Rating: 
Summary: Enter another world
Review: A lot of people claim that this novel is really, really funny. Maybe I'm just not receptive to this particular brand of humor, but I just don't get it. A few things made me smile or even laugh out loud, but in general, hilarity was at a minimum. Furthermore, at times Faulkner is clearly having trouble maintaining the fine line between stylization and just plain self-indulgence. A clear example of this is the section with Ike Snopes and the cow, where he goes into this weird, faux-pastoral style of writing. This is amusing at first--and the entire premise of the segment is effectively bathetic--but it just goes ON and ON and ON, eventually losing most of its appeal. The man just doesn't know when to stop sometimes.Let it not be said, however, that there is not some excellent material on display here. The tension-laden section with Lump Snopes trying to get Mink to show him where the body's hidden is simply brilliant, and in the character of Armstid we see a genuinely frightening portrait of obsession. Furthermore, Ratliff is a great character, even if the ease with which he ultimately lets himself be swindled by Flem Snopes isn't even slightly believable. Ultimately, what we have here is clear evidence of Faulkner's best tendencies as well as his worst. In my opinion, however, the former do outweigh the latter to some degree. The Hamlet is perhaps not the best starting place, but well worthwhile for enthusiasts.
Rating:
Summary: Dead-On Characterizations & Backwoods Hilarity
Review: After reading all of Faulkner's 35 yrs ago in college, I have not been back until I bought this book recently. I think I appreciate Faulkner's ability create fully realized characters in a vivid setting now than I did way back when. His writing is closest literary equivalent to a good painting. The Hamlet is funnier than Catch-22, with much darker overtones. The book is really just a string of tall tales. The movie version (The Long Hot Summer) left out all of the good stuff.
Rating:
Summary: The Snopes myth and top-notch Quality Lit.
Review: Although I have been a Faulkner fan practically since birth,I put off reading the Snopes trilogy for years because, Isuppose, it seemed inconceivable that Faulkner could write more than a small number of books as gripping and involved as "The Sound and the Fury" or "Light in August" or "Absalom, Absalom"; in other words, I delayed reading the back volumes of his oeuvre, as it were, in order to stave off disappointment, to delay the moment at which I would have to admit that Faulkner, even Faulkner, could not be great all of the time. After all, who could expect such Biblical grandeur and keen insight from yet another book covering the same Mississippi turf? But Faulkner is nothing if not surprising: his prose here is just as innovative and finely-tuned as in his better-known work, and the chapters -- many of them published separately as short stories, such as the famed "Spotted Horses" -- are individual gems which, when added up and interconnected, form a satisfyingly complex and interdependent whole. Faulkner is the very greatest, the writer who almost single-handedly raised American literature to the level of myth; who saw most clearly the meaning of roots and background in the shaping of human lives; who understood most incisively how such stories could grip and lash the imagination, and the consciousness, of a receptive reader. I plan to read the next installments of this trilogy post-haste, without regard to potential disappointment: I trust him now to take the story to new heights.
Rating: 
Summary: Great American Literature from a Great Writer
Review: Anyone wishing to understand American Literature must go through William Faulkner's works, and anyone wishing to understand Faulkner's works must go through Yoknapatawpha County, the setting for the Sartoris-Snopes battle. In this first installment of three books documenting the exploits of the infamous Snopes Family, Faulkner solidifies his unique place in American letters.
You can find synopsis upon synopsis of what the story is about, i.e., the rise of Flem Snopes and how he goes about taking over a small town, about how the story reflects the decay of the post-bellum South as divine retribution for slavery and rebellion blah blah blah (pure excrement), etc. If critics must force the story into being some sort of commentary on the South, then the most correct assessment would be that Flem Snopes represents the post-bellum degradation of the South by some Southerners coming under yankee influence. By increments Flem forces, cheats, and seduces the village in Frenchman's Bend into his own image of unchecked, unabashed greed and the desire to control all for his own enrichment to the total detriment of everyone else, something foreign to the true Southern mind. Flem Snopes is the personafication of the yankee parasite that sucks the life out of its host/victim, completely oblivious to the probablilty of his own destruction by his destroying his host/victim (remember what lady MacBeth said: "'Tis safer to be that we destroy/than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy."). The notion of Flem in particular and Snopesism in general as a parasite is especially applicable because the label is a dehumanization. In Faulkner's worldview, the only thing that is unforgivable is inhumanity, the absence of human-ness, and it is the absence of human-ness that characterizes Flem Snopes (and by extension, exploitative, parasitic yankeeism). To be sure, there are in the story a couple of Snopeses who are not inhuman, but they serve to set Flem's yankee-ish inhumanity in higher relief.
As with all his Yoknapatawpha tales, characters from other novels (notably The Unvanquished) and short stories (notably Barn Burning) move into and out of The Hamlet with all the naturalness of citizens of a self-contained universe. The story is intriguing and intense, and the prose is vintage Faulkner. The skillful reader and sincere philologist will appreciate the impact Faulkner's prose technique. Only west-coast flakes whose artistic legacy is such deep and penetrating thoughts as "Ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-bra-ann", and whose linguistic contributions include gruntings such as "gnarley" and "tubular", would think of dismissing the technique as "unintelligible gibberish." Such willful blindness is but one more example of owls mistaking the passing shadow of an eclipse for their native night and hooting mockingly at eagles, convinced that what is hidden from them can not possibly exist.
Read The Hamlet. Read lots of Faulkner. Pay no attention to "Cliff's Notes critics" who have neither the intellectual wherewital nor vision broad enough to see beyond communication of greater sophistication than the phrase "You've got mail."
Rating:
Summary: A silly quote
Review: It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor. -Sandman, Neil Gaiman
Rating:
Summary: A Sardonic Look at How the Old South Fell to Greed
Review: Itinerant sewing machine salesman V.K. Ratliff matches wits with hard-headed businessman Flem Snopes and his ubiquitous relatives in this smoothly interwoven series of tales from Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The Snopes Saga continues with The Town and The Mansion, but neither of these books are nearly as sardonically humorous, and this first volume ends neatly enough that the unimpressed reader can stop right there. But most readers will be captivated by Faulkner's yarns of the horse-trading, deal-making, penny-pinching folk who inhabit Frenchman's Bend. Faulkner uses these stories to reflect how the naiveté of the Old South allowed it to fall victim to a species of social infestation somewhere around the turn of the century. Flem Snopes is not exactly the hero of this book; he is mean, miserly, graceless, and unprincipled, but he does have a distinct knack for making money, and his inexorable rise seems to indicate that he is by some standards the smartest man in the village. Of course Faulkner can't help but try to show us how much the glory of the Old South gets lost in the process: courtesy, honor, common decency, and public responsibility. Snopes doesn't care who get hurt, so long as he comes out ahead in the deal. Faulkner's often difficult prose is easier to follow in this novel than in some of his others, and absent the bizarre experiments with point of view that he's noted for, most readers should find this book sometimes rambling and long-winded, but not incomprehensible. As an example of folksy Southern humor, this one is more seriously pointed than his nostalgic reminiscence The Reivers, but not as grimly dark as his black comedy As I Lay Dying, and really shouldn't be missed. As is always the case with Faulkner, the women-folk may consider themselves excused.
Rating:
Summary: The American Shakespeare
Review: No doubt about it: Faulkner is the American Shakespeare. He puts the "fun" back in "dsyfunctional." By American literature standards, this is a great book. By Faulknerian standards, this is a good book. It is not quite up there with "Absalom, Absalom!" "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying," and "Old Man." But it's still pretty damned good.
Rating:
Summary: Enter another world
Review: The Hamlet is about the beginning of the rise of the Snopes clan. But what you get out of it, what is more lasting than the stories of a pack of low-down people clawing and cheating and killing their way across Yoknapatawpha County -- which are devastating, and funny, and weird enough in themselves to earn this novel the highest praise -- is the sensation of immersion into William Faulkner's fictional reality. It is a universe in which the characters do things that people do, but as you are reading you get the feeling you might be dreaming. Something is just off, and that strangeness serves as a giant light beam on the human soul. No one has concocted a stage and players like this, with such deep insight, and beautiful poetic prose, and humor, since Shakespeare maybe. Read The Hamlet slowly, read sentences twice sometimes, don't hurry, and you will be utterly, irreversibly hooked.
Rating: 
Summary: Strictly southern fried and a little half baked
Review: This book's title refers to Frenchmen's Bend, a section just outside Jefferson, Mississippi. The chief citizen of the Bend is Will Varner, who's daughter, Eula, eventually marries Flem Snopes, whose family forms an important, if shadowy, presence in the town. Flem, himself, whom Varner hires to clerk in his store, comes to Frenchmen's Bend with a somewhat shady reputation preceding him.
_The Hamlet_ has a certain amount of pastoral charm and beauty, owing largely to Faulkner's expert hand in describing the seasonal/environmental changes of the land of his southern roots. Faulkner's writing style is a mixed blessing, being composed of lengthy run-on and circuitously written sentences. I also often had difficulty identifying to which of his characters Faulkner was referring. Faulkener kept saying "he" rather than give the man's name, particularly frustrating in an otherwise mysteriously harrowing section of the book where several characters were attempting to locate the body of one of their "murdered" denizens.
The book presents its plot--if you can call it that--as a series of incidents rather than a seamlessly narrated novel, with a beginning, a middle, the climax and a denoument. Faulkner's frequent verbal diversions and lack of continuity often cause his stories to poop out and fall flat. On the other hand, Faulkner's use of picaresque characters and colorful set pieces is nearly flawless and very often comical, quite apparent in sequences concerning a wandering, unmilked cow and during a horse auction in which many of them become wild and run away.
_The Hamlet_ does not so much end, a rather weak ending at that, but very cautiously paves the way for a sequel.
Rating:
Summary: It's a slow go, but well worth it
Review: Three-and-a-half stars. There is nothing about The Hamlet that will surprise fans of Faulkner's work: it is a dense novel written in the author's trademark style--mind-bending prose that often leaves one wondering what in the world just happened. But it's worth it, because The Hamlet is the springboard for Faulkner's impressive Snopes trilogy. What happens in this book sets the stage for the more entertaining (and more accessible) The Town and The Mansion. Flem Snopes emerges as a force to be reckoned with, and the manic antics of his redneck relatives propels the narrative forward with enough momentum that the reader, at novel's close, is curious to learn what happens when the diabolical genius of Flem Snopes is loosed on Jefferson. Read it: but keep in mind that it all gets more interesting in the books that follow.
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