Rating: 
Summary: Unconvincing
Review: Unlike many of the other reviewers, I didn't find this book particularly difficult to read, but as to proclaiming its greatness, I must point out that this book has many problems beyond its melodramatic title.
Faulkner writes each of the book's small chapters in first person from the point of view of various members of an ignorant backwoods family or one of their neighbors. Yet, many times it's difficult to see the advantage of this, with large chunks of these chapters being essentially third person narration. In dialogue, the language of these rough country characters is "them eyes a hisn," but the narration that is supposed to be interior monologue is laced with Faulkner's own U of M vocabulary - recapitulant, cubistic, interminable, ascetic, ejaculant, etc. (Darl especially). Other places, these ignorant backwoodsmen are making comparisons between what they are seeing and Greek sculpture.
The mental snap of the young child is unconvincing, being developed mostly by repetitions that he believes that his mother is a fish. The mental snap of a second character is weaker yet - Faulkner fundamentally fails to develop it at all, as though he didn't even care whether it was convincing. The symptomatic of the limp ending of the book. Only the plight of the sister upholds the interest-level of earlier parts of the book.
The plot is also weak - essentially the story of a trip to the graveyard where everything goes wrong. The intentional ambiguity in the novel's beginning was also annoying in that the relationships between the characters are a mystery, which comes off as less something to pique the curiosity and more of a bother - why doesn't Faulkner just let his readers know?
But with all these criticisms plainly stated, I must also state that I kept right on reading. This book, like the father in the family of characters, has something strange that draws people to it and keeps them at it, reading right through to the end, even when there is a part of the reader saying it's not worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: Tough Reading
Review: _As I Lay Dying_ is, like all of Faulkner's books, truly original. This is probably the toughest book that I have ever read (that is because I didn't actually finish _Ulysses_). However, it is certainly not unreadable. Some of the passages in the novel were beautifully written as only Faulkner can write. I would say that I liked this book, the only reason that I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because the first Faulkner I ever read was _The Sound and the Fury_ so that will, unfairly, forever be my measuring stick for all of his other works. Most would argue otherwise, but I think this book is much more difficult than _The Sound and the Fury_. That is because there are so many characters to keep track of and the order of events is at times a bit arduous. So to summarize, I would not recommend this book to someone who has not read any Faulkner before, however, if you have read some of his other works, go out and buy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Faulkner's Meditation on Language
Review: Because of its relative brevity and "surface" accessibility, this novel often winds up being the sole Faulkner encounter for many readers. And it fascinates, even puts its hooks in, readers with its grotesque situations and dark humor. But Faulkner's fable about human encounters with death resonates because below the "story-level" quest of putting Addie Bundren's corpse to rest is the deep-structure quest of the human struggle for "meaning," of finding words that represent and give shape to human experience. Addie hates words because they separate her from their referents, from the experience itself, increasing her sense of loneliness. But it's her words that assure her presence in the consciousness of all of the other characters--most notably Darl, who inherits her facility with language. She tricks not only her own family but the reader as well into confronting the loss that both death and language entail. As a representation of experience, or as the "presence of absence," words distinguish Addie and Darl from all of the other characters, marking them as the only characters who can think abstractly and honestly. The cost is, in Addie's case, extinguishing loneliness only in death; in Darl's, becoming estranged from a "sane" social order. The gain--probably for Addie, Darl, Faulkner, and the attentive reader--is the knowledge that your dead mother can be neither a horse nor a fish. (I hate to add another, explanatory paragraph. But as Faulkner knows, words are a curse and a blessing. They threaten to isolate us from the "external" world of experience, but they are unavoidable in our attempts to represent--"re-presence"--the meanings that are always fading from our grasp. Vardamon's deciding that Addie is a "fish" and Jewel's designation of her as a "horse" are two versions of the childish, rudimental and perfunctory uses of language by human beings who seek simple problems and solutions in life--from suffering and death to complex and challenging relationships. Compare such language to Saddam's calling America a serpent and Dubya's designating problematic nations as an "axis of evil.")
Rating:
Summary: Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
Review: Nobody writes language as well as William Faulkner. That is, without a doubt, the strength of As I Lay Dying. If you've ever tried to write prose and have it have rhythm and meter, you probably have an idea of how quickly it can turn pretentious or just plain ridiculous. Most of us just want a story (plot *or* character driven) and anybody who focuses on making their writing "poetic" usually gets panned pretty quickly. Faulkner's language in As I Lay Dying is so brilliant as to be dizzying, and it's easy to get lost in the interior monologues of some of the characters. The story -- as most anyone reading this review probably knows -- is told from about a dozen different perspectives each pretty tight at 1-3 pages, and most offering several different chapters to the principle characters. It is different than The Sound and the Fury in that the different perspectives shifts every few pages. It keeps revolving as the story goes along, and the story of a poor-white-trash family carrying their dead matriarch to Jefferson to be buried moves forward through the progression of the novel. Faulkner's tone is both grim and comical but everything takes back seat to the language in what a young Faulkner called his "tour de force." It might be worth noting that if a writer today refered to his own work as a "tour de force" he would be way-laid by reviewers and readers.... Yet, Faulkner is now considered one of the most important writers in American history and As I Lay Dying one of his best novels. I ain't no Faulkner specialist but I'd have to say if you *wanted* to start with a Faulkner novel, As I Lay Dying is just about as good a place as any to begin. At roughly 260 pages, it's a pretty quick read. I'd like to offer one suggestion though if you are gonna read this: every now and again, ...read parts of it out loud. It might give you a better idea of the kind of cadence, meter, and rhythm with which Faulkner seems focused in this novel. Stacey
Rating:
Summary: Not for the weak of mind
Review: This book is incredible stylistically - it takes a great mind to be able to write as Faulkner does from 14 different points of view. He takes the simple death of one woman and turns it into a harrowing journey, a complicated story of family and selfishness. Darkly humorous, it takes a sharp expert reader to pick up the nuances in language to fully unlock what's going on in the story. But the characters are endearing, edgy, and just plain fantastically deep. I love this book because it is so tricky to understand - I've read it over and over and I am still discovering new ideas and meanings - but once you do, the richness of the story is yours to enjoy. It is a great secret held in the story that needs unlocking - good luck if you read it, and I hope everyone gets to enjoy it as much as I do.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but yet...
Review: ...not a book I could get into. I, like everyone who has experienced Faulkner, will warn you, the book is tuff. "As I Lay Dying" is even supposed to "introduce" one to the Faulkner canon. I, however, could not get into this book. I pride myself on having good taste in literature. Maybe it was too dark, the prose too fragmented, the charaters too unlikeable. Too something!? If I did not have so many other books sitting on my shelf waiting to be read, maybe I would force myself to read this again. I have that feeling, that this book would grow on me, an aquierd taste possibly. Do not get me wrong, Faulkner is a wonderful writer, but not one I enjoy reading. I can see why he is considered important. Classic? Yes. Entertaining? Not as much so.
Rating: 
Summary: Alas, but..
Review: ..this is the worst book I ever read. I hate to say it, because reviews that say "I don't like this book" are generally extremely unintelligent reviews. And generally I write extremely good reviews of books, and I can always find something good in almost any book. Except perhaps this one, I'm sorry to say. While Willliam Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness form was unprecendented and original, it does not mean he should be praised for his extremely poor use of it. The idea is good, but his execution makes the novel almost unintelligible. Sometimes it's best to sacrifice the realism of the stream of human thought for the sake of the reader's own mind and dramatic effect. I disliked the book more when I took it seriously. In order to get the most out of it, you ought to take it as comical, a farcical attempt for a completely inept and dysfunctional hillbilly family to get the rotting corpse of their matriarch to the family burial grounds. And everything goes wrong along the way, with the corpse rotting away as they trek it through the countryside, try to get it over a river, and all the while argue with each other and go crazy and break bones, as the youngest child thinks his dead mother is now a fish. Let's face it - the book is -funny.- But that doesn't mean it's well-written. Like I said before, it's good in theory, but the stream-of-consciousness is almost impossible to comprehend. And.. these are not people whose minds you want to get into and read every thought of. They're the typical country stereotypes found in literature - the bible-beating, overbearing, hypocritical patriarch; the hardworking but slow-thinking and meticulous son; the bad-tempered but poetic-minded and clairvoyant son; the ethereal daughter who was wronged by a boyfriend and is now pregnant (and gets the particularly irritating name of "Dewey Dell"); and the youngest son, named after a politician and as innocently quirky as they come. That, and none of them -ever- get along, and none of them are terribly intelligent or possess a modicum of decent common sense. The way Faulkner writes in _As I Lay Dying_ is very good in its theory, running through the same events over again from different points of view. The problem with it is that none of those points of view are terribly intelligible, and you end up with an extremely garbled view of events and characters. It seems as though Faulkner is trying too hard to make each character's thoughts different to the point where it's simply ridiculous. Very often those books hailed as classics of American literature do not deserve that title. Yes, they were innovative, but that does not make them excellent books - sometimes the first person to do the job is not the best person for it. I can honestly say that _As I Lay Dying_ is the only book that I ever literally -threw across a room- in sheer frustration of both the writing and the irritating nature of the characters. I truly wish I had something better to say about it, but if I'm going to give my honest opinion, this is it.
Rating:
Summary: a grim, stark, hilarious book
Review: Toss out all the high-faulting chatter on 'modernism' and 'symbiology' and other meaningless semantics academics use to justify their own misunderstandings. All that really serves to do is to stun an author's humanity into intellectual encryptions that serve only to bring their originality down to the presumed levels of the student who wishes to generalize all style into an accessible genre. No, Faulkner was more than a contributor to some mechinized stylistic that was rampaging through the imitators, but a brazen and unique story-teller who was interested in individual perspectives (of his characters and, more to the point I am making, of his readers as well . . .) As I Lay Dying, I believe, surpasses The Sound and the Fury in this approach, taking a far more exciting premise and spreading it out into the minds of every character who rambles along to form an opinion on what and why the Burden family is doing what they're doing. While The Sound and the Fury was a dense, often confusing piece (trying spending 80 pages in the winding maze of a not just retarded but deranged character's mind and, no matter how impressed with the reality of the words, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand anything, contradictions with the other character's thoughts notwithstanding), As I Lay Dying is very straight-forward, a complex attempt at 'high-literature' written as a low-brow, lower-class Southern crime story. The book is at times unexpectedly moving and at other times horrifyingly funny with scenes you find yourself laughing at as much from discomfort and disgust as from the antics and absurdity being described. My favorite of Faulkner's books (thus far, as I intend to bleed the well until I hate him), it was the first time I'd been more than just impressed and felt myself graduated into the realm of being something like a fan--
Rating:
Summary: As real as human pain can get
Review: Faulkner's writing provokes in me feelings of powerful awe and intense discomfort. These are difficult feelings to reconcile, and have led me to develop a frustrating love/hate relationship with him. The unflinching rawness of his prose cuts right to the core of what human suffering is all about, and this is the stuff that great literature is made of. In As I Lay Dying, as in much of his work, Faulkner places no distance between himself as writer and his characters. The first-person narration throughout the book, and the lack of an objective voice to buffer the reader from the pain of the characters, makes for intense reading. The blood on the pages is as close to real as it gets, and that can be awkward for a reader who wants to observe but not experience. But Nobel Prizes are rarely given out to writers who shy away from pain and humanity in all its ugliness, and ultimately it is Faulkner's honesty with his characters that makes them so powerful. As I Lay Dying is the story of a family's journey to fulfill a promise to their dead wife and mother by burying her in her home town. The narrative voice changes from chapter to chapter, sometimes the stoic, enduring father, sometimes the rebellious four children, and occasionally even the voice of the deceased. It is a quick read, but like most of Faulkner's fiction, a painful one. This is a book to appreciate for its brutal realism - nothing sugar-coated and no rose-colored glasses. And yes, ultimately a masterpiece of American fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Ugliness
Review: Maybe "As I Lay Dying" wasn't the best choice of Faulkner novels for me to read first. I just couldn't find it humorous, though I can appreciate how bringing a different attitude to the book might make it the most hilarious dark comedy anyone has ever read. It certainly is structured brilliantly, but you won't really be able to appreciate how brilliantly until you read it all the way through and get to the last page. The novel is told episodically from the perspectives of each member of the Bundren family as they track through the Mississippi heat with the coffin of their dead mother (whose posthumous point of view is also provided). It's a ridiculous and unnecessary journey that allows Faulkner to bring on display some of the very worst in human nature. What troubled me about this book on the first reading, was that Faulkner doesn't seem to counterbalance the ugliness with beauty of any kind, but that's the reader's problem to deal with, I think. By the end it is clear that Faulkner has done exactly what he has wanted to do and done it in such a way that "As I Lay Dying" has its own unique place in American and, surely, world literature. This is a serious book, but if you don't take it too seriously, it might move you in ways I'm afraid it didn't move me.
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