient but humble narrator who glimpses into the future fate of his characters (The book reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez). The language is lyrical without being poetic. There are very few metaphors and yet what is described comes to us in new, fresh, language that awakens us. Most of all, one can sense an underlying compassion throughout this work for all the characters: the good, the ignorant, the evil - all human and all victims of a system that denied our common humanity.

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Beautifully written

Jones has written a classic, one which looks carefully at the always incendiary topic of race in America. He focuses on an unusual couple of freed blacks who owned their own slaves in Manchester County, VA. Throughout the book, the reader is exposed to the complicated relationships between this couple, Henry and Caldonia Townsend, their slaves, a white neighbor, and the county officials. Jones' tone is consistently unsympathetic, straightforward, and unsentimental. His dialogue between characters is beautifully crafted, funny at times, painful at others, but always worth re-reading. Stories within stories unfold and double back upon each other. The richness of the characters is revealed by the reader's changing reactions throughout the book, at times loathing a character and, just a few pages later, feeling sympathy toward him.

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Incredible

This is one of my all time favorite books. Nonetheless, the content is very serious and very real. It is a page turner, well written, and full of character development. It explains a lot about the institution of slavery. The in depth explanation makes it easier to understand why it was so hard to stop slavery.

Much to recommend

"The Known World" took me into an area of history I knew nothing about -- free blacks in the South who became slaveholders before the Civil War.

The writing style and the story itself thoroughly held my interest. It followed multiple characters in a non-linear fashion, mixing history, magic realism, foreshadowing, and almost stream-of-consciousness to explore the lives of the slaves, the sides of slavery, and the different impacts it had on people in ways I hadn't previously considered.

It was simultaneously both challenging and entertaining.

It is not a Civil War story, but it helps understands the human side of slavery, what caused the war, and resulted from it. I highly recommend the novel.

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