Edward P. Jones

This is a complex book about a historical fact that, although uncommon, existed; free blacks became slaveholders. One would like to think that free blacks would be more likely to be abolitionists. In this book, we meet characters that see slaveholding as a sign of prestige. Slavery affected them in a perverse way- they embraced the values of the social system that enslaved them.
My edition had an interview with the author in which he asks the essential question the book deals with: "What are the human origins and social impact of an institution built on dominance and oppression?"
Very thought-provoking.… (mais)

If found it hard to get through, despite some striking moments, and some interesting glimpses into the lives of slaves and free black slave-owners. I think the collage-like structure - jumping around between a variety of loosely connected plots and characters - is a promising literary device in theory that Edward Jones doesn't quite master in practice, leaving me uniformly indifferent to all of the characters (and indeed there are so many that it can be hard to follow the story of some of them). Perhaps that's the biggest fault of the book - there's little reason to care about any individual character in narrative that spreads itself thinly among so many.… (mais)