Edward P. Jones: "The Known World"

Edward P. Jones's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel takes its readers to antebellum Virginia and to fictional Manchester County, in which a former slave, Henry Townsend, becomes an owner of his own plantation and 33 slaves. His first and oldest slave, Moses, an overseer and major character in this incredibly populous panoramic novel, is also one of the many points of view (or voices heard) in The Known World.

The following passage neatly introduces the issue which Jones's book takes under scrutiny: Moses was the first slave Henry Townsend had bought: $325 and a bill of sale from William Robbins, a white man. It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn't fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, 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?

The novel thus delves in a very perplexing problem of black people, well familiar with the slave-owner's whip, buying other black people and treating them with similar cruelty, as does Henry Townsend. Bought out of slavery by his father, who decided to never own a person, Henry is more loyal to his former owner than to the father. Though he originally plans to treat his slaves better than white people do, his ex-master, William Robbins, persuades him to change his mind as follows:

Henry, the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. . . . But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave. And it does not matter if you are not much darker than your slave. The law is blind to that. You are the master and that is all the law wants to know. The law will come to you and stand behind you. But if you roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property turns around and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you need. You will have failed in your part of the bargain. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter. Immediately after he hears this humiliating sermon, Henry hits Moses on the face and sends him to live in a shed.

This whole episode is told in flashback though, as in the novel Henry dies first and his young wife Caldonia runs the plantation with huge help from Moses. Despite her efforts, the plantation comes undone: slaves run away one by one, they start fighting among themselves and the work is not done properly and on time. The degeneration of the Townsends' plantation seems to be the linking motif of the otherwise very fragmentary novel, which presents a range of minor characters' stories. The inclusion of so many characters turns the book into a picaresque novel of an episodic structure and roguish characters: no one here is absolutely positive and no one, even the most influential white citizen of the county - Robbins - is absolutely negative. Moses himself is a living example of what slavery does to people: separated from the woman who he said was his "family", Moses later mistreats his wife and son. Moreover, seeing that a black man can be freed and become a slave owner, he intends to take his master's place by romancing with widow Caldonia. Finally, he persuades his wife to run away with the child and abuses the power which he has as an overseer by sending a pregnant woman to hard work in the field, which results in miscarriage.

Apart from the issue of black people's owning other black people, the novel uncovers some other facts concerning the reality of life under slavery, the most eye-opening to me being the practice of selling free black people into slavery again by so called slave "speculators". Now the burlesque ending of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck and Tom free Jim, who is already freed by his owner, does not seem so entertaining at all: you might need to free a freed slave again and again. Moreover, another conclusion can be drawn at this juncture: namely that once a person becomes a slave, they will always remain slaves.

The most interesting episode, however, is connected with the character of Alice Night, a woman who "was kicked in the head by a mule" and became crazy. She wanders alone at night singing funny songs and talking nonsense to strangers. When she succeeds in running away from slavery, she becomes an artist and has her own art gallery. The story of Alice Night is the most poignant commentary on the debilitating effects of slavery on both owners and the owned. Though not even close to the power of Toni Morrison's Beloved (but then, what is?), Jones's novel is definitely worth giving it a try.

Zeruya Shalev: "Late Family (Terra)"

Zeryua Shalev is an Israeli writer who gained critical acclaim after publishing the novel Love Life, which was translated into more than 25 languages (the Polish translation from the original Hebrew language appeared in 2003). With Love Life she started a trilogy which was completed with the publication of Late Family in 2005, available now on the Polish book market in a beautiful hardcover edition.

Shalev's three novels are all written in the form of internal monologue of the protagonist who is always at a critical point of her life. First, in Love Life, the woman, infatuated with her father's childhood friend - a man twice older than she - lets her marriage fall apart by pursuing the erotic adventure. The sensuous prose, quite daring erotic scenes and the humiliation that she experiences during her sexual romp make the book an exciting journey into the mind of a woman who seems to be deranged with, well, a destructive passion. At that time Zeruya Shalev was sometimes compared to Erica Jong. The second novel of the trilogy, Husband and Wife, explores what happens in a marriage after twenty years of life in apparent security and comfort. The health crisis of the husband, who wakes up one morning and is unable to move, turns out to be a symptom of the crisis that the couple has been going through for some time. Brutally honest in her scrutiny of the protagonist's motives and most intimate thoughts, Zeruya Shalev offers again a disturbing narrative which some readers might even find too disturbing to go through.

Finally, in Late Family the readers are witnessing a personal crisis of a woman who decides to break up her family and leave her husband to search for freedom and independence. In its depiction of doubts and emotions of the protagonist, who yearns to go back to the security of her obnoxious marriage the moment she realizes that her dream of independence has come true, the narrative probes into the complexity of the psyche and the puzzling motives behind people's decisions. The novel ends with the protagonist landing in a new relationship which she wants to build because she has fallen in love. Since each of the prospective partners has a child or children, the new family is a very fragile and precarious construct when you look at it, and it is doubtful whether the woman will ever be able to feel as secure as she did with her reliable and predictable ex-husband.

Being such an honest analysis of a woman's psyche, the novel does not leave its readers with an obviously positive ending. There are a few nagging questions that arise after the reading is completed: Is this all desire to be independent in life just a naive dream, a fiction created by those who are bored with the routine - but also safety - of marriage? Is there any alternative to the normative pattern of life (that is marriage) that could be satisfying, or are people made in such a way that a solitary existence scares them to death and makes them pursue anybody willing to share life with them, maybe only because they are scared as well? It is because of the ability to pose such questions that I find the novel so brilliant.

P.S. Here is an interview with Zeruya Shalev in which she reveals her political views (something she never does in her novels) and where you can find out some facts from her life, career and learn about an injury which she incurred in a terrorist attack.

TOP OF THE TOPS: "A" like ATWOOD

TOP OF THE TOPS was suggested to me by a former student - now a friend - of mine, who said she would find it more useful if I recommended books which may not be recent publications but which make up my private literary canon. TOP OF THE TOPS will be devoted then to the works which over years have become my classics and which I would naturally recommend to anyone wishing a genuine reading adventure, hopefully as life-transforming as those that I've been privileged to experience. The idea of the alphabet for my TOP OF THE TOPS is catchy, but I might not "fill in" all the letters evenly, I might not follow the alphabetical order, either, though I will do my best.

Margaret Atwood comes first in the series for a number of reasons: first, her surname's initial nicely matches the first letter in the alphabet; second, for quite a few years now Atwood has been my number one candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and just recently the Nobel Committee disappointed me again. This disappointment in the Nobel Committee's verdict(s) is bitter not only because they haven't chosen Atwood but because they seem reluctant to grant the Prize to women writers. Let me think: the last decade saw only two luminous exceptions: that of Elfriede Jelinek (I still remember what scandal broke out then) and Doris Lessing; the other eight prizes went to male writers. Looking at the last two decades, I can add two exceptional (in both senses) laureates, that is Wislawa Szymborska and Toni Morrison. The numbers are merciless and telling: since 1988 only 4 women and as many as 16 men have received the Nobel Prize for Literature, that is women make up 20% of the total number of Nobel Prize laureates. I'm starting to wonder whether this Nobel Prize is at all representative.

In my unflinching support for Atwood, gender is not the ultimate criterion by any means, as her literary output is impressive: Atwood has been writing poetry since 1961 and novels since 1969 (by now she has written about twenty of them). She is a most prolific poet, novelist, essayist (or literary critic if you like) and children's literature writer. Atwood is frequently considered a post-colonial writer because of her ramifications on Canadian identity (subdued by American (U.S.) cultural hegemony, sometimes called neo-colonialism) which are combined with feminist issues that she raises. Feminist and post-colonial aspects of her writing are easily combined - in her works both women and Canada are culturally dominated.

I have read a vast majority (well, probably all) of Atwood's novels, and my favorite are: 1. Surfacing (1972) 2. Lady Oracle (1976) 3. The Robber Bride (1993), next come Bodily Harm (1981) and the radical feminist anti-utopia The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which was turned into a movie by Volker Schlondorff.

My first encounter with Margaret Atwood took place quite a few years ago, when I was still a student. The book that I came across then was a Polish edition of Surfacing (the Polish title "Wynurzenie" can be understood in three ways at least, all wonderfully encapsulating the novel's sense). The novel perfectly fits the description of post-colonial literature, though I prefer to read it as a feminist story of the protagonist's journey (both physical and psychological) to finding her own place in the world after a traumatic experience. Unoriginal as I sound at this point, I'm not going to reveal anything more about Surfacing, hoping that my Readers will discover it for themselves. Few books have influenced me so, though originally I'd never expected the reading to be that rewarding, since at first I thought the story was a drag. As it turned out, I read the book at one sitting and then I couldn't sleep a wink all night: I also experienced what Aristotle probably meant when he used the word "catharsis". My advice: in order not to miss the roller-coaster experience of reading Surfacing, if you do not feel very confident about your English, read it in Polish - you certainly won't regret it. Have fun and let me know how you found the book.
P.S. Here is a short interview with the wonderful writer, in which she talks about her recent book Moral Disorder, but not only.