The Known World by Edward P. Jones see larger photo List Price: $13.95 Our Price: $11.16 Released 25 May, 2004 Paperback Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

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Customer Review
Superb, and yet...
4/5 Stars
A couple of days after finishing this novel, I'm still not sure what to think of it. No question, Edward Jones is a very talented writer. His language and imagery are poetic. He is acutely sensitive to the inner lives of his characters. He has a terrific sense of pacing. He knows how to tell a story, and tells it in refreshingly novel ways (including frequent use of forward-chronological asides that lend the novel an oral-historical feel).

That said, for all the brilliance of Jones' writing (here, credit is definitely due), the depth of his characters, and his evocative scene setting, in the end KW left me a little cold. In this case, the whole was less than the sum of its parts. Why my failure to connect, emotionally, with this novel? In part, I think, because of the bizareness of the subject matter (black slaveholding in the antebellum south -- the historical extent of which Jones does little to elucidate in the book's postscript interview). In part, because Jones infuses every character and many scenes with shades of moral ambiguity. In fairness, such ambiguity does pervade real life. However, in a novel about so abhorrent an institution as slavery, an unrelenting sense of moral ambiguity seemed out of place.

I am not saying that the south's "peculiar institution" finds anything remotely like support in KW. Obviously not. Rather, I am saying that Jones' deep sympathy for his characters -- both white and black -- and his concern with illustrating aspects of their human condition, at times made KW's implicit condemnation of slavery seem muted.

In the final analysis, I did not connect with the characters, place, time, or circumstances of this novel as much as I expected to and would have liked, and I was not as enraged or saddened by it as I should have been. That said, Edward Jones is a very talented writer. I shall gladly read anything he writes in the future.

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