Rating: 
Summary: The reviews are much better than the book
Review: This was my second shot at trying to appreciate William Faulkner. I read Light in August a few years back and gave it 3 stars. I'm a big fan of Steinbeck, a contemporary of Faulkner's, who is often compared to Faulkner. Some reviews have said if you like Steinbeck you will like Faulkner. I disagree. Steinbeck writes clear and concise stories that are carried by his creativity and a reflection of the life he led. To describe Faulkner's style in Sanctuary, I will borrow from another review that said it was "oblique and distracting". I finished the story with a half-hearted understanding of what I had just read. By reading all of the other reviews on this site I now understand so much more about the book. That's a problem, I don't connect with Faulkner....
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant Language, Poor Plot
Review: While Faulkner admitted that this book, alone among the myriad of his writings, was written for money purposes only (and thus has some of his most lurid, sensationalistic, and reactionary prose), it has a very powerful attracting factor: its language. While the convoluted and unclear plotline (which Faulkner himself detested enough to heavily reconstruct, revise at a personal cost of $270 in a time when that was a small fortune) is an obvious detriment, the gorgeous word choice, word placement, and sentence construction nearly make up for it. For a short example, I will submit the final sentence: "She closed the compact and from beneath her smart new hat she seemed to follow with her eyes the waves of music, to dissolve into the dying brasses, across the pool and the opposite semicircle of trees where at sombre intervals the dead tranquil queens in stained marble mused, and on into the sky lying prone and vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain and death.&q! uot; Simply gorgeous; but the unconvincing story of rape, murder, lynching, a bumbling lawyer, a dangerous bootlegger from Memphis whose entire past history and motivation is described in 4 or 5 of the final pages, and many others can seem at times very outlandish and hard to follow, not from intrinsic, Faulknerian difficulty to read, but because of poor detail and a shallow style of writing. Characters have very little depth, and are afforded very short monologues when given one at all; Many characters, uncharacteristically, seem to simply not exist below the exterior, under the surface. However, if a reader can bypass this gruff outside layer of paint, Sanctuary has much to offer in way of the English Language.
Rating: 
Summary: Darkness, American Stlye
Review: While _Heart Of Darkness_ portrays the bleakness of the unchecked human spirit, it is Faulkner's _Sanctuary_ that places it squarely in our noses, our ears, our eyes as well as our hearts and souls. In this purely American novel we see not "adventurers" in Conrad's traditional sense, but American debutantes causually thrust into the orbit of the Memphis Prohibition underworld. As in _Sound and the Fury_ Faulkner uses his "shadow of the branch" approach to the narrative keeping the reader guessing as to what actually takes place at the "Frenchman's Place"; and when the reader finally "gets it" -- or, more accurately -- when this reader "got it," the experience was as shocking as anything to be seen in Doestoyevsky, Conrad or Bauldelaire. I wrote my thesis on this work five years ago and its effect on me, as I flippantly spew these remarks are as vivid as the first time I encountered Popeye with his face like "tin," and Temple Drake. Highly recommended for those not afraid of impingement, because _Sanctuary_ will impinge on whatever the reader's threshold for true darkness and horror may be.
Rating:
Summary: A Novel Master
Review: William Faulkner stands in my mind with only a few authors whose writing does not seem like writing. His novels seem more moments of real life. While I was reading "Sanctuary" you forget you are reading a book and the characters take on a virtual reality in your mind. Like all of Faulkner's books, this one is disorienting at first, simply by the author's strength of vision. The main plot revolves around Temple Drake, a coquettish college girl who likes to secretly sneak out of her college dorm to attend dances. One of her rides back from one of these dances is a boy named Gowan Stevens. He decides to stop off at an illegal moonshine operation and promptly sets about getting drunk. Temple is trapped at the house surrounded by all sorts of shady characters you would associate with such an operation. One of these is named Popeye, and trust me he is not a hero, he rapes Temple. One of the things I found slightly disturbing was the sense that Temple is a flirt and you get the sense that Faulkner felt that eventually some sex crime was going to be committed against her. She could get away with things around college boys but she fails to realize that with criminals, its a very bad move. It's the beginning of her great moral slide that was always just waiting to happen. There are other subplots going on around it. The owner of the moonshine operation is a convict and his wife supported herself through prostitution while he was in the joint, which is a source of tension between them. Horace Benbow is a lawyer who has left his wife simply because he recognizes the hollowness of his marriage. These characters are connected by the crime against Temple. The depressing thing about this novel is that noone really gets a sanctuary. The ending is not pretty. That's what makes it so powerful and so real. This book is right up there with Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in sheer power of vision.
Rating:
Summary: A Novel Master
Review: William Faulkner stands in my mind with only a few authors whose writing does not seem like writing. His novels seem more moments of real life. While I was reading "Sanctuary" you forget you are reading a book and the characters take on a virtual reality in your mind. Like all of Faulkner's books, this one is disorienting at first, simply by the author's strength of vision. The main plot revolves around Temple Drake, a coquettish college girl who likes to secretly sneak out of her college dorm to attend dances. One of her rides back from one of these dances is a boy named Gowan Stevens. He decides to stop off at an illegal moonshine operation and promptly sets about getting drunk. Temple is trapped at the house surrounded by all sorts of shady characters you would associate with such an operation. One of these is named Popeye, and trust me he is not a hero, he rapes Temple. One of the things I found slightly disturbing was the sense that Temple is a flirt and you get the sense that Faulkner felt that eventually some sex crime was going to be committed against her. She could get away with things around college boys but she fails to realize that with criminals, its a very bad move. It's the beginning of her great moral slide that was always just waiting to happen. There are other subplots going on around it. The owner of the moonshine operation is a convict and his wife supported herself through prostitution while he was in the joint, which is a source of tension between them. Horace Benbow is a lawyer who has left his wife simply because he recognizes the hollowness of his marriage. These characters are connected by the crime against Temple. The depressing thing about this novel is that noone really gets a sanctuary. The ending is not pretty. That's what makes it so powerful and so real. This book is right up there with Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in sheer power of vision.
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