This is Thomas Wolfe's first book, which is widely regarded as one of the great American novels of the 20th century.

The real star of the show here is Wolfe's unique writing style. It is highly lyrical and ornate, filled to the brim with a plethora of adjectives, adverbs, and other rich vocabulary. This made me constantly reach for the dictionary to look up the meanings of words.

However, despite the challenge posed by the complex language, the writing is truly beautiful. It is the kind of prose that demands you to slow down and savor each and every word. It took me a considerable number of months to get through this book.

The main reason for this was that in the early chapters, before I had fully acclimated to Wolfe's distinct voice, I had a tendency to doze off after reading just a paragraph or two. But as I persisted and became more attuned to his style, I began to appreciate the beauty and depth of his writing more and more.

Why on earth was I so driven to read this book? I, who eschew excess words and have no problem wiping them out of my own books and the work I edit?

I first read Look Homeward, Angel when I was in junior high school. I retained none of the story, only my reaction to it: awe.

For more than forty years, the yellowing hardcover that my father purchased at Macy’s (per the stamp on the back end paper) has been on my top shelf near the ceiling. It's a shelf of books that I rescued from death by mildew in my mother’s garage in the 1970s. A week ago, on impulse, I pulled it down and started reading. Why did I keep reading until page 318? I think because, fifty-some years after first having read it, I can articulate that Wolfe writes what I feel. His poetry, although a laborious read and sometimes almost adolescent in its verbosity, conveys the essence of what it is to be born “a stranger in a strange land.” It makes one feel stuck between spirit and life in a body, to have memories that defy sentence-making. And rather than drown in all his words, at least for the first half of the book, I mostly inhaled them, trusting my brain-transcending comprehension.

And there are a lot of words. There are endless poetic streams that suddenly and unexpectedly are peppered with raucous, sly humor. Like the inanity of a conversation between a drunk and his wife and parodies of newspaper society pages and cheesy romantic novels. For example:

“He crushed her to him in a fierce embrace; her slender body yielded to his touch as he bent over her; and her round arms stole softly across his broad shoulders, around his neck, drawing his dark head to her as he planted hungry kisses on her closed eyes, the column of her throat, the parted petals of her fresh young lips.” (105)

What fun Wolfe must have had writing this.

In 626 tightly printed, densely packed pages, Wolfe tells the story of his alter ego, Eugene Gant, born in 1900. The pages are dripping and leaking and flooding and inundating your puny intake orifices with inky words. (I’m demonstrating here, in case you’re taking me seriously. And FYI, Part 2 of the three parts gets so heavy with modifiers that it becomes almost funny. Can you follow this parenthetical bit? Sorry, but it’s nothing compared to the book itself.)

He felt, rather than understood, the waste, the confusion, the blind cruelty of their lives—his spirit was stretched out on the rack of despair and bafflement as there came to him more and more the conviction that their lives could not be more hopelessly distorted, wrenched, mutilated, and perverted away from all simple comfort, repose, happiness, if they set themselves deliberately to tangle the skein, twist the pattern. (136-137)

Alas, a little less than 200 pages later, I found myself skimming and then drowning, and decided that reading this once in a lifetime, even if I can’t remember it, will suffice.

Still there are things I admire here. Despite his excessiveness, Wolfe expresses the nuances of life and, with a sage’s X-ray vision, the many layers of Eugene Gant and all the people who surround him.

________

*I read the 1929 edition which was trimmed by 60,000 words at the bidding and hands of the immaculate editor Maxwell Perkins (see a wonderful movie about Perkins and Wolfe called \\n  Genius\\n) and is still torturously overwritten. In 2000, the original cuts were restored in a new edition; read at your own peril.

**Because it is 2016, I feel compelled to note the business-as-usual racism in the book for younger readers. This book would never be published now not only because of the overwriting but because the culture would not accept this expression of a white Christian’s take on Blacks and Jews. But if you can accept this kind of stuff as representative of the time when it was written, read it.

Monumental book, but not recommended.

It is a family epic set in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. The struggles of the growing youth of successive generations are sublimely described.

The numerous quotations from literature and references to names and events from this period make you constantly feel that you are missing something that the writer is trying to make clear to you.

Good background knowledge of the time period is actually necessary to be able to properly interpret the book.

Excellent translation and annotations by Sjaak Commandeur.

Overall, while the book has its merits in terms of the vivid portrayal of the family's experiences and the historical context it presents, the abundance of literary allusions and references can be overwhelming for readers without a solid understanding of the era.

It may be more suitable for those with a particular interest in American history and literature of the early 20th century.

However, for the general reader, it might prove to be a bit of a challenging read.

Nevertheless, the quality of the translation and annotations by Sjaak Commandeur adds value to the work and helps to make it more accessible to a wider audience.

In revisiting this novel, I discovered that it was strikingly different from the masterpiece I had believed it to be during my twenties.

Back then, I would have毫不犹豫地rated it a five-star, as it seemed to capture the essence of life so accurately. However, now it no longer evokes the same emotions in me.

Perhaps it is a sign of growing older and more jaded, but I find myself lacking the patience for a young man who simply desires to escape from his parents, friends, and hometown, and who complains about them non-stop.

Thankfully, the writing remains lyrical, and I can still appreciate the beauty of the language.

Good-bye, Thomas Wolfe. It was nice to run into you again, but our relationship is no longer as close as it once was.

In the future, I will give a little more thought to rereading a favorite book. It is truly disappointing when it doesn't live up to my expectations.

In the early XX century, there was a book called "The Golden Fund". It tells the story of a white family in America. The parents, the father and the mother, were rather strange to each other, trying to realize the "American dream" in their own way. From them stems the life story of each child, filled with joys and sorrows, illnesses, deaths, injuries and victories. But there is such a hopeless sky covering all the generations that sometimes one has to look away from the book. At the top of the book is a very accurate quote from the author: "The world is not so bad anymore, but also not so good anymore, not so scary anymore and not so beautiful anymore. All this is life, life, life, and this is the only thing that makes sense."

This book provides a deep and detailed look into the lives of this family, showing the complexity and reality of their experiences. It makes the reader think about the meaning and value of life, and how we should face the challenges and difficulties that come our way.

Through the description of the family's story, the author also reflects on the social and cultural background of that era, revealing the problems and contradictions that existed in American society at that time.

Overall, "The Golden Fund" is a thought-provoking and moving book that offers a unique perspective on life and society.

I love you! I love you! Eugene is the angel. I will never forget you! How naive and romantic it is. First love is always a special and precious experience. Eugene's first love was Laura, a woman five years older than himself. That part appears at the end of the story and it is truly the part I enjoyed most about this book. It made me feel the purity and intensity of young love.

I was also watching a movie about Thomas Wolfe, who was portrayed as a very talented writer. He wrote an abundance of works and it is said that he could describe a single item in numerous paragraphs. His publishers had a really tough time dealing with his long and detailed descriptions. That is partly what happened in the story as well.

The character of Gant, Eugene's father, was an aggressive and cruel man. He had a way with words that was often hurtful. Every morning, he would wake up and greet his children with insults, constantly calling them good for nothing bastards. Eliza, on the other hand, was his wife and a shrewd business lady who owned a boarding house. Her character added another layer of complexity to the family dynamics.

Nota preliminar aclaratoria

I have read Look Homeward, Angel simultaneously in three editions:

1. The standard English edition first published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1929.
2. The English edition published by Penguin in 2006, in which cuts have been made to the Scribner edition equivalent to about 55 - 60 pages.
3. The manuscript edition of the novel, titled O Lost, which Wolfe presented to Scribner in January 1929 and which underwent significant editorial cuts before publication. That original manuscript was published by Matthew and Arlyn Bruccoli in 2000 with minimal editorial intervention (see here my review of this edition).

I have also consulted during the reading the two existing Spanish editions:

1. The one translated by José Ferrer Aleu for Bruguera in 1983 from the Scribner English edition, and later published by Valdemar.
2. The one translated by Miguel Ángel Pérez for Trotalibros from the Penguin English edition and, therefore, has a significant number of cuts compared to the previous one.

Valoración

From the comparative reading of the edition published by Scribner as Look Homeward, Angel and the 2000 edition of O Lost, which is about two hundred pages longer, I conclude that the latter deserves a higher overall rating. Firstly, because it contains extensive passages that give meaning to the work as the narrative of a family saga and not just the mere bildungsroman of Eugene Gant, which is what Max Perkins, Scribner's editor, reduced the work to. And secondly, because the drastic pruning and editorial reorganization of the original -forced by Perkins, although accepted by Wolfe- did not solve, but rather aggravated, the narrative structure problems of the original.

Both O Lost and Look Homeward, Angel lack that intelligent management of rhythm and narrative structure that give unity and coherence to a work in the reader's mind and turn it into something more than a mere linear chronicle of events. However, if we disregard the above, Wolfe's writing is often lyrical and absolutely inspiring, to the point of making this novel, in any of its editions, a great American novel.

Style: 5/5
Narrative Structure: 3/5

Reseña

“One morning at the beginning of July, sixty-five years ago, two boys were standing by a Pennsylvania roadside on the outskirts of the little farming village of York Springs, watching a detachment of the Confederate Army …”

With this passage, Wolfe began the manuscript of his great American family epic about the Gants and the Pentlands. It was the one he submitted typed with the title of O Lost to Max Perkins, the editor of Scribner, and the one that Perkins, according to Wolfe, would subject to a pruning that left 626 pages instead of what would otherwise have been 825. Unfortunately, the quoted passage along with another fifty-six pages that constituted the prologue about the origins of the Gants and the Pentlands in O Lost did not survive the sieve.

•
Look Homeward, Angel (henceforth Angel), the published version of O Lost, consists of forty chapters divided into three parts that range from the union of Oliver Gant and Eliza Pentland to the graduation of their son Eugene from the university. The first part briefly narrates the “Yankee” origins of Eugene's father, the family life of the Gant couple in Altamont (the fictional name Wolfe gives to his native Asheville), the awakening to consciousness of the child Eugene, and the emancipation of the mother, Eliza, who acquires Dixieland to establish a boarding house. The central events of the second part are mainly related to the education that the pre-teen Eugene Gant receives at the private school of the Leonard couple. The third part, which deals with Gant's university experience, contains as a climax the death of his brother Ben during the Spanish flu epidemic.

•
O Lost/Angel is thus a family story perhaps inspired by one of Wolfe's favorite works: The Buddenbrooks. But it is also a bildungsroman around the figure of Eugene Gant, a sketch of Wolfe. The comparison with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce is inevitable. In fact, there are passages in O Lost/Angel that are clearly Joycean.

•
The novel has a declared autobiographical root: Eliza and Oliver, the parents of Eugene, are Julia Westall and Oliver Wolfe, the parents of Thomas. A central character like Ben Gant, whose death gives rise to some of the most beautiful pages of the book, is none other than Benjamin Wolfe, Thomas's brother.

•
Other relevant characters in the novel are: the Leonard couple, Eugene's teachers, Laura, his girlfriend, some of the boarders of Eliza in Dixieland, and, of course, the books and the train trips.

•
As I said at the beginning, I share the idea expressed by many critics that O Lost and, even more so, its edited and published version Angel, do not achieve an adequate narrative structure; but who cares when Wolfe's language is full of lyricism, as Peter Handke said. Whoever doubts it should read his wonderful lyrical prose in the following scene at the foot of Ben Gant's grave that closes chapter 37:

\\" Wind pressed the boughs, the withered leaves were shaking. It was October, but the leaves were shaking. A star was shaking. A light was waking. Wind was quaking. The star was far. The night, the light. The light was bright. A chant, a song, the slow dance of the little things within him. The star over the town, the light over the hill, the sod over Ben, night over all. His mind fumbled with little things. Over us all is something. Star, night, earth, light … light … O lost! … a stone … a leaf … a door … O ghost!… a light … a song … a light … a light swings over the hill … over us all … a star shines over the town … over us all … a light.
We shall not come again. We never shall come back again. But over us all, over us all, over us all is — something.
Wind pressed the boughs; the withered leaves were shaking. It was October, but some leaves were shaking.
A light swings over the hill. (We shall not come again.) And over the town a star. (Over us all, over us all that shall not come again.) And over the day the dark. But over the darkness — what?
We shall not come again. We never shall come back again.
Over the dawn a lark. (That shall not come again.) And wind and music far. O lost! (It shall not come again.) And over your mouth the earth. O ghost! But, over the darkness, what?
Wind pressed the boughs; the withered leaves were quaking.
We shall not come again. We never shall come back again. It was October, but we never shall come back again.
When will they come again? When will they come again?
The laurel, the lizard, and the stone will come no more. The women weeping at the gate have gone and will not come again. And pain and pride and death will pass, and will not come again. And light and dawn will pass, and the star and the cry of a lark will pass, and will not come again. And we shall pass, and shall not come again.
What things will come again? O Spring, the cruellest and fairest of the seasons, will come again. And the strange and buried men will come again, in flower and leaf the strange and buried men will come again, and death and the dust will never come again, for death and the dust will die. And Ben will come again, he will not die again, in flower and leaf, in wind and music far, he will come back again.
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again!

Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years.

The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.

Wolfe's Bildungsroman thus greets us and then sends our pert selves down the path on a journey into and out of a mind vexed by spirits past and present.

The future burns for fuel hot tears, slovenly humps of passion brought and lost, bright beginnings and desperate losses.

Wolfe works a magic that might be described, but like all good art, it must be experienced, whether for better, worse, or mediocre.

Hill-haunted, Eugene guides us. His parents and siblings, along with many others, are motley and varied in special allure, weaving in and out of this tale.

Besides the refrains of southern hymns and back-porch strains, my mind also encountered "Tell Mama" by Savoy Brown (especially when thinking of Eugene's distant but obsessively possessive mother).

Take this as it is, somewhat lacking in a first novel kind of way, but do not neglect it.

Sometimes books have to be read at a certain time in your life.

For me, this one was the perfect end to college. I finished it two days after graduation.

After all of my friends departed for points unknown or home, I was laying in the grass at Fordham in the Bronx with the sun shining.

The words my mother spoke to me when she dropped me off four years earlier echoed in my mind. She said, "You won't be back." And I told her I would.

But reading this book, finishing it in the grass in the Bronx, with everyone who had been close to me gone, I knew she was right.

College is a chapter of life that comes to an end, and with it, many things change.

The friends we made, the experiences we had, all become memories.

As I lay there, I realized that I was about to embark on a new journey, one that would be filled with unknowns and challenges.

This book, in a way, served as a reminder of the past and a sign of the future.

It made me reflect on all that I had accomplished and all that I still had to do.

And as the sun continued to shine, I knew that I was ready to face whatever came next.

Every culture has its southerners. They are the ones who work as little as possible, choosing instead to dance, drink, sing, brawl, and even kill their unfaithful spouses. They have lively gestures, lustrous eyes, colorful garments, and fancifully decorated vehicles. They possess a wonderful sense of rhythm and charm, charm, charm. Unambitious? No, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, and uninhibited. They are never on time and are conspicuously poorer, or so the northerners say. Despite their poverty and squalor, they lead enviable lives, envied by the work-driven, sensually inhibited, and less corruptly governed northerners. The northerners claim to be superior, clearly superior. They don't shirk their duties or tell lies as a matter of course. They work hard, are punctual, and keep reliable accounts. They caution themselves, knowing they are part of a superior culture: they mustn't let themselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, or outback. For if they start dancing on tables, fanning themselves, feeling sleepy when they pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, or making love whenever they feel like it, then they know. The south has got them.

He wanted opulent solitude. His dark vision burned on kingdoms under the sea, on windy castle crags, and on the deep elf kingdoms at the earth's core. He groped for the doorless land of faery, that illimitable haunted country that opened somewhere below a leaf or a stone. And no birds sing.

Warning: This is lush writing. It's like blown roses, crushed on the sidewalk, releasing their heady scent into the muggy August night. It's unfaithful lovers swooning under the spell of a cheese-yellow moon, as bats flicker overhead. It's a sweaty, post-coital sprawl on a messy bed, and it is deep Southern Gothic. Do not read this book right now if you are really in the mood for Raymond Carver, because it will likely induce nausea and vomiting and the rending of garments or pages. I can go both ways, austere and overblown, but happen to be in the mood these past several months where I am enjoying fat, dense, too-many-words books with my big ol' mugs of tea. I'm also preferring untidiness - the sweet disorder in the dress - the early, conspicuously imperfect works of writers who would later learn to polish away their rough, amateurish edges.

I can understand why this book has fallen out of favor these days. As I mentioned in one of my status updates, it has something in it to offend just about everyone. But, I think it's important to keep in mind that Wolfe was writing both a grand love song (that is also a threnody) to the South, and a satire. At times, it reaches lyrical heights worthy of the poets he so admires, and at times, it plummets into the hilarity and bawdiness of a good limerick. He is pointing a finger from the distance of the North and mocking what he was and, in part, still is (at the time of writing). He is cringing at the indecency and ignorance of his people and his home, too, whilst still loving them all passionately for being his. And for being, let's face it, what the North can never be: overblown, lush, lyrical, drunk with the smell of honeysuckle and jasmine on a hot summer night. Faulknerian. Deeply, unabashedly sensual.

Wolfe, in telling us (indirectly through the voice of Eugene Gant) about his home and his people, catches us at the core of our humanity. For who doesn't love their drunken, monstrous, bombastic lout of a father/grandfather/uncle and their penny-pinching, stubborn, bossy, and ignorant mother/grandma/aunt, despite their flaws? Without which they would not be themselves but some impostor. How many of us have felt the impassable chasm that opens between us and our loved ones when we seek and find something beyond the life they have offered us, which inevitably alienates us from a world and a family who were once our whole existence?

Another title of Wolfe's is 'You Can't Go Home Again,' but in writing 'Look Homeward, Angel' Wolfe has tried to do that, at least in memory. He has reached back through time, raiding his sealed boxes from home, and produced a striking memoir-ish novel of his past.

My impression is that Wolfe wrote 'Look Homeward, Angel' as neither an apology nor a defense of the South. Rather, he presents his messy young life to us whole, as gilded as any art but also vulnerable in its expression. There is much in this book which is disgusting and shameful, and much that is tender and poignant. He knew that when he wrote it. He shows us the wild beauty and grandeur of his place and its people, whilst simultaneously exposing the tragedy and sorrow, the disease, decay, and corruption that exists beneath the surface of all life. That is his gift to himself, for one feels that writing this book must have been a profoundly cathartic experience for him, and to his readers. If you miss the integrity intrinsic to 'Look Homeward, Angel', you miss the whole point of the book, really. Wolfe has paid homage to what he both loves and despises and, in doing so, he reveals the tragicomedy of human existence. The love and hate exist side by side and cannot do without each other.

Having implied now that the book has a universality that throws a net across all human existence, I have to backtrack a bit. I read and understood this book, as a Southerner. I moved to Australia fifteen years ago, but my roots are the American South. My people, for generations back, are made up almost entirely of European immigrants who settled in Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas, starting in the 17th century. They fought in the Civil War, on the Confederate side. I don't know how people who aren't marinated in those particular juices make sense of this book at all, and I would not blame them if they couldn't.

I've often wondered that about Faulkner, too, though. Clearly, people around the world read Faulkner, but I assume they are missing some of the deeper chords, just as I suspect I miss things when I read books from other countries, especially in translation. Because the South is its own country, in the heart of its people born and bred there, and holds on to its own beliefs and customs, passing them down from generation to generation, even while all things change around it. As a woman who grew up in Texas but has never voted for a Republican, I can tell you that it is perfectly possible to simultaneously love and loathe the land that nourished you. I felt a deep simpatico with Wolfe's experience.

'Look Homeward, Angel' is lush and ascetic, harsh and generous, brimming with joy and screaming with rage and existential terror. It's a great book. I loved it. And some of it, I hated, too. I am perfectly comfortable with that and feel that it makes for an outstanding reading experience. The writing is exceptional, and I was reminded not only of Faulkner, whom I've mentioned, but also Milton and Shakespeare, and Spencer and Coleridge, all of whom are much admired by our narrator and Wolfe's alter ego, Eugene. But the book reminded me, too, of Joyce's 'Ulysses'. If one could use Ulysses, as Joyce hoped, to recreate Dublin, then one could use 'Look Homeward, Angel' to recreate a certain small city in North Carolina, at a certain point in time. The lyrical flights, the soliloquies, and the rhapsodic pleasures and pains, as they are spilled across the page, also made me think of 'Ulysses' repeatedly whilst reading.

I don't doubt that I have no hope of defending Wolfe against the stones thrown at his corpse by modern readers, for the anachronistic racism, sexism, and every other bad -ism you can think of, in this book. But I will leave this quote from the book, that he may speak for himself. The book must be read and understood as a whole, in the way that he intended it, or it ought not to be read at all. Which I think would be a great shame because it's magnificent.

His feeling for the South was not so much historic as it was of the core and desire of dark romanticism - that unlimited and inexplicable drunkenness, the magnetism of some men's blood that takes them into the heart of the heat, and beyond that, into the polar and emerald cold of the South as swiftly as it took the heart of that incomparable romanticist who wrote \\"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,\\" beyond which there is nothing. And this desire of his was unquestionably enhanced by all he had read and visioned, by the romantic halo that his school history cast over the section, by the whole fantastic distortion of that period where people were said to live in mansions, and slavery was a benevolent institution, conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn largesses of the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his happy dependents, where all women were pure, gentle, and beautiful, all men chivalrous and brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger, death-mocking cavaliers.

Years later, when he could no longer think of the barren spiritual wilderness, the hostile and murderous entrenchment against all new life - when their cheap mythology, their legend of the charm of their manner, the aristocratic culture of their lives, the quaint sweetness of their drawl, made him writhe - when he could think of no return to their life and its swarming superstition without weariness and horror, so great was his fear of the legend, his fear of their antagonism, that he still pretended the most fanatic devotion to them, excusing his Northern residence on grounds of necessity rather than desire.

***

* What is the American South? It has come to my attention recently that there is some confusion about what states make up the \\"South\\" and the \\"Deep South,\\" or \\"Dixie,\\" terms which are culturally more significant than mere geography would explain. It's probably helpful to understand some of this before reading Look Homeward, Angel, because the book is so deeply Southern and reflects the codes and myths by which Southerners live.

The Confederate States of America (CSA or C.S.), commonly referred to as the Confederacy and the South was an unrecognized country in North America that existed from 1861 to 1865. The Confederacy was originally formed by seven secessionist slave-holding states - South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas - in the Lower South region of the United States, whose economy was heavily dependent upon agriculture, particularly cotton, and a plantation system that relied upon the labor of African-American slaves.

Each state declared its secession from the United States, which became known as the Union during the ensuing civil war, following the November 1860 election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Before Lincoln took office in March, a new Confederate government was established in February 1861, which was considered illegal by the government of the United States. States volunteered militia units and the new government hastened to form its own Confederate States Army from scratch practically overnight. After the American Civil War began in April, four slave states of the Upper South - Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina - also declared their secession and joined the Confederacy. The Confederacy later accepted Missouri and Kentucky as members, although neither officially declared secession nor were they ever largely controlled by Confederate forces; Confederate shadow governments attempted to control the two states but were later exiled from them.

Though often used in history books to refer to the seven states that originally formed the Confederacy, the term \\"Deep South\\" did not come into general usage until long after the Civil War ended. Up until that time, \\"Lower South\\" was the primary designation for those states. When \\"Deep South\\" first began to gain mainstream currency in print in the middle of the 20th century, it applied to the states and areas of Georgia, southern Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, north Louisiana, and East Texas, all historic areas of cotton plantations and slavery. This was the part of the South many considered the most \\"Southern.\\"

Later, the general definition expanded to include all of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and often taking in bordering areas of East Texas and North Florida. In its broadest application today, the Deep South is considered to be \\"an area roughly coextensive with the old cotton belt from eastern North Carolina through South Carolina west into East Texas, with extensions north and south along the Mississippi.\\"

Wolfe astounds me with his writing on every page.

His words seem to dance off the paper, creating vivid images and emotions that grip me from the very first sentence.

Whether he is describing a beautiful landscape or delving into the depths of a character's psyche, Wolfe's writing is always engaging and thought-provoking.

He has a unique ability to bring his stories to life, making me feel as if I am right there in the middle of the action.

Each page is a new adventure, filled with surprises and revelations that keep me turning the pages long into the night.

I am constantly amazed by his talent and look forward to reading more of his work in the future.

Why did I choose to read this book? Well, when I was approximately sixteen years old, I read “You Can’t Go Home Again” and was deeply impressed by Wolfe’s flamboyant prose. That’s why I decided to pick up this one. However, almost immediately after starting, I regretted my decision. Nevertheless, I persevered and managed to get through the entire thing.

The most challenging aspect was the blatant racism and sexism present in the book. Given that it was written by a Southern white man in the 1920s, it is somewhat understandable. In this autobiographical novel, he was描绘 the environment in which he lived and the way he perceived it. But it truly clashes with modern sensibilities.

To be fair, at times his writing is indeed beautiful, rich, and astonishing. However, most of the time, it just feels overly elaborate. His sentences, burdened with numerous adjectives, can seem overcrowded. Therefore, I cannot recommend this book to anyone else, despite the fact that there are about a dozen pages that are truly outstanding. It simply wasn't sufficient for me. Perhaps books like this are not meant to be read outside of their specific historical context.