William Faulkner Books

I read this book when researching a paper I was writing on Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" and it was excellent. The particular paper I was writing was on the character of Jim Bond, but I really wish I had found it earlier when I wrote one on "miscegenation" -- the racist concept of "mixed blood" in "Absalom, Absalom!". It was precise, interesting and well-researched. It is particularly helpful for anyone doing research on William Faulkner's works specifically related to people of color. It focuses on the Sutpen family, but I think there's useful information that can also be related to other works.

Faulkner's life is a massive subject that oddly seems to become more, rather than less elusive with time. He was at least half a 19th century sensibility, and samplings from recent biographies show him disappearing in the fog of current political corectness. The major, "official" biography in 2 volumes by Joseph Blotner is of course indispensible for names, dates, places, and other essential data. Nor can one fault Blotner for his respect for the writer; too many literary biographies seem to run on virtual hostility, anymore. But something nonetheless is missing from Blotner and all of the others, and this book by David Mintner supplies it.

Minter presents an unforgettable portrait of a tragic, suffering Faulkner that is both scarily true and absolutely renching. Chiefly, the elements of the pain are a terrible addiction to alcohol and an unhappy marriage. Indeed Faulkner's alcoholism was legendary during his own life, but was seen by detractors as a sort of joke, by defenders (in a much more boozed age than the present) as no big deal.

Be forewarned: you may never want to read another book about an alcoholic writer or artist, or any kind of alcoholic, afterwards. It is done, too, with both an uncanny intimacy and a saving sympathy. Yet all this might merely add up to the stuff of soap operas, but for Mintner's like insistence on emphasizing the writer's enobling mission and belief in the greatness of his own work. Out of the South's defeat and out of his own Celtic bloodline Faulkner inherited a romance for lost causes; doing the impossible and failing was his great and oft-expressed polestar. With attention both to the impossibly sublime and the quite real pathology, Mintner presents a portrait of Faulkner that not only makes sense in human terms, but also gives an aura of universality to the story of this major American artist.

As difficult as this encounter with truth is, then, it is necessary and convincing. You will finally understand the sort of man who could have created the fragility of a Quentin Compson, the monstrosity of a Colonel Supten, and a whole universe of others, all out of himself. Even the alcoholism becomes explicable, with a kind of awful clarity, when you come to dimly see what a rare sort of human being is here under review: a sort of empath, who either by birth or by will felt the accumulated pain of his region's entire history and people before he could project it. In this sense the alcohol was a sort of folk home remedy which provided support to the impossible undertaking.

Todd Sentell is the author of the mother of all golf satires, Toonamint of Champions

Since 12th grade I've been fascinated with William Faulkner ... his work and the way he lived was revealed to me then by my high school English teacher and that fascination is coming up on thirty years. And like all Faulknerians, I devour, as quickly as it comes out, any book on the man. Carolyn Porter's recent work has just been devoured by me in a wonderful June afternoon and she's provided something special ... something no other Faulkner explainer has ever provided ... and it's in her final chapter, titled, A Final Note to New Readers: Bibliography. In this chapter she gives you some tips on the best place to start with Faulkner ... and where to go from there. Sure, this is a book review ... but it's also a thank you note from me to Carolyn Porter. Thanks for a new road map. A road map I'm happy to begin again.



by Todd Sentell, author of the wickedly hilarious social satire, Toonamint of Champions

Wonderful and compelling. Full of the magic of his creativity and it goes into depths of his pain.

Just looking for some great reads for the summer As much as I like Faulkner and many say this is his best I really look to the time alone with this book Great shippiing price and the hard cover quality is excellent

Gives an understanding of what it means to be Southern as only William Faulkner can.

Absolutely incredible! The writing structure is extremely difficult along with the shifting narrators, but it is an amazing book in large part because of these challenging aspects. Faulkner's use of language is exquisite, so that you feel like you are flowing down a meandering river and taking in the sights as you move through the text. Definitely one of the best ever!

Thomas Sutpen is a man with one single, unfailing goal: to forge a dynasty in 1830s Jefferson, Mississippi. A century later, young Quentin Compson, obsessed with Sutpen, slowly uncovers the interweaving, ever-expanding story of Sutpen's ruthless ambition, the intervention of the Civil War, and his ultimate failure and destruction through his children. A gothic novel of the highest degree, this book is rich with complicated family histories, race issues, and above all complex character motivations that create a slowly evolving story of increasing depth and darkness. The writing style is lengthy and dense, becoming at times frustratingly difficult, but in the end the pieces of the story unify into a whole truth: a vivid analysis not only of one man's life, but of the lives of those he touched and of Southern identity itself.

The major fault of this novel is the lengthy, wordy, sometimes difficult writing style; the major strength is the complex layers of plot which confuse, reveal, confuse again, and reveal more, building an ever more complex and meaningful complete story. In many ways, this weakness and strength feed in to each other: it would not be the same book if it were written any other way, but the novel may be difficult or off-putting to some readers as a result. Faulkner's writing style is often dense and presented as a stream of consciousness, where topics shift, articles go unspecified, and phrases or words are repeated for emphasis. In Absalom, Absalom! the style is even more exaggerated, with incredibly long sentences and paragraphs. Worse, despite the fact that the narrator changes a number of times through the book, the narrative voice is almost always identical, making it difficult to separate speakers and determine character relations. The difficult, dense narrative may make it hard for the reader to begin this book--it takes a few chapters to get into the rhythm of the writing, and the reader has to accept a certain degree of confusion and trust that the story will explain itself in time.

However, granted some hard work and some faith in Faulkner's storytelling, the novel expands into a story of increasing complexity and great depth. Like the writing style, which often begins with confusing references and repetition before resolving into comprehensible storytelling, the plot is alternately confusing and revealing. Once one relation, motivation, or event is revealed, it again becomes confusing, and then again reveals new information--information which often revises previous events or complicates an earlier character. As such, the story may come back to the same event three times, but each time exposes more about the event, the people involved, and their motivations, creating an ever more meaningful story as the truth is revealed. Such complexity would be impossible without the dense writing style, and both style and story aid the other into new settings, rich language, new events, greater motivation.

As the book comes to its conclusions and the final revelations unfold, there is a classically tragic sense to Sutpen's story: stuck between the reality and the appearance of his own success, he watches and enacts the repeated downfall of his personal dynasty and finally himself, all by way of his offspring. Quentin, the reader's companion as he researches and knits together Sutpen's story, must interpret this underlying failure, the crisis of Southern identity: what it means to be a part of, what it means to be great in, the South--and ultimately, of course, this is an identity crisis that reaches from the South to all humanity. The end of the book is heavy with motivation and character, and ultimately fulfilling, even as it raises doubt and a sense of personal dis-ease. So while the writing style can be difficult at times, while the constant confusion and re-confusion of the plot may become frustrating, this is ultimately a satisfying read: satisfying to the very heart of the reader, a brilliant piece of storytelling and a wonderful analysis of humankind. I greatly enjoyed it and very highly recommend it--to all readers, even those that have to force themselves through the first few chapters.

This is a dark, convoluted, complex novel written in a stream of consciousness text that can easily confuse and scare the casual reader away. For the serious reader who is willing to put the time and effort into this work of art you will not be let down. First, however, you must read The Sound and the Fury (SAF). If you work your way through that novel and you "get it" and love it, then Absalom is a absolute must. But be prepared. T.S. Eliot once said of the book that it communicates before it is understood. Typical Faulkner. It takes some fortitude and a little background. Let me help with a little background. For starters, The title comes from an the Old Testament (2 Samuel 13). Absalom, one of David's sons kills his brother Amnon for raping their sister Tamar. Hence the title and a clue. The book is full of clues and in a sense can be taken by the reader as detective story full of mystery and revenge, suspense and gothic drama. This is the story of Southern tradgedy and the fall of the House of Sutpen. The central character is Thomas Sutpen who is the fountainhead of the southern, self-reliant man seeking to reach the American dream through creating a grand design of dynasty. To pass his dynasty on to his eldest legitimate son is part of the design and part its downfall. The story takes place before, during, and after the Civil War and issues such as race, miscegenation, class, economy, worker's rights, women's rights are all spun into the story that is a portrait of Southern realism. The story is told by four narrators: Quentin Compson (from SAF), Quentin's father, Quentin's roomate Shreve, and Miss Rosa Coldfield. Quentin however is the central narrator and by reading SAF one can better understand the issues facing Quentin and the reason he struggles so much with this story. Absalom is very much the story of Quentin's hatred for the bad qualities in the southern country that he loves. Much of the story as told by Quentin and Shreve is purely imaginative construction of what could have been as they speculate on the enigmatic drama that unfolds. In the back of the book is a genealogy and chronology which is extremely helpful as the story often jumps from one time period to another and from one character to another. Work on keeping it straight and reread if necessary. The book doesn't get any easier as it moves toward the conclusion. Do trust Faulkner. If you pay attention, he pulls it together and you will discover why this novel is, in my opinion, the greatest American novel of the 20th century.

This "Absalom,Absalom", and "Go Down, Moses" are my favorite novels by Faulkner. "Light in August" has the advantage of being his most readable book. I will let you in on a little secret, though. I have found that Faulkner is much better to LISTEN to than read straight. I'd read several of his books when I discovered my local library had a number of tapes and CDs of his work. Those read by Mark Hammer are in a class by themselves. Not only does he have the proper accent, but his pauses in Faulkner's often long,involved sentences show a great familiarity with the work and add a strong element that make his words sparkle like jewels with brilliance and an uncanny insight into the characters he displays for us. After that, reading Faulkner is never the same.

I found my first Faulkner a bit too disquieting to be rated as a 5-star classic. Faulkner's flashback-filled style of writing in "Light in August" goes backwards as much as forwards, and the first major character introduced and followed through the first third of the book disappears for the middle third and most of the last third. While Faulkner makes Lena Grove likable and unforgettably strong in her straightforward simplicity, the character Joe Christmas who is introduced and dominates the middle third seems too over-the-top to be believed; he ends up reading more like a literary type than a real character.

Faulkner by toning down Joe Christmas and focusing on Lena Grove could have written a heartwarming story about the girl who redeems her youthful mistake to become a strong Southern women in, in spite of, and even because of her heritage and surroundings. But that wouldn't be the story Faulkner has in mind--every character has flaws, and one's heritage and surroundings may be greater than even the most moral character can overcome. The best one can hope, as does Lena by the end of the story, is to survive by moving on (as another great Southern writer would pen, you can't go home again).

The story is heightened and perhaps driven by its contrasts--set in the Depression-era deep South, townsfolk live uneasily alongside country folk, whites share geography but can scarcely be said to live beside blacks, cars and mule-drawn wagons share the roads, houses are lit by kerosene and electricity, the occasional open-minded unprejudiced citizen (universally hated and condemned by their neighbors) lives uneasily alongside and amidst the virulently racist majority and the atmosphere that breeds this backwards-looking, closed, feudal society.

I can tell from this first reading that I concur with the majority of literary critics that Faulkner is one of the great writers of the last century. I respect him, I'm just not sure I can say I found the story likable. The Amazon-suggested tag "southern discomfort" captures the essence of this book succinctly.

A friend recommended this to me. I cannot belive how wrong he was about it. First off, I found it extremely annoying and confusing that there were several characters who had the same or similar names; it was kinda hard to keep track of who was who or what was going on. Second, and my main problem with the book is that I just could not relate with or even like one character in this book. I can't connect with a book if I hate every single character. Overall, this book was just dismal, although its one redeeming quality was its narratives about racism and the differences between whites and blacks. That is the only thing keeping me from giving this a one star review.

This book has been touted as being Faulkner's most accessible. Although a bit easier to follow having less stream of consciousness it still requires some patience and appreciation for nuance. Further, if you take the story at face value you will be missing out on 90% of what it has to offer. The themes run deep and the characters symbolic. I'd recommend reading exerpts from One Matchless Time by Jay Parini who provides some good insights into Faulkner's life and his writings. I'd also read the review written by A.Mason (below). This was one of the more violent and sexual books that I have read of Faulkner. Although I was surprised, I was in awe of his tact and style in portraying these events in a subtly gruesome way that takes the reader off gaurd. The climactic scene of Joe Christmas's undoing was Faulkner at his best. I'd recommend this book to anyone who loves good writing and is fascinated with the tragedy of the post-Civil War southerner.

This book was my introduction to Faulkner, based on a suggestion by my well-read aunt.

It is certainly possible to recognize the skill of a writer without necessarily finding the story he tells endearing. That was the case here. Faulkner's prose is often like poetry and his use of the language is unquestionably masterful. He shows his talent not so much in the words he uses - the vocabulary is actually quite plain - but rather in the way he combines those words. Simple adjectives are used to create compelling scenes and even more compelling characters.

Faulkner strikes me as the consummate observer. He doesn't moralize, he doesn't become overwrought, he doesn't offer judgement. He simply observes the way things are, not the way we want them to be, and there is a sense that we are being propelled towards not tragegy but simply reality in his writing.

Light in August is ostensibly about Joe Christmas, a headstrong and mysterious drifter in the 1920s deep South, but surprisingly we aren't introduced to him until several chapters into the book. The book chronicles the intersecting people and events that surround Joe Christmas in Faulkner's fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi. However, the author introduces us to so many other non-incidental characters that it is often hard to separate the leading from the supporting cast.

If I had to describe the characters in this book in a single word it would be "trapped." There is an overwhelming sense of stuck-ness we get in observing their lives. One does not necessarily get the impression that they saw themselves as stuck and hopeless - indeed many seemed to exist in frustrating ignorance of reality. But for the outside observer to whom Faulkner tells this story using his rich narrative, it is obvious that to a person, every character in this book is indeed on a treadmill. Slavery may be over, but the people that populate these pages are in very real servitude to themselves and their pasts.

The book is a glimpse at the deep South immediately prior to the depression era. We're presented with a culture that still hasn't quite come to grips with life on the other side of the Civil War and racialism is so deeply ingrained that although slavery is no longer law, the caste system it birthed lives on in the arrogant attitudes of the whites and the subservient squalor of the blacks.

The loyalties and alliances and relationships in this book are complex, as are the characters, and more than once I found myself wanting to slap these characters into sense. Without exception, each was their own worst enemy and managed to almost single-handedly sail their lives into the rocks. Although many were admittedly pointed rock-ward via their upbringing, they had ample opportunities to change course but continued sailing directly for the cliffs.

Although I have not yet read other books by Faulkner, I'm told this is the most approachable of all his writing, reading the most like a traditional novel. There is plenty of tension in the story, as the saga of Christmas and the other characters unfolds dramatically. Consequently, most people will find themselves turning the pages in anticipation of what happens next. Faulkner takes the reader on numerous side journeys, showing how the characters came to be what they are, and those characters often share certain aspects of their history in common, not just their present circumstances.

As the book draws to a close, the treadmill keeps turning with characters trudging futilely into the sunset, still stuck in the same ruts in which the beginning of the story found them. I'll say little more. To do otherwise is to risk spoiling the plot.

I can perhaps describe the overall experience here as bittersweet. The writing sweet, but the tale itself thoroughly bitter.

For all its attempts to elucidate the economic and social structures that led to the decline of the south, this book is best in its portrayal and critique of romance. The section introducing Eula Varner as an object of desire is one of the most compelling before the opening passages of Lolita (forgive me twice):

her entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic times--honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof.

I mean, come on, passages like that just make you feel ashamed of the shallowness of your own emotions, vocuabulary, and existence. Oh, and that intensity goes on for almost 20 pages.

****SPOILER ALERT (Sort of)****
And if that gets you revved up, the book escalates the language and shifts to another starcrossed couple, an idiot ward of Flem, Ike, and a neighbor's wandering cow. Here's Ike trying to soothe the spooked cow:

trying to tell her how this violent viloation of her maiden't delicacy is no shame, since such is the very iron imperishable warp of the fabric of love.

The book is worth reading for those two sections. Much of the rest drags. It's filled with stories that Faulkner finds humorous and they are set to the laugh track of Ratliff who is constantly telling the reader what they should find humorous. It's about as effective as Jim smirking into the camera throughout the 3rd season of The Office to let the audience know what a delightful practical joke he's just played.

In all, this is worthwhile, but this falls in the middle of an incredible period of Faulkner's career, and even when you're reading it you come across huge passages that remind you how disappointed you are in him.

The Hamlet is an episodic, sometimes uneven novel of jealosy, avarice , and poverty. Some of Faulkner's best characters including Flem and Eula Snopes (Varner), Ratliff the cagy sewing machine salesman, an Houston, the luckless cow-owner. All in all good stuff not as difficult to read as some of Bill's stuff.
Unfortunately the trilogy goes downhill from here, it was many years before he wrote The Town. The Mansion I thought was a stronger book. Give The Hamlet a try, some vintage Faulkner here.

Frenchmen's Bend, Yoknapatawpha County--a land so familiar and yet so distant that it could be some wide-encompassing foreign country; not merely a fictionalized South. Faulkner's cadence, description, and narrative that travels dreamily from one place and character to another I found to be initially off-putting, but as I feel under his spell and the colors, and people of the world he wove out of the rough-hewn broadcloth sack, a sack built of a small town, in a place that exists on the outskirts of reality, normalcy; I found myself ensnared, as the residents of Frenchmen's Bend are caught in the snare of Flem Snopes--a man who would, who does, talk the Devil out of the possession of his immortal soul. To travel into the peculiar and yet seemingly real Frenchmen's Bend is to be lost within a surreally stunning place.

I'm not sure how exactly to say this without sounding closed-minded and elitist, so I'll apologize right off the bat for that. But I'm not sure the people who disparage this novel on this website quite "get it," and I think part of the reason might be that most of those people aren't from the South. This is an episodic, rambling, distinctly Southern story, told in an episodic, rambling, distinctly Southern way. That's just how things work down here, and I realize it's not that way in Hoboken (which is fine too). It's also a very rural setting, so that may turn some people off or lead to some misunderstanding.
Having said that, this book is a major Faulkner work, meaning it's great, not merely good. It's his most explicit critique of capitalism and his most explicit commentary on love in all its forms, and it's a very funny one at that -- again, it's from a Southern angle, though; if you've lived in an industrial rather than rural society your whole life, it may not appeal to you as much. Like most Faulkner, you have to settle into the prose and the pace.
The characters The Hamlet introduces are among Faulkner's most memorable: the rapacious Flem, the wonderful Ratliff, the oddly moving (trust me) Ike, etc. Faulkner has been accused of exploiting his poor whites in this novel, but I think his surprisingly sympathetic treatment of Mink in the trilogy counters this charge pretty well.
I've read everything Faulkner's ever written at least once (two to four times, for his major works), and this is my favorite. If you think Anse is funny in As I Lay Dying, or Virgil and Fonzio in Sanctuary, you'd probably really enjoy this book. It's the only time you'll ever hear a teenage girl rebuff her schoolteacher's inappropriate sexual advance with the command, "Stop pawing me. You old headless horseman Ichabod Crane." Priceless.

Faulkner assembled much of THE HAMLET from short stories, where his themes were courtship, lust, love, and obsession or where the average person succumbs to greed or foolishness and is victimized in business.

Take the subject of love. In THE HAMLET, Faulkner examines obsessive and unrequited love through his characters Labove (an achiever obsessed with untouchable beauty) and Ike Snopes (a retarded man in love with a cow); ambivalent love through the experience of Mink Snopes (a vicious murder) and Jack Houston (a guilty widower); and loveless marriage through the lives of Eula Varner and Mrs. Armstid, who are at the top and bottom of social hierarchy. Each of these characters is unique and fully realized. Yet each suffers from cruel variations of a single force.

Not to be a pedant: But Robert Penn Warren described THE HAMLET as: "...a sequence of contrasting or paralleling stories" where Faulkner's "...movement was not linear but spiral, passing over the same point again and again, but at different altitudes." This is exactly right.

At the same time, THE HAMLET is about Faulkner's writing. Here's one quick example, with this great author writing about the weather. "It was a gray day, of the color and texture of iron, one of those windless days of a plastic rigidity too dead to make or release snow even, in which even light did not alter but seemed to appear complete out of nothing at dawn and would expire into darkness without gradation." Great isn't it?

Even so, I was surprised by one aspect of THE HAMLET. It is: terrible things happen to all the characters. This even includes Flem Snopes who is a winner in the male world of business but surely locked in a loveless marriage. Yet despite their cruel fates, Faulkner's amazing characters persevere. As he said when accepting his Nobel: "When the last ding-dong of doom has clanged, ...there will still be one more sound: ...a puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this...." READ THIS GREAT BOOK

This book says so much about the American South, about the identity crisis that is America as a whole...as poignant now as it ever was circa the Civil War. This is your string-of-consciousness modernistic writing, yet very palatable (as your ordinary reader, I've been bored, baffled, or enraged by what I perceive as the pretentiousness of other 20th century writers labeled as "modernist"). Faulkner's intrinsic sense of cadence and pace is truly a gift: rather than stumbling / getting lost in the narrator's "hiccups" of subconscious, for lack of better words, the lecture just flows; like a William Carlos William poem (if I may draw a far-fetched comparison), it functions in lieu of a seemingly effortless presentation of universal themes (that should strike a chord in any reader with a pulse). This isn't just a book about race....or is it? _Go Down Moses_ was my first foray into Faulkner's prose and it left me very hungry for more. A must read.

Yes, I know, everyone should read the whole book. But let's get right down to it: you can read "The Bear" by itself. Just make sure you skip over part four.

In my opinion, "The Bear" should be read as a companion to _Moby Dick_. It certainly wouldn't be the same without the influence of Melville's masterpiece. I don't want to give anything away, so go read them both. America's greatest novel and America's greatest novella belong together.

Buy _Go Down, Moses_, read it, and reread "The Bear" again and again.

****

By the way, I often teach "The Bear" to my ninth grade students. They need it.

The Southern landscape of field and swamp and woods becomes a prominent character throughout these rich, complex stories. Indeed, I'd imagine most of Go Down, Moses could provocatively serve an environmental history class. 'Pantaloon In Black' is perhaps my favorite here; this haunting tale, full of powerful, archetypal imagery, is mentioned far less often than some of the other, more well-known works, but it struck me immediately. 'The Bear,' with that sprawling coda tackling humankind's relationship with the land, is rather a reading experience unto itself.

This is in my opinion, not one of Faulkner's best books. It is, however, a beautifully written story of generations of a single exstended family. Because the book is written in that it is made up of several short stories instead of chapters, the story can seem fragmented at times, leaving you wondering what happened to the characters in the last piece. It is difficult at times to keep characters straight, but the best story in the book is by far "The Fire in the Hearth" which follows the Lucas and Molly, this part of the book is often overlooked in the shadow of the long and tedious "The Bear"- but should be read and enjoyed.
Overall the book is a good introduction to Faulkner, but may be a challenging read to some.

Go Down Moses was my latest stab at Faulkner. I'd certainly recommend, as someone before me has, a college course or reading group study of this book, and just about any other great Faulkner work. That being said, even a marginal understanding of this book (like mine) is worth the time and effort.

Go Down Moses is a collection of temporally fragmented novellas and stories concerning the McCaslin family's past, present, and future legacy in a southern town. Thematically, Faulkner tackles a bevy of issues--race, slavery, paternity, masculinity, the natural and supernatural. The stories are loosely centered around Isaac McCaslin, descendant of Carothers McCaslin--a plantation owner.

The best regarded and most complex story is considered to be "The Bear." Over a hundred pages long, it follows (often meandering) the hunting team that includes young Isaac, ex-Civil War officers, and a half Choctaw/half African hunter (Sam Fathers) as they obsessively pursue the invincible bear Old Ben through the years. Bursting with imagery and symbolism, "The Bear" will please Faulkner fans and hunters alike.

My personal favorites are "Was" and "The Fire and the Hearth." Lucas, half-black and the oldest living McCaslin save Isaac, searches for buried gold on Carothers Edmonds's plantation, where he farms, while his wife, fed up with his mania, gives him an ultimatum. An unlikely and graceful story of marital bonds and family values, and the triumph of humanity and dignity over birthright

Lena Grove travels, on foot and with the aid of strangers, through the South in search of the father of her unborn child. Her journey introduces the reader to a variety of characters, including the child's father, a man who falls in love with Lena, and a biracial man named Christmas. Like Lena, all of these characters have stories to tell, and Faulkner interweaves a number of back stories and histories in the body of this book. One of his more accessable texts, Light in August is easy to get in to and builds up gradually to its complexities and confusing narrative traits. The result is a readable text that still manages to capture the character depth and human study that Faulkner does so well. While I prefer his more difficult/complex work, I definitely enjoyed this text and I highly recommend it.

For the first couple chapters, this book doesn't didn't feel like Faulkner. I was surprised by just how approachable and linear the text was. By the last few chapters, Faulkner is intertwining disparate narratives and times and using more streams of consciousnesses. The book definitely becomes more complex as it progresses. This gradual build up in style and complexity allows the reader to adapt to Faulkner's writing style and techniques, making the end of the book more rewarding because the reader has a better grasp of how to understand and interpret it. I highly recommend this text for readers new to Faulkner, and I think high schools would do well to use it in place to As I Lay Dying in schools.

That said, I enjoyed both As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury more than this book. Because both books delve immediately into the complex end of Faulkner's writing style, they reach their full potential from the onset rather than building in to it. Characters have more stories, more thoughts, more key events; information is tightly packed, emotional, and raw, less filtered through the writer's lens. I don't feel like I found as much depth or character interest in Light in August, with the possible exception of Christmas, whose life story receives the most attention and time. I have no doubt that this was a good book: characters are real and descriptions detailed, almost physical; Faulkner attacks his greater issues of humanity, personal history, and fault and action from multiple angles both narrative and character-based. The book is compelling, both depressing and uplifting and certainly enlightening. Nonetheless, I believe that Faulkner sacrificed some depth by limiting the writing style at the beginning of the book.

I do recommend this book, as well as any other book by Faulkner. He is an extraordinary author and conveys fascination with and insights on humanity: what makes a man, what insights him to action, and when, despite all justification, man is still at fault. This book is a good start for those new to Faulkner. While it may be disappointing, in terms of style and depth, to those that have already read him, Light in August nonetheless contains one of Faulkner's most complex and compelling character and is a rewarding read

Lena came from Alabama. She traveled to Mississippi looking for Lucas Burch. Beside Lena Grove, Gail Hightower, Joe Christmas, and Joe Brown are characters in the story. Hightower's wife had jumped or fallen from a hotel window and had died. He had been the Presbyterian Minister. Even the Ku Klux Klan had not managed to persuade Hightower to leave Jefferson.

Hightower and Byron Burch commence to discuss a fire at Mrs. Burden's house. Christmas and Brown lived in a structure in the back. Mrs. Burden had started praying over Joe Christmas. It was not her fault she had gotten too old.

Joe Christmas went from an orphanage to the home of the McEacherns, a Presbyterian couple. As a teenager he started to see a waitress in town. McEachern watched Joe. He ordered the waitress away. Joe went to Chicago, to Detroit. Finally, age 33, he was on a Mississippi country road in the vicinity of the Burden house. During the first four or five months of his stay in a cabin on her property, Joe and Mrs. Burden would stand and talk like strangers. Later she told him she was pregnant. Now he had a partner in the whiskey business--Brown.

After the fire and Joanna Burden's death, the people searched for Christmas. Brown was placed in jail for safe-keeping. Christmas ran off to Mottstown. He becomes obsessed with getting food. Joe Christmas is killed. He is sent across the square with a deputy and unidentified men take him.

Gavin Stevens is the district attorney, a Harvard graduate. Stevens tells the authorities that Christmas will plead guilty and take a life sentence. His death follows. Lena's baby is born around the time Joe Christmas dies. The mother of the baby had started her journey in Alabama and three months later she is in Tennesee.

None of the reviews of this edition have mentioned Dick Hill's performance. I've listened to many audio versions of fiction, and this is in a class by itself (approached only by Donal Donnely's version of "Portrait of the Artist"). For once the performer has character (and is a character) in himself, and also brings each character alive brilliantly. For some reason, other readers are one or the other: surprisingly many readers are good at character voices but their own "narrator" voices are as dull as your high school principal reading the new lunchroom policy. The well-known Frank Muller does the whole thing quite well but at a kind of TV level of acting. Some readers are just bad all around. Dick Hill's version drew me in right away and made me believe it. It's a work of art in its own right like a great theater performance.

This is the first Faulkner book I have read, and I enjoyed it. The whole book takes place in the course of a week or so, in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi (there are two Jeffersons in MS, one near where the story seems to take place, but I suspect Faulkner's Jefferson is highly fictionalized). The main character is Joe Christmas, who we don't meet until some way into the book. Other main characters include Lena, a pregnant woman looking for the father of her baby; Joe Brown, a co-worker of Christmas' at the mill; Byron, their supervisor; and Hightower, a disgraced minister and friend to Byron. All their lives interwine in a way that moves the story along, and delightfully. I live near where the story took place, and I think Faulkner has captured the flavor of the people and place pretty well. It was very realistic and I can imagine people behaving exactly like the characters in the book.

What is out of the ordinary about this book is how it is told. Much of it is told via flashback, or of two characters discussing events that the reader doesn't directly observe in the reading. Faulkner experiments freely with narrative style, sometimes brilliantly, but sometimes it's confusing. I sometimes had trouble following who was talking, or where they were, etc. I was let down by the ending (the climax of the story is told to us by two people we hadn't met up that point - "Did you hear what happened uptown?"). But if you follow Faulkner's lead and enjoy the ride, you are in for a treat. I'm sure this is a book I will get more out of the more I study it. I'm sure I missed a lot.

A great read and I recommend it.

Out of all the Faulkner novels I've had the pleasure to read, Light In August has to be the one of my favorites and is easily the simplistic of his novels to read. It's a love story but not in a traditional sense and yet after you read it you'll fall in love with the characters.

This book was so hard to find locally, and was needed for a class. The price and delivery were amazing - thanks so much!!

This novel is the first Faulkner I read. I liked it. I think it gives a fair image of the South after the Civil war, although I am Dutch.

Though Faulkner has been compared to very difficult writers as Proust, and his style and works often have been called hard to understand, I thought it excellent written. The use of metaphor and symbols in this book is very stunning. E.g. When father Sartoris comes home from a lost battle, the first thing to do is build a fence. Yes a fence to keep northern influences away.

The book gives some good examples of the change in relations between black and white people. It helps to understand politics and society in Southern states.

A local English professor's answer to a radio call-in question, "What's a good place to start reading Faulkner?" sent me looking for "The Unvanquished." This short novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction was created out of a series of magazine stories written by Faulkner in the 1930s, with one previously unpublished story added. Faulkner maintains his famous stream-of-consciousness style, but manages to remain approachable, perhaps because his narrator is a young boy, around whom (and his slave/friend) the stories revolve. The narrative is a little disjointed on a chapter-to-chapter basis, as each was written to stand alone. Apparently Faulkner didn't add much to enhance continuity in the novel format.

Like "Cold Mountain", the story focuses on the homefront during the Civil War. Rather than spouses, children and older people are the lead characters. Their ingenuity during the hard times of war is impressive, as is the general chaos surround organizing a war effort.

The book's last chapter "An Odor of Verbena" focuses on the Reconstruction period. Our current politics can't compete with this era for danger and intrigue, depicted at the local level in this story.

Some of my forays into Faulkner have foundered on his infamously difficult style--dense language, paragraph-long sentences and chapter-long paragraphs. "The Unvanquished" lowers this hurdle while retaining the sense that you are inside the character's minds while they deal with the challenge and tragedy that is the Civil War.

Recommended for all adult readers and even teenage readers with an interest in literary fiction or the Civil War.

If you've never read a Faulkner novel, this is the perfect place to get your feet wet. I did exactly the opposite, starting with THE SOUND AND THE FURY, AS I LAY DYING and ABSALOM, ABSALOM! Had I read this first, I might have been more accustomed to Faulkner's difficulties (i.e. using pronouns to keep the reader guessing, frequent repetition of key phrases, images and symbols, allusions to the Bible, occasionally using obscure vocabulary, providing minimal context to action especially early on, lengthy sentences and italic text to indicate a character's interior monologue) and not had to struggle so much when reading his masterpieces.

The characters and stories here (and please, read THE UNVANQUISHED as a collection of short stories told chronologically, rather than as a novel) are more simple and fun than his novels. And perhaps that's because he was taking a break from his most serious and difficult work and needed money and a vacation from ABSALOM, ABSALOM! The stories here progress in Faulknerian difficulty, the amount of Southern Gothic tragedy they depict, and the complexity and intricacy of the plots as the book goes along. By the time you're finished reading it, you're ready for SANCTUARY, THE WILD PALMS or LIGHT IN AUGUST.

But to dismiss THE UNVANQUISHED as a lesser work somehow, because the stories are more accessable, is to make a big mistake. The stories are teeming with beautiful prose and haunting storytelling, and they have a great deal to reveal about what the South endured during and immediately after the Civil War and about the mindset of Southerners at the time and for a long time afterward.

Although published in 1938, the initial appearance of this novel can be traced to September 1934. Pressed for cash, Faullkner sent off the first of a series of short stories, dealing with the adolescent adventures of two boys during the Civil War, to the Saturday Evening Post and Scribners Magazine. The idea of collecting these stories into a "novel" was first proposed to his publisher in late 1936 although it is obvious that Faulklner was interested in a quick sale rather than in the creation of another serious work of literature. He did not put a lot of work into the revision and editing of these stories for the novel and consequently the "chapters" of the novel are pretty much identical to the stories that appeared in the two magazines from 1934-36. Interestingly, he was not able to sale the most powerful of the stories, An Odor of Verbena, to the magazines and thus this "chapter" represents the only unique part of the novel. (For those readers who are interested in the original form of the stories that make up this novel, they can be found in The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner).

Faulkner had already written of the Sartoris family in an earlier novel, Flags in the Dust, but he set that novel during the era of post-World War I disillusionment and in it dealt with the descendants of Bayard - one of the two boys of The Unvanquised - and the condition of the South some sixty years after the Civil War. It is by far the superior work. Perhaps because The Unvanquished was serialized over a period of two years and went through scant editing for re-publication, it is much too episodic and fairly soaks in sentimentality, incongruity, and disbelief - all key ingredients for stories published in the mass circulated periodicals of the day such as the Saturday Evening Post. If the Yankees of the novel were as stupid as Ringo and Granny Rosa made them out to be, we (I guess my Southern upbringing is showing through) would have been marching on the White House in the summer of 1862.

But with even the weakest Faulkner novel there are places in which his brilliance shows through. The description of the flow of recently freed slaves - having no concept of what freedom represented - following the retreating Union army is mesmerizing and the characterization of Ringo and Granny Rosa is among his best. Ringo is elevated from the stereotyped pickaninny, whose sole purpose was to serve and entertain his masters, to an intelligent and cunning boy who is not only the intellectual superior of his white playmate and master, Bayard, but is equal to Granny Rosa in her business dealings with the Yankees. The scene in the church where Ringo is forced to sit in the balcony with his fellow slaves although holding the ledger that could save or destroy the lives of his white "superiors" is brilliant and the irony is not lost even on the most casual reader. By the end of last story, "An Odor of Verbena," it appears that Bayard has made a significant movement away from the nebulous but clinging heritage of the South with all its manifestations of honor and codes of chivalry, to a more aware state of mind. However, to readers of Flags in the Dust, set in the 1920s, this same Bayard is shown as an old man unable to sever himself from the traditions of the Old South, and still rides to town in a horse drawn carriage driven by his family's old slave, Simon.

Many reviewers have suggested that this novel is the place to begin for readers new to Faulkner. It is most decidedly not. Start with Light in August, Sanctuary, or even Flags in the Dust - all three very approachable and far superior to The Unvanquished.