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Summary: A Brief Defense of "Absalom Absalom!"
Review: Incredibly difficult? Yes. Idiosyncratic? Yes. One of the best American novels ever written? Yes.
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Summary: Great, but why does it have to be so challenging?
Review: There's a great story buried underneath all those convoluted 500- to 1,000-word sentences crammed with vocab words like "miscegenation," "effluvium" and "implacable." Faulkner also has an annoying habit of using pronouns like "he" and "they" without telling you who he is referring to. You just have to figure it out in context. The story is a great one and picks up toward the end, but Faulkner buries the plot and the layers of meaning in frustrating prose that is almost as hard to interpret as the book of Revelation. It requires concentration and determination to get through to the end, but when you get there you realize you still don't know everything that happened and you want to start over. I found "A,A!" much more difficult than "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Daying," but all three are drenched in meaning and symbolism. The long sentences and vocab words make it far more difficult. Of the three, I think "A,A!" has the best plot but might be too damned hard to make it worth it. Still, I have found that, while difficult, Faulkner's stories are disturbing and they stay with you long after you've read them. If I could start my Faulkner reading over again, I might start with something more straight forward like "Light in August" or "Sanctuary" first. The three I've read are just too hard for an intro to Faulkner.
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Summary: Ghosts of the Old South
Review: Faulkner is notoriously cruel to his readers for making them scrape and dig for details in his almost incomprehensibly dense chronicles of the fictional families of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, but not for nothing is he one of the greatest of American writers. A story is not a collection of cold hard facts but of ideas and images designed to make us exercise the remotest faculties of our minds, and Faulkner's fiction presses the buttons and turns the dials that set our mental mechanisms in motion."Absalom, Absalom!" is a particularly intricate machine that links the Old South with the New and features a family tree whose branches are gnarled beyond all reasonable efforts at traceability. The trunk is a man named Thomas Sutpen, who, after an adventurous youth in Virginia and the West Indies, arrives in YoCo in the 1830's with a large supply of money and black slaves, builds a plantation, marries a local girl, Ellen Coldfield, and fathers two children, Henry and Judith, envisioning a fruitful dynasty. In Faulkner's characteristically confusing style, the story is narrated through a few different viewpoints. The closest to the Sutpen family is Ellen's sister Rosa Coldfield, who happens to be younger than Henry and Judith. She has suffered some unhappy experiences as a result of being associated with Sutpen, but she retains a certain pride as she recounts her history to Quentin Compson, the morose young man who, we know from "The Sound and the Fury," is later to drown himself in the Charles River. Quentin also gets information from his father, whose own father was a close friend of Sutpen's, and in turn discusses the Sutpen saga with his Harvard roommate Shreve, to whom Quentin insists, as the novel ends, that he doesn't hate the South. As in "Light in August," race consciousness is a major subject in "A, A!" Thomas Sutpen is revealed to have fathered a boy named Charles Bon by a Haitian woman he thought was "pure" white, but he abandons her and the baby when he learns of her mixed ancestry. Later, he has a daughter named Clytemnestra (oh, the implications) by one of his slave women, proving himself to be a rather lecherous sort of hypocrite. Trouble begins when Henry meets his half-brother Charles at the University of Mississippi and brings him home, where he and Judith fall in love; Quentin's ultimate lesson about the Sutpens is that irony is a merciless punisher of irresponsibility. "A, A!" returns to the impressionistic style of narration used in "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying." There are frequent shifts in focus and voice and extremely long parenthetical digressions which make this a difficult novel, but this is the kind of difficulty that gives Faulkner's fiction its substance. With an almost Shakespearean sensibility, Faulkner creates majestic characters of dazzling complexity and brooding intensity out of the basic cloth of ordinary folks, which is why figures like Thomas Sutpen, Quentin Compson, and Rosa Coldfield survive in our memories long after we finish reading the novel.
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Summary: "why happened" not "what happened" book
Review: I first read Absalom, Absalom! in a class on women's writing and feminist interpretation. The instructor assured us that this book was "all about" Faulkner's fear of and jealousy of women or more specifically of our reproductive power. Even though I was very much a feminist at the time (hence the class in the first place) I admit, this interpretation ruined the book for me. In fact, I never finished this book while at college and only read enough to get an "A" on the term paper and exam. It wasn't until very recently that a good friend of mine finally succeeded in convincing me to give Faulkner another chance. I did and this review is a kind of thank you to that friend. For Absalom, Absalom! is an incredible work. For those of you who want to know "what it's all about," the plot is fairly simple: a poor boy goes to the West Indies to make his fortune, meets a woman there, marries her, finds out she is part Black, repudiates her and his child, gets another (White) wife and family. Eventually his son by his first wife meets his second son, the two come home and his first son falls in love with his half-sister. And the younger brother kills the older brother before the latter can marry their sister. That's it. That's the "what happened" plot but the real "plot" is in the "why happened" not the "what happened". This book takes us on a breathless journey to the depths of the human heart (a heart corrupted by an immutable caste system) and lifts us up again on a rollercoaster ride that is a bit hard to take sometimes. It is about the way people think and react; about the way (and the why) they love and whether they acknowledge that love (or not) and what happens as a result. It is about the choices we make once but that happen over and over as though those choices are not and can never be made only once. And no doubt Faulkner's fear of women is in here too. It's just that this time I didn't see it as much; or perhaps it wasn't the only thing I saw.
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Summary: stunning.
Review: this is the ultimate in american literature. faulkner's other tales of previous days and people in mississippi are stunning, but 'absalom, absalom' is so transcendent in all it attempts to do, that it clearly identifies itself as THE essential american novel. in case you are somehow unaware, this is another piece in the puzzle of the fictional county in mississippi faulkner created to illustrate the american south in the early twentieth century. more specifically, it is the tale of henry sutpen and his grand design to rule whatever he could. it really is a tragedy of sorts -- sutpen will go to any length to be in control, when he really has no control at all. the story is much to cavernous to describe here. this opus is just another indicator that faulkner was the master of stream of consciousness writing. from miss coldfield's telling of her version of sutpen to quentin compson [yes, quentin from 'the sound and the fury], to shreve mccannon spewing conjecture at quentin in a dorm room in harvard, to the shocking, disturbing end, faulkner's prose keeps the pages ablaze. i once had a teacher who said that reading and understanding this book was much like climbing a mountain. i cannot agree more. digesting faulkner's masterwork is amongst the most rewarding experiences possible via literature. words of warning: don't expect to be blown away the first time through. this book reveals its beauty when it unfolds in subsequent readings. if you are new to faulkner, try 'the sound and the fury' or 'as i lay dying' first, as each serves as perhaps a better introduction to the universe of southern mississippi.
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Summary: Fascinating, but Go Down Moses is better
Review: Absalom Absalom has all the markings of a great classic, and it is considered by many to be one of Faulkner's greatest works. It is worth reading, but if you are going to read only one of Faulkner's books, I think Go Down Moses is far better. Both novels are written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness manner, but the prose in Go Down Moses seems tighter. In Go Down Moses every word counts, while in Absalom there is a great deal that I would have trimmed if I were the author. Another thing that bothers me about Absalom is that everyone speaks (and thinks) in almost exactly the same style of prose--there is almost no variation between the way characters think, which is in long run-on sentences, and the way they speak to others, which is likewise in long run-on sentences full of similies and metaphors (some of which do not seem to make sense, and some of which are very good). I also found it annoying that I could sometimes read for pages before figuring out who was talking (or thinking). The stream of consciousness writing style is good when handled with skill, and in my opinion it is handled with more skill in Go Down Moses.
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Summary: Gripping Masterpiece!!
Review: I took the advice of those who've reviewed Faulkner on Amazon and introduced myself to Faulkner with A Light in August, and then moved on to this work. Light in August was a great introduction to Faulkner because the language was simpler and the story more straightfoward, but Absalom! Absalom! stands out as one of the most gripping, brooding, intense books I've ever read. Yes, the language was difficult, but it is extremely effective in getting the reader actively inolved in the book -- I never felt like a passive reader/observer of the narrative but was completely sucked into the world of Thomas Sutpen. The way Faulkner revealed the story little by little through the perspective of several different characters (many of whom new about the actual events except through hearsay) was riveting and suspenseful. I literally wept at several points in the story and I felt as if I had accomplished something and learned something by reading it. If you focus on this book and cut out external background noise and really concentrate, this book can be perfectly understandable and extremely rewarding. Highly recommended.
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Summary: American Epic
Review: I once attended a lecture by a Famous Contemporary American Writer who, among other things, bemoaned the fact that there was no "great American epic" on the Civil War. Well, sir - this is it, and in my humble opinion the finest output of America's greatest writer (which makes it the great American novel, in my humble opinion.) It wasn't the book closest to Faulkner's heart - that was "The Sound and the Fury" - but Absalom, Absalom! has the lurid, desperate power of a fever dream that manages to tell the story of the Southern States before the War, the Confederacy, slavery and "race relations" all in 300 or so pages. Even after having read the book twelve or so times I gawk with amazement at the ease with which Faulkner switches voices and point of views between Quentin Compson at Harvard in the 1910s, Mississippi before, during, and after the War. Some might find them sudden and confusing, but I find them seamless and profoundly moving, especially when he switches from Harvard to the Confederate retreat in 1865. The pentultimate scenes - the last conversation between Shreve McCaslin and Quentin, and Quentin's discovery at the ruined Sutpen plantation - are some of the finest writing by an American or anyone, ever. Who needs Anselm's ontological proof of God's existence when you have William Faulkner? Yes, the book is dense, with Faulkner's famous page-long sentences. But allow yourself to be drawn into the strange and brutal magic of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner's tragic vision of history, and you'll come away enriched, knowing more not only about America's greatest tragedy, but the nature of man himself.
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Summary: Books on Tape audio edition of 'Absalom, Absalom!'
Review: It may be rather pointless at this late date to review a now-unavailable audio edition of one of Faulkner's most important works, but I have only just now encountered (from my local library) the Books on Tape #3220 unabridged 'Absalom, Absalom!', read by Wolfram Kandinsky on 11 90-minute cassettes. Kandinsky is not what I would consider an especially poor reader; he pays careful attention to his text, and he usually enunciates clearly. To try to keep from being boring, he sprinkles voice modulation and emphasis in his lines, and not entirely at random. However, he unfortunately IS a boring reader, and I have to admit I couldn't get past the first tape. But even aside from being a boring reader, Kandinsky's real problem is that he has no ear for the sounds and rhythms of Faulkner's language, of his unique Faulknerian dialect. 'Absalom, Absalom!' is itself a difficult book to read convincingly--sentences can go on for pages on end, with hardly any other intervening punctuation. In this experimental book, Faulkner is building, in a very architectural sense, piling words upon words; and it's in the architecture of his writing, as much as, or more than, in the sense of the individual words themselves, that the meaning and the impact of his story is revealed. This requires a very different style of reading than Kandinsky can muster--it needs a subtle, almost flat and uninflected, almost hypnotic, building of words and lines and pages, with slow and deep waves of emphasis that grow and recede and grow again. Like many (or most) really good books, 'Absalom, Absalom!' needs to be "told" to the listener, not simply "read". Wolfram Kandinsky's reading would suffice admirably for a Hardy Boys mystery; but anyone who knows and loves Faulkner is bound to be disappointed.
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Summary: my favourite Faulkner and the Bible
Review: O.K., so this is not exactly easy to read. At the beginning you have to constantly deduce who is narrating. But once you have learnt that the whole story of the Sutpen family is going to be told through a series of interviews between Quentin and several witnesses of the facts related, you can relax and really enjoy it. For me, one of the greatest wonders and sources of joy in this novel was to find the paralelisms between the story of the Sutpen family and that of king David of the Bible. And even though we know what is going to happen with Colonel Sutpen and his offspring (especially the one who stands for Absalom), Faulkner's chilling solution for the conlfict is inevitably amazing. Do I need to add that the paralelism does not only work at the level of the Sutpen family tragedy, but also with the historical setting --the heroic times of the American Civil War in the South?. One of the jewels of universal literature.
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