Points Of Skew
I'm so glad it's not just me that had a tough time reading this book. Actually, I thought Faulkner's earlier "The Sound And The Fury" is a tougher first read, its opening stream of consciousness narrative set in the mind of a simpleton. What 1936's "Absalom, Absalom!" is is a tough second read, making it a harder pill to swallow.
The challenge as I found it was not quite the same as "Sound". There, once you lock into the story, the digressions and the abstract metaphors fall nicely into place. Here, you never quite lock into the story exactly. It follows a man by the name of Sutpen, who carves out a corner of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi for his own. This doesn't endear him to everyone, but he manages to find a bride, settle down, raise two children, and run his spread with the help of some wild Haitian slaves, one of which is his illegitimate daughter. Then comes the Civil War, a tidal wave of change by itself but the least of Thomas Sutpen's problems.
Faulkner makes Sutpen a compelling if mysterious central character. A slaveholder, a hypocrite, a scoundrel, and a cruel "man-horse-demon" as his bitter sister-in-law Rosa Coldfield remembers, Sutpen emerges too as a man of great will and courage. Faulkner observes: "He had been too successful, you see; his was that solitude of contempt and distrust which success brings to him who gained it because he was strong instead of merely lucky."
Miss Rosa is the first tipoff the story isn't going to play out as straightforward as it reads. She's very bitter about Sutpen, as it turns out, in part for good reason, but in part because she's sexually uptight and a snob, mourning a social order Sutpen blew through like tissue paper.
Then there's Quentin Compson, a semester removed from his suicide at Harvard, sharing stories of Sutpen with his jocular Canadian roommate Shreve. Quentin's reminiscence is gentler than Rosa's, but farther removed from the source and tinged with strange melancholy. Maybe the tale of frustrated incest strikes a nerve.
The story doesn't so much come out in pieces as it revolves and gets respun with different accents and emphases. It's a hell of a story, "intense Southern Gothic", like it says in a top review here, with some sudden plot twists unusual for a deep-thought novel. That it goes on in this vein a bit too long, chewing over the same points, is a concern that doesn't melt away when you read the book a second time. Faulkner writes with power and verve, and a poet's flair, but he doesn't use periods nearly enough, overweighting sentences with layers of meaning that go off into corners and bounce back only after stretching a point to breaking.
I may need a couple of more readings before I come around to embracing this novel the same way I did with "The Sound And The Fury". It's not as fun, though some humor does show up, much of it involving the frigid, hypersensitive Rosa. It does provide major insight into the antebellum side of Yoknapatawpha County, with a hard but compelling look at slavery's toll on both black and white that nevertheless is far from the novel's whole story.
The story is great; the telling is problematic if mostly for the best. I'll enjoy re-immersing myself in the enigma that is "Absalom, Absalom!", but if I wind up more confused than ever the next time I read it, I won't be a bit surprised.
A Tough Read
Having read three major works by Faulkner, I never thought Faulkner's prose to be THAT long and convoluted until I read this one. The sentences go on and on, sometimes for half a page, sometimes for an entire page, strung together with clause after clause, requiring the reader to really focus and remember what the subject of the enormous sentence is, though retaining and figuring out what all the clauses are referring to is often times hard to determine as you get lost in that meandering prose that keeps burgeoning like this, sometimes ignoring grammar altogether, sometimes even omitting commas when listing euphuistic obscure poetic little adjectives, punctuated with long parenthetical asides (kind of like this, making it hard to follow the gist of the sentence and causing momentary amnesia whereby the subject of the sentence you tried so hard to retain throughout the long serpentine sentences is almost completely obliterated, sometimes made more complex by an insertion of another parenthetical aside inside of it (like this, you see?) compelling you to go ALL THE WAY back to the beginning and skip the asides altogether and re-read the entire damn thing again to wholly understand what the hell it's saying), the inexplicable semi-colon followed by a dash -- the dash long and imposing, confusing and unnecessary, enclosing more clause after clause in this fashion, severing the subject from everything else that is relevant and instrumental in understanding the sentence as a whole;-- the dash further elongating and compounding the sentence, and all those "not only...but" constructions that are sometimes embedded in or juxtaposed with a negative clause, making it outright ANNOYING (here it is, just CHECK this out) not because they are unpoetic (it can be at times) or stylistically uninteresting (because sometimes - just sometimes - it is) but not only because they are unnecessary and time-consuming to read but because they are just damn confusing!
So if you made it this far in my review and took the time to understand what I said above, you should be able to handle Absalom, Absalom!. Or maybe not. Though there are ups and downs, the entire book is written in this convoluted style. So know what you're getting yourself into before tackling this difficult work.
The story, on the other hand, is interesting. Though 90% of it is really telling and not showing at all, it's generally interesting enough to impel you through the dense, clattered prose and understand the story of a mysterious and impeccable man bent on building a dynasty of his own. In a nutshell, it's a good Shakespearian tragedy (the son destroying the dynasty) with a good Southern twist (in particular, racism).
Overall, despite my parody of his style, I did enjoy the unique experience of reading Faulkner at his most convoluted. An interesting (yet hard) read.
Masterpiece
It is impossible to distill the complex mysteriousness of this great work in a review. Faulkner's 'Absalom, Absalom!' is perhaps his most difficult and experimental novel-a novel that is composed entirely in thickly wrought stream of consciousness prose, with switching perspectives and an a linear chronology. It is too simple to call this great work "Southern Gothic," for it is so foreign in its conception and is a radical departure from the kind of writers Faulkner is normally associated (O'Connor, McCullers, Anderson). Rather, this text is closer to Joyce's 'Ulysses,' in terms of its linguistic complexity and attention to the labyrinthine workings of the mind. This is a novel about ruin, about decay, about what it means to be a part of a deteriorating empire. It is both political and personal, as all the great tragedies are. Through an inspired interplay of interior voice and secondary hearsay, Faulkner creates the story of Henry Sutpen and the gradual decline of his once prestigious family. This is a novel about slavery, about incest and miscegenation. It is American in its content in only the most horrifying ways. It is an incomparable literary achievement.
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