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    The Known World
    The Known World
    The Known World
    Audiobook14 hours

    The Known World

    Written by Edward P. Jones

    Narrated by Kevin R. Free

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his affairs with unusual discipline. But when death takes him unexpectedly, his widow, Caldonia, can't uphold the estate's order and chaos ensues. In a daring and ambitious novel, Jones has woven a footnote of history into an epic that takes an unflinching look at slavery in all of its moral complexities.

    Performed by Kevin Free

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 15, 2004
    ISBN9780060774110
    Author

    Edward P. Jones

    Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; he also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004. His first collection of stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short listed for the National Book Award. His second collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award. He has been an instructor of fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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    Reviews for The Known World

    4/5

    119 ratings85 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I loved this book. I believed it. A black family owning slaves before the Civil War. Yet, I believed it. Jones has a quiet way of letting the story unfold--no need to rush to the end, just relax and appreciate the journey.
    • 2/5
      Pretty dull, & if it wasn't hard to follow I just stopped trying to follow it. I just didn't care about what happened.
    • 4/5
      A pretty amazing book. I read it in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma, and I would not have predicted it as a good choice for post-hurricane reading, but it turned out to be marvelous.
    • 2/5
      It's with trepidation that I write this, because I'm an intellectual weenie who is really intimidated by people who are smarter than me, but I didn't like this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about free blacks who owned slaves in the antebellum south. I can understand in some distant abstract way that it has great artistic merit, but boy, for me it was a slog. We start with the nonlinear narrative. No big deal by itself because anyone reading modern literary fiction had damned well better be used to fractured time. But in a work with what seemed like a thousand characters, the nonlinear narrative was more confusing than usual. A friend of mine said she couldn't always tell what decade she was in, and that's about right.And those thousand characters. Most of them felt like sketches, and I wasn't emotionally invested in any of them. I'm a sucker for realism. The characters in the Ian McEwan novels I've read, or in Never Let Me Go, they are real, they breathe, and I love them and hate them. Like oil paintings where you see every muscle and every drop of perspiration and every thread in the clothing. Not like some modernist painting where it's all a mishmosh. Yes, I'm a philistine.This just wasn't a conventional novel at all, and I'm in a conventional mood, I suppose. Rather than a coherent work, it felt episodic, with most of the episodes kind of fuzzy and impressionistic, and then a moment of stunning clarity which would give you hope for coherence that never came.Oh yeah, and if you're going to write a historical novel, it might be cheating just a tiny, tiny bit, to decide not to do a whit of research. I don't care if you're making up a fictional county. You've picked a hell of a provocative subject, and a bit of factual knowledge might have proved helpful.
    • 2/5
      First, let me say that it took a long while to finish [The Known World]. I started it some time ago for a class, and it just never took me. It's well-written, and the plot is interesting enough, but alone that's fairly damning praise for me. I found the structure of the book jarring and it often seemed to be trying-too-hard to be artistic and new. The rambling nature of th story felt forced, and it never seemed to come together. There were also so many characters that I never felt as if I really got to know any of them, and many of them I simply didn't like--by extension, I couldn't make myself care about them. If I hadn't recently read [Uncle Tom's Cabin], I could hypothesize that it was the subject or the times that didn't connect, but it wasn't. Stowe's work was engaging, and her characters felt real, where as this book just didn't measure up to any of the other contemporary lit. or slavery related lit. that I've read. It attempted a great deal, but I cannot say that it came through on any level for me. I wouldn't recommend this one.
    • 5/5
      The usual: would I recommend it? Definitely, with no restrictions, except for those who want something extremely linear to follow as far as plot. This book weaves in and out of time so if you're put off by that sort of thing, then don't pick this one up.I loved this book!!! I cannot recommend it highly enough! Do yourself a huge favor and read it. I had no idea that there were black slaveholders before I bought this book. In fact, this premise is what drew my eye to the book ... long before it had won any awards or ended up on any bestseller list. I've had it sitting here since it first came out and I'm only mad at myself for not having read it sooner.I will begin my impressions of this book by starting at the end, where a man is in Washington DC in 1861, sees a line of people & gets in it because he's curious. When he reaches the object of his curiosity, he finds a tapesty an artist has done which he immediately knows is the plantation of Henry Townsend in Manchester County VA -- it moves him to describe it as "what God sees when He looks down on Manchester;" "a map of life made with every kind of art man has ever thought to represent himself." (384) It is, in fact, a recreation done of the place where the viewer grew up, every detail stunning in its perfection, down to the flowers on Henry Townsend's grave.It is Henry Townsend's death which begins the book; afterwards we come to know Henry through stories that capture him in his childhood as a slave on the Robbins Plantation, then as a freed man, and finally as the owner of his own home and land, complete with slaves. These are not told linearly, but go in and out of the story through different events and different times. As Henry's story is told, it is by necessity interwoven with the stories of the people in Manchester, including the slaves on Henry's farm, slave owners, poor whites, those who only see slaves as commodities from which to profit, and other freed blacks who own slaves who have secret aspirations & desires of becoming as powerful as the white people. Not only is the present examined for all of these people, but their pasts and their eventual fates are offered as well. No one in Manchester was left unaffected by slavery.The author's tone is very muted and understated; the prose is most excellent and really draws you to keep reading. The story itself is unique. The characters are alive & real and by the end of this book I had been so sucked in to the story I did not want it to end.I can't recommend it enough.
    • 5/5
      One of My all time Favorites!!!
    • 5/5
      In an exeptionally good novel that is exceptionally painful to read, Jones tells the story of black slave-owners in fictional Manchester County in antebellum Virginia. [ Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post (8/24/2003) aptly compares Manchester County to "Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, with its own elaborate history and mythology."]The story begins with the death of Henry Townsend, a 31-yr-old black man who owned 33 slaves and over fifty acres of land, and whose unspecified ailment was not treated by "the white people's doctor" since "the ailments of white people and black people were different, and a man who specialized in one was not expected to know much about the other..." Henry's freedom had been purchased from the town's richest man, William Robbins, by Augustus, Henry's father, a locally renown woodworker who purchased his own freedom, then his wife Mildred's, and then Henry's. Henry was closer to his master than his parents, however, and listened to Robbins when he told him, "Don't settle for just a house and some land, boy. Take hold of it all. There are white men out there, Henry, who ain't got nothin. You might as well step in and take what they ain't takin. Why not? God is in his heaven and he don't care most of the time. The trick of life is to know when God does care and do all you need to do behind his back." Henry's first slave, Moses, becomes the overseer of all his subsequent slaves, many of whom we come to know. Moses too speculates on the role of God in this world: "Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?" Despite God's apparent lack of interest in the world, the characters are quite interested in God, from the preacher who comes on Sundays and funerals to tell the slaves "they should obey their masters and mistresses, for heaven would not be theirs if they disobeyed," to the earnest Christian sheriff who prays constantly, but who will not hesitate to kill if "denied by a...by a nigger."Henry's widow, Caldonia, had thought about freeing the slaves on Henry's death, but decided they and the plantation were her and Henry's "legacy." While she could never imagine being a slave herself, nor could she imagine that her own slaves might want to be free. In fact, just what slavery means to both master and slave is a dominant theme in the novel. Ownership of people is not the only kind explored: sex, love, loneliness, greed, are all taken into account as "enslaving" the characters. Yet it is the all-encompassing exploitation of human slavery that receives the most attention as well as the least explanation. The casual cruelty displayed to slaves throughout the book gives appalling evidence of the evil of man and the exacerbation of that evil by the institution of slavery. No factual account could evoke the same horror as when the characters, now a part of the reader's known world, suffer these appalling fates. Although the book moves backwards and forwards in time all the way to the current day, the main action ends with a letter to Caldonia from her brother Calvin, dated April 12, 1861. A similar device to that used by Isaac Bashevis Singer in "The Family Moskat" (likewise a portrait of a known world about to be extinct), no mention is made that this day brought the beginning of The Civil War. Calvin tells Caldonia about the story quilt he saw hanging in an exhibit in D.C. by one of Caldonia and Henry's escaped slaves. (Moses led the slaves to freedom, but could not go there himself.) The quilt depicts the entire known world of the slave Alice from a God's-eye-view. Once again, the characters see God as central, looking down, but just looking.This book won the Pulitzer Prize and a number of other awards. (JAF)
    • 5/5
      Incredible writing. Moving story, complex and interesting characters. Powerful, uncomfortable, gripping, couldn’t put it down.
    • 5/5
      One of the best books I read last year. I never would have picked it up, if not for my book club, but I am really glad I did.
    • 4/5
      A wonderful book I never would have read except for Book Club. Written in the language of the slaves, the oral tradition; about the coming in and going out of all the characters in their lives.
    • 5/5
      A book worth reading. Jones will seem to wander off topic, but even if it seems tangential, you'll probably hear tell of it again. Each character, whether a brief cameo or a protagonist, is vividly sketched. Jones has a voice worth paying attention to. If you liked this book, try Lost in the City, his first short story collection, or All Aunt Hagar's Children, his second, both concerning black life in Washington, D.C., among other things.
    • 3/5
      I'm too old to spend two weeks with a book this sad.
    • 2/5
      I started this book three times before I managed to get all the way through it. I've thought about why it seemed so uninspiring to read despite the fact that many passages were written in interesting ways. I think it is because there was little identifiable as a plot. There was certainly not presented obvious conflicts that needed to be resolved except in a few individuals minds. The last third of the book was the most interesting. I would not say this is a must read from the perspective of the story telling, but it an important read with regard to the difficult subject mater around slavery.
    • 4/5
      Thought provoking story on slavery from an interesting angle: black slave owners. Beautifully written, although hard to follow at times.
    • 5/5
      Excellent book - great topic and title, beautifully written in a let-me-tell-you-a-story fashion with wanderings, humor, history and suspense. A real gem.
    • 4/5
      Incredible book. A little like Gone with the Wind but with former slaves who become slave owners. The writing is riveting and a little mysticism thrown in makes this one of my favorite books read in 2008.
    • 5/5
      Lyrical book, made up of interwoven, individual sagas concerning the black slaves of black slave owners in Virginia.The Known World is tinged with magic (like Toni Morrison's novels), and at the same time grounded in research. The prose has a mythic ring, probably because of the way the narrative leaps from story to story and uses physical details as small weights to anchor those stories.
    • 5/5
      Shifts the narrative of enslaved people in a meaningful and moving way. An intimate and confounding story with unique humanity.
    • 4/5
      A great view into the world of slavery, how humans were viewed as property, and how that view transcended, at times, the color boundary. A very good read, especially for those interested in that time period of American history.(Candice)
    • 4/5
      It took me a while to get into this book, but even though it was slow moving, I couldn't abandon it because I wanted to know what happened to each character. You find out too! This is the first book I've read that really explored what life must have been like for freed slaves before the Civil War, living between worlds, not protected by the law, nor free exactly in the eyes of the South.
    • 5/5
      A novel about a slave-owning black man in pre-Civil War America.This book has interesting characterizations of both black and white people - Henry, the black man, is especially well-drawn. He sees nothing wrong in owning slaves; he also reads Milton. Williams, his former owner, a white man, beats his slaves but is desperately in love with a black woman, and is as fond of Henry as he is of his own sons.
    • 4/5
      This was just as good as its reputation. Fine, fine storytelling from an oddly omniscient narrator who jumps forwards in time to tell the endings of characters that we meet in their prime, so we always reminded that we are reading a history, even if the history turns out to be utterly fabricated.

      I love the idea of an impressionistic history as it conforms to so much of the way I experience fiction. This terrific book may not be telling any one person's story even as it includes specific details from invented scholarly works, but there is something magical and vital in the telling nonetheless.
    • 5/5
      Excellent and harrowing novel of black slave owners...
    • 5/5
      Story of free slave, Henry Townsend, who came to be master of a plantation with own slaves. Some of book are told in flashback, but much of bk occurs after death, which occurs on 1st page. Beautifully written with large cast of characters. Provides good description of economy of slavery.
    • 5/5
      Edward P. Jones accomplishes the amazing feat of writing whole books in his head, and the result is as close to omniscience as you can imagine. He knows their past, present, and future, and doesn't hesitate to hint at all of them.

      Still, though, some fates remain cloudy and become realized in their gaping horror over the course of the novel. The opening chapter is about the death of Henry Townsend, though you don't yet know him. Though the narrative seems atemporal at first, this is just a denser juxtaposition of flashbacks and "flashforwards" than any other book you've read. It eventually settles on following Henry from childhood into adulthood into the events after his death.

      Jones takes as his subject a handful of black landowners who also kept slaves, and the way that the institution of slavery gradually deformed their lives and moral selves. It seems relatively settled at first, but starting about 1/3rd in the true horror of slavery starts to become apparent as Henry is turned against others and slowly shaped by Robbins into what he would call a "proper master."

      In the end, fate works to undo those not undone by themselves, in a slow decline familiar to any viewer of The Wire. That show probably is the best analogy for how The Known World does its work, although Jones is freed by writing to make his picture of the world more pointillistic.

      Would absolutely recommend to anyone.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant for making black nor white (pun intended) the victor, but for deeply exploring gray areas.
    • 5/5
      Das ist wirklich ein ausgezeichnetes und auch sehr erschütterndes Werk über die Sklaverei in den Südstaaten Amerikas.Der Autor beleuchtet v.a. die Tatsache, dass es freie Schwarze gab, die Sklaven hielten. Wie brüchig dieses System war, zeigt er am Beispiel der Plantage Henry Townsends. Henrys Vater hatte ihn und seine Mutter freigekauft. Als Henry selbst einen Sklaven kauft, bricht für ihn eine Welt zusammen. An diesen Personen wird das Unrecht der Sklaverei überdeutlich, die Willkür, wie wenig ein Leben zählt. Ich fand das Hörbuch grandios, wenn auch die vielen Personen und ihre Namen, sowie die Erzähltechnik mit Vor- und Rückblenden beim Hören Konzentration erforderten. Kompliment auch an den Sprecher!Die bekannte Welt ist die Welt der Sklaverei und des Rassismus, die nicht besser wird, wenn es Schwarze sind, die wie Weiße agieren. An vielen Beispielen zeigt der Autor das Unrecht auf. Völlig willkürlich erscheint es, wem am Ende ein Happy End beschieden ist und wem nicht.
    • 3/5
      The Known World is the story of a black in the American pre-Civil War south. He gains his freedom, then acquires slaves of his own. The book is about his relationship to his slaves, and his relationship to the rest of the community. The book is difficult to read. It struck me as a collection of short stories glued together by a few common characters. The stories jump around in time, making it difficult to follow and the characters difficult to keep separate. There is no discernible plot in the book and each story is left to stand on its own. Edward's sentences tend to run on, making the book difficult to read on another level. I found the characters a bit flat. There were none that I felt any ties to. Generally, the stories are fairly nonviolent, but a few break that trend, some can be difficult to read. Some of the short stories are interesting and informative. The author works in historical information to tie the story to events we are familiar with. In spite of its having won a Pulitzer, it isn't one I can recommend. I didn't even finish this book, although I have strong urges to finish it just for completeness. Some people seem to get a lot out of the book, but I did not.
    • 2/5
      This book was very promising, but for me, it never went below skin-deep with any of its characters. The voice of the narrator was too removed and distant for my tastes, and the habit of integrating facts from present day to reflect them upon the lives of the 19th-century characters was interesting, but distracting. It made me feel even more separate from the characters, reminding me (in effect) that I was a modern reader. When I read a book, especially a work of historical fiction, the whole point for me is to grow closer to that time period and experience it through the characters.In short, I was disappointed by this book, because the premise and characters were so promising and made me want to experience something that the narrative prevented me from experiencing.