Book #26: The Known World

Title: The Known World


Author: Edward P. Jones


I'll admit it: I had very high expectations going into this book. The reviews on the book jacket positively glowed, and, unfortunately for me, one of the reviewers compared The Known World to Cold Mountain, which is one of my favorite books ever.


There were a lot of things I really liked about The Known World. I loved the way that the book was so un-linear (ok, so I know that's not really a world). But what I mean is that he'd introduce a character in the course of the main story, and we'd find out not only how she fit into the main narrative, but also what she had been doing twenty years earlier and how she would die fifty years later. So even though the main story takes place over the course of only a few months, it feels like an epic.


I also feel like I learned a lot while reading The Known World, which is the story of what happens on a plantation in Virginia when the young, black slaveowner dies, leaving his widow in charge. Until I read this book, I never realized that free blacks in the South owned slaves, so reading about the relationships between slaves and slave owners of the same race (and often of the same family) was pretty eye opening.


The Known World is a book I have a lot of respect for. It stretched me as a reader in a way that few books I read these days do. In fact, I feel that I would have gotten a lot more out of it had I read it in a college literature class. But it wasn't Cold Mountain. It doesn't have the same romantic, wandering spirit as Frazier's book. If you want to experience life and sorrow in a single Virginia county (hence the title of the book, since the county literally was "the known world" to the inhabitants) then it's worth your time. But if you're looking for passion and love, go read Cold Mountain.


--originally published 5/7/06