The Known World by Edward P. Jones Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Known World
Book Review: Flat and monotonous.
Summary: 1 Stars
The subject is interesting, but the characters and the writing are boring. The characters are one dimensional and the writing style is very simple and flat with short sentences lacking a smooth flow. There are no interesting insights or observations by the narrator leaving one detached and uninvolved. As others have commented the story also jumps around a lot and so many characters are introduced leaving one confused.Book Review: Good as a novel, great as an analysis of social custom
Summary: 4 Stars
This book tells the story of a Virginian plantation during the slavery period. When the black proprietor dies, his widow does not have the ruthlesness required to hold the slave community together and everything goes wrong.
As a novel this book is good but not great. The storyline is interesting enough and the events are heart-wrenching, but there are too many characters, and there is too much hopping between dates, locations, and viewpoints. The original perspective, with different third-person viewpoints interspersed with historical facts, make the story hard to get into.
As a social analysis however, the book beautifully illustrates how the system of slavery is sustainable as the interplay between the customs, beliefs and motives of the participants. The slaveowners and those who uphold the law are driven by lust for power, greed, and sadism, but also genuine belief in the divine justness of racial separation and benevolence in guiding what they believe to be less worthy people. The subordinated display acceptance, resignation or fruitless resistance. The result is a social system that shapes the characters and their actions and is at the same time created by them. Jones skillfully shows how even the most horrible racist acts carry a sense of inevitability and justness within their context. Symbolic is the map of the county ("The known world"), that the pious and honest sheriff of the community has in his office.
At the same time, the book shows that the system is fragile, and depends crucially on the authority and the threat of violence by the powerful few. The decline of the plantation and the unravelling of the status quo show that there is no space for moderates within the slavery system.
In short, the book brilliantly lays bare how the system of slavery trappes its participants in a self-enforcing but fragile web of beliefs and customs. This more than makes up for the unfortunately fragmented storyline.
Book Review: Had a hard time finishing it!
Summary: 2 Stars
I was really excited to read this book because I've read many of the Today Show Book Club Selections and enjoyed them all so far. I'd say this was my least favorite as of yet.
I am an avid reader, but yet had a hard time remembering all of the characters in this book. I felt there were way too many than what would have been necessary. This made it difficult to really dig into the book. Once I started getting better acquainted with the characters, it was still slow going, I just didn't feel much anticiaption or excitement for what would happen next. I also did not feel much of a connection for any of the characters. Furthermore, especially at the beginning I had a hard time keeping straight the storyline, obviously not remembering all of the who's who didn't help!
I finished the book, but it took me quite a long time because I just didn't have a lot of interest in it. But, I kept reading hoping it would get better, towards the middle I did start getting into the story more and the last half was better than the first for sure. I am giving this book such a low review based on all of my reasons above. I do love a good historical novel, but this one just didn't do it for me. I would not recommend it to a friend.
Book Review: Incredible
Summary: 5 Stars
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.Book Review: Intimate portrayal of how the institution of slavery affected lives in the South
Summary: 5 Stars
In his Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Known World", Edward P. Jones weaves together the storylines of many different people at all strata of pre-Civil War society in the South: blacks who are slaves, oversee slaves, have earned their freedom, were born free, and those who own slaves themselves; whites who own large plantations, those who just own a slave or two, regular working-class folks, poor folks, drunks, scoundrels and criminals. Jones' great achievement is to show, in a highly engrossing way without being didactic, how the lives of all of these people are profoundly affected and perverted by the institution of slavery. Even those characters who are partially or fully aware of the evils of slavery, and who try to minimize or resist its influences, ultimately cannot escape it. Slavery, in Jones' view, was effectively poisoning the very air breathed by everyone in the pre-Civil War South.
Jones populates "The Known World" with characters who are complex, often flawed, and hence believable as denizens of that place and time. There is no character who is perfect or who would qualify as the hero. The language that Jones has his characters speak, and the way they behave, seem very appropriate for the setting. Thus, when the characters interact, and when critical events happen, it all seems very believable. Through his characters and the events of the story, Jones is able to deliver powerful messages without ever having to have a character or an all-knowing disembodied narrator explain the moral by launching into a monologue. Thus does Jones create a masterpiece worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.
My negative criticisms of "The Known World" are minor. I felt that some of the minor incidents didn't make sense (and hence I wonder why Jones included them). Jones' choice of words in his descriptions is not as precise as some other authors, and while I commend him for shuffling his chronology and for leaving reality to explore the world of the fantastic, these scenes don't flow quite as smoothly or poetically as a true master of this type of writing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But not being Gabriel Garcia Marquez is hardly a sin. "The Known World" delivers an important, powerful message in an accessible, engrossing way, and is likely to be one of the more memorable novels that you read.