Chrissie's Reviews > The Known World

Here is a book about black slave owners in the antebellum South! My interest was immediately piqued. On top of that, the book has won all sorts of prizes:
*Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2004)
*International Dublin Literary Award (2005)
*Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (2004)
*National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (2003)
* Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominee for Debut Fiction (/2004
*National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (2003)
I knew I had to give it a try.

I am glad I have read it, but to say I like it, would just not be true. It’s OK, so I am giving it two stars.

There is no real central character to the story, because he dies right off the bat. It is 1855 when Henry Townsend dies. He is black. He had been a slave, but his parents had bought him his freedom. He leaves behind no children but a wife, Caldonia, a twenty-eight-year-old educated black woman born free, and his property of thirty-three slaves and fifty acres in Manchester County, Virginia. The book is about the hell that breaks loose afterwards, but really what it is about is life in the South during the antebellum era, about the mindset of Blacks and Whites of this era.

The story is told by an omniscient narrator—who knows how each character thinks, what has happened to all of them in the past and what will happen to all of them in the future. It is this all-seeing narrator that shapes the entire feel of the story. This narrator knows everything, but he is not particularly adept at cogently telling a story. In one sentence you may switch form the present to the future and back again. In the next sentence you flip back to the past. It is easy to become confused. Character upon character is thrown at you, with little tidbits about their lives in the past, present and future. You are given an entire community of individuals—Whites and Blacks, a Native American or two, those who are free and those who are slaves, a sheriff and his deputy. The omniscient narrator is constantly restating who each one is, which is good in one sense, but the flow of the tale becomes jerky. Stop and start, backward and forward and often confusing. Use of the omniscient narrator is pushed to the extreme.

It is kind of nice to have a character or two to guide you through a story. You do not have that here. There are a whole group of characters, characters that are hard to attach yourself to. You do not get close to any one individual. In the afterword the author points out that he wanted to draw characters that were neither all good nor all bad, each one different in their own way. You do get that here, but you fail to feel anything for any of them. What you do get is a strong sense of being one of a large community. You are there, one among many, living in the antebellum South. This does give one a hands-on feeling of life then and there and how people were thinking.

Kevin Free narrates the audiobook. It is simple to follow, the speed is fine and he intonations are well done. The narration performance is good so I have given the narration three stars.