Well, Faulkner has truly outdone himself once again. He has left me completely at a loss for words, and more importantly, at a loss for thoughts about this book. The Bundren family and their "quest" - a most unromantic one at that - to bury their mother Addie is a complex and deeply affecting tale.

There are indeed some comic moments scattered throughout the story, but for me, they are overshadowed by the overwhelming pathos, ignorance, and near tragedy. I found myself rarely smiling, and when I did, it was only with a sense of ruefulness.

The characters in this book are all so vividly drawn. Anse, the father, with no capacity beyond his desire for new teeth. Darl, who is clearly disturbed. Cash, who is damaged. Jewel, who is different. Vardaman, the child. And Dewey Dell, the hopeless daughter. Addie, it seems, left them all behind somewhat gratefully, or so I suspect.

As Addie recalls her father's words, "the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time." Now, that's a philosophy that doesn't exactly bring joy to one's days! Poor Addie. And then she marries Anse.

Addie's thoughts on motherhood, fear, pride, sin, love, and language are all so profound. Through her mind, Faulkner offers a scathing commentary on language. He shows us that words can sometimes be inadequate to express the true depth of our experiences.

Next time, I will make an effort to read this book in as close to one sitting as possible. I did read the last half at one time, and that did enhance the power of the experience. I find it difficult to rate this book, partly because of the characters. There is so much to dislike about these people, but that is a testament to the power and method of Faulkner's writing. He gives us a brutally honest portrayal of harsh people living in a harsh land, with little to no apparent positive emotion left in their lives. However, there are also some glimmers of hope in a couple of them. I wonder if those glimmers ever lasted, or if they simply petered out.

Well, in the process of writing this review, I've come to a decision - I rate this book a 5. It is a powerful and thought-provoking work that will stay with me for a long time.

The second book of Faulkner that I have read and once again, as I finished it, I felt a deep claustrophobia for all the characters. It is one of the few books that always bring me to this state, since a basic theme of Faulkner is the family tragedies and the human passions that constantly cover human existence (and coexistence). Faulkner's writing style is extremely particular, especially if you haven't read the additional information at the end for each person. If you don't read them, you gradually gain access to the story and the characters. For example, Vardaman says around the middle that Darl, Cash, and Jewel are his brothers. I don't know what the author's real intention was, whether it was accidental or whether he didn't know how the story would go (something I surely don't believe), but this element I like very much.

Just like in "The Sound and the Fury", what made me love Faulkner's writing was the descriptions of events from different perspectives. The ability to write entire chapters with a different tone depending on the protagonist, to maintain the rhythm of the era according to the experiences and age/psychological composition of the person and at the same time develop a story requires mastery and talent, something that exists in huge quantity in the person of Faulkner. Fantastic, difficult, complex, and multi-layered.

Only for demanding readers, but not only for the "elite". It is not surreal or difficult conceptually. On the contrary, it is extremely realistic and most of the ideas are "readable" in the first year. The difficulty comes with the writing which requires familiarity. Patience is essential and a second reading is inevitable for someone to understand the characters in depth. There must be a desire.

Death is a complex and often misunderstood phenomenon. It is not just the end of a physical life but also has a profound impact on the minds and emotions of those left behind. As the author states, "Death brings out the best and the worst in the families." It can cause people to come together in support or tear them apart in grief and conflict.

The story of Addie Bundren is a prime example of this. Her death sets off a chain of events that forces her family to face their own flaws and secrets. The journey to bury her is filled with obstacles and hardships, both physical and emotional. The family members must confront their own mortality and the meaning of life as they deal with the loss of their mother.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story is the way in which Faulkner uses multiple narrators to tell the tale. Each character has their own perspective on Addie's life and death, and their stories intersect and overlap in unexpected ways. This creates a rich and complex tapestry of human experience that is both moving and thought-provoking.

In conclusion, "As I Lay Dying" is a powerful and poignant exploration of death, family, and the human condition. It is a book that will stay with you long after you have turned the last page.

This book is about Hicks.

Hicks is a character who decides to go to town.

The story follows Hicks as he makes his way to the town.

Along the way, Hicks encounters various people and experiences different situations.

He might meet friendly locals who offer him help or advice.

Or perhaps he comes across some challenges that he has to overcome.

In the town, Hicks explores the different streets and buildings.

He might visit the local shops, the market, or the tavern.

As he spends time in the town, Hicks learns more about the place and its people.

He might discover some secrets or mysteries that the town holds.

The book takes the reader on a journey with Hicks, allowing them to experience the excitement and adventure of going to town.

It shows how Hicks grows and changes as a result of his experiences in the town.

Overall, this book is an engaging and entertaining read that will keep readers hooked from start to finish.

About a year ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a job that involved working for some sociologists conducting research on Mexican immigrants in the US.

My main responsibility was to transcribe their recorded interviews, which I actually found quite enjoyable. It was like listening to a plethora of life stories, some humorous, some heartbreaking, and often a combination of both. The task was engaging, and the pay was decent. However, like any job, it had its initial challenges.

I soon realized how much communication can vary from spoken to written. The mispronunciations, shortened structures, and defied grammar that we often use in speech are part of the beauty of how language evolves. But for me, it was initially puzzling to figure out how to make some sentences legible for the researchers who would later read them and to determine the most appropriate punctuation marks. This was when I truly understood the importance of proper transcription.

I believe the people I worked for were relatively satisfied with my work, and I was grateful for the experience as it helped me appreciate some of the significance that lies within language itself. Language is our means of expressing things, bringing ideas into a common understanding, and telling stories, events, and messages that can become masterpieces of literature.

Now, when it comes to talking about literature, it's like trying to pour all the water of the sea into a sand pit, as St. Augustine metaphorically described the Mystery of the Trinity. One of the literary styles that I particularly like is what's known as "stream of consciousness." This device vividly depicts the human mind and the way it constructs sentences, which can be long or short, rambling or brilliant aphorisms based on experience. We can see this in Proust's subtle and delicate prose, Joyce's raging and cunning writing, Woolf's rhythmical and alluring style, and Faulkner's playful use of words and sentences.

Faulkner, in works like "As I Lay Dying," takes this to another level. The novel is narrated by multiple characters, each with their own unique voice and perspective, creating a chaotic yet captivating stream of consciousness. It can be a challenging read at first, but once you get accustomed to it, it truly pays off. The sentences break free from traditional grammatical protocols and lead the reader through the story in their own way. While conventional prose might guide you along the pavement, Faulkner's writing takes you through the gravel. The destination, however, is the same: the intense emotions and complex relationships of the Bundren family.

You may get moments to catch your breath, but eventually, you'll be drawn into the engrossing world of the novel and experience their love, rage, sex, life, family bonds, and solitude vividly. It's such a passionate work that it makes me passionate about literature. Sho, it's a darn masterpiece! Aint it?

As Faulkner wrote, "He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."

Adam doesn't bring these women to work. You won't understand what they mean until you come. You see, their meaning is something else. And they are skinning you for why you understood their meaning that way!

"Gor Be Gor" is a complex narrative of the death of a family's mother, written using the "stream of consciousness" technique. The story is told through fifteen different characters, and it was very difficult for me to understand this narrative style.

The father of the family, under the pretext of fulfilling the mother's will, forces the whole family to emigrate so that the mother can be buried in her hometown. During this journey, the family faces serious challenges, and after several days of separation, one of the family's children is forced to set fire to the mother's coffin, and the family, due to being suspected of arson, takes him to the hospital. The father of the family also falls in love with a woman who has borrowed money from him for the burial of her husband.

In my opinion, anyone who can write a story in this narrative style must be crazy. Also, I don't think a complex narrative like this can be translated except by a translator like Najaf Darya Bandari. The book was difficult. Reading it burned my brain. Like solving a triple integral...

Colossal Faulkner! It's hard to classify this work. Is it unclassifiable, ambitious, or what term should be used?

It is sometimes funny, tragic, and absurd in others. The style is that it is told by multiple protagonists in the first person from their personal experiences. The microhistories of each member of the numerous family that tells the story enrich it in a unique way.

After reading this magnificent novel, many profound questions inevitably arise for a somewhat attentive reader. Where is the limit of madness? When there is a protagonist as great as Darl who has the reputation of being crazy, and yet the rest of the family seemed to me much, much crazier. How is religious fanaticism put into context in such a peculiar rural and southern American society that Faulkner always focuses on?

I think that in this novel, the fantastic imaginary region of Yonakpatawpha appears for the first time, which he then continued to develop in the trilogy of The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, and in all his works, just as the Snopes family debuts and many other signs of connection with Faulkner's work.

I won't go into too much detail. It's fantastic, with well-developed characters, a narration with a more or less rhythm, and small intrigues within the novel. Curiously, what left me the coldest is the center of what is pursued during the story, which is resolved in just a couple of lines, and it surprises you even in that.

Dark reality in prism

When I first read this, over 20 years ago, I was truly astonished. It was my introduction to Faulkner, and in hindsight, its ingenuity is truly remarkable.

We are presented with a series of monologues from various characters surrounding the dying old woman, Addie Bundren. After her passing, the arduous journey to transport her body to Jefferson City, where she wished to be buried, begins.

The transfer of the coffin is almost epic in nature, yet it also has its hilarious moments. There is a complex web of attraction and rejection among the characters, and almost all of them seem to be trapped in their own lives. The events described have both a horrific and a comic aspect. There is blatant stupidity, insensitivity, and meanness, but also fidelity, loyalty, determination, and sacrifice.

What's truly remarkable is that Faulkner refrains from passing moral judgments. The multiperspectivism is masterfully executed, adding dynamism to the story. Each character provides additional information and a different perspective on the dead woman's life and the power relations within the family.

While Faulkner's later novels may have been more layered and ingenious in their own right, none speaks to the reader with the same power as this one does! (3.5 stars)

A special book, fragmented, strange, and grotesque in some aspects. Although it is characteristic of Faulkner (a multi-layered narrative with many narrators), it seemed easier to me than the previous ones I have read. It is ranked among my favorite books along with "Absalom, Absalom!" and I think it was one of the best ways to end my year obliviously.

"When Cash was born, I understood that the word'maternity' was invented by someone who wanted to save face and give them a good name because those who have children do not give a damn whether there is a word for it or not....... He also had a word. Love, he called it. But there came a time when I had become accustomed to words. I knew that this word was like all the other words: a simple framework to fill a void and that when the fullness of time came, you would not need this word."

Right, now I see why so many of my American Goodreads friends love Faulkner.

The characters and setting are weirdly close to what I expected. They are people who could have been caricature rednecks. To quote a recent left article about Ulysses, it's 'a democratic and humanistic novel where the everyday is elevated to the level of epic. It valorises the ordinary, giving minor characters an interior monologue'. This includes characters who are unlikeable and make decisions that don't benefit them. But the descriptions and the metaphors are spectacular and awe-inspiring. The guy really was a great writer.

For example, Above the ceaseless surface they stand—trees, cane, vines—rootless, severed from the earth, spectral above a scene of immense yet circumscribed desolation filled with the voice of the waste and mournful water. Or Cash like sawing the long hot sad yellow days up into planks and nailing them to something. These metaphors bring the story to life.

Though sometimes the metaphors are too densely crowded and become mixed and contradictory. For instance, within a few paragraphs, pa is a steer that's just been killed, and then a steer getting up from the mud. Ardent fans might say this shows the prodigiousness of Faulkner's talent. His words can seem carved out of the land, Biblical, and Classical epic.

There's a rhythm, feel, and atmosphere to the novel that is at the roots of American culture. I can hear Tom Waits in it and the post-apocalyptic scenarios of American preppers. It also helps me understand how white American culture relates to the land and how it maintained its dominance through the canon.

The novel gave me an epiphany about its place in history. It reminded me of how Britain looked down on America in the late 19th to early 20th century. The Bundrens' story might have happened earlier in Britain but not in 1930. The novel is a powerhouse, showing America as an up-and-coming power.

I like the modernist approach where writers give their characters elaborate thoughts, narrative, and speech. However, my favourite chapters were Vardaman's, the small boy's. His stream of consciousness with simplified vocabulary and childish thoughts added a unique charm.

Faulkner's writing also has a curious honesty and elegance. Tull and other characters using italicised 'thoughts' as omniscient narrators is a perfect fit with the modernist approach.

But reading this with English as a second language would be a slog. The dialect and phrasal verbs are difficult to understand, even for native speakers. It's more difficult than Paul Beatty's The Sellout.

It's weird there are no critical editions of Faulkner in the UK. He needs the annotations more than many 20th century writers.

Overall, while I like and admire a lot about this novel, I didn't click with it enough for 5 stars. It sometimes felt too tropey, and I wasn't convinced by a couple of developments near the end. But it's still a great novel, packed with detail and motifs, and I can see why it's studied so much.

(read & reviewed September 2019)

This is the second book I've read by William Faulkner.

My first, Intruder in the Dust, was assigned to me in high school and served as my introduction to both Faulkner and the stream-of-consciousness technique. It wasn't a pleasant experience in either regard.

Now, shortly after grappling with Joyce's Ulysses, regarded as the epitome of stream-of-consciousness literature, I finally read As You Lay Dying, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for an indeterminate amount of time. It's a much easier read than Ulysses, but I'm afraid I found that decades later, I still despise Faulkner with intense passion.

Published in 1930, this is the story of Addie Bundren's final journey with her family to be buried in Jefferson, Mississippi. One of her sons, Cash, starts building her coffin where she can hear the sawing of the planks as she lies dying.

The novel is told through 15 first-person points of view in 59 chapters, a third of which come from one of her sons, Darl. While a bit macabre, it might have worked better with a more conventional style, allowing us to understand Addie and her family and the impact of her death from all those perspectives.

However, I think part of my issue with writers like Joyce and Faulkner is that their techniques often seem like a gimmick. It's all you can notice, standing between the reader and the story, and making it impossible to care about the characters.

The style doesn't seem to fit these simple country folk. Their monologues are often rendered with misspellings, dialect, and random absences of apostrophes, but then Faulkner inserts these articulate, sophisticated sentences that don't match the first-person point of view.

There are also times when we are subjected to that irritating stream of words meant to represent a wandering, meandering mind, with run-on sentences and non sequiturs.

Goodness knows not all great works are easy to read. Chaucer and Shakespeare are not easy, mainly because the English language has changed so much since their time, but also because poetry is more difficult to scan than prose.

For Dante, Homer, and Virgil, I'm willing to make the effort, and I can see how their style and structure work with their content. Once I get used to their styles, I'm enthralled.

With Faulkner's novel, I didn't feel that strong connection. And even though the stories of Homer are centuries old, I often felt for the characters in his works.

I will try Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury someday. It's considered one of the most important novels of the last century, and I imagine it might have something to teach me about modern literature.

I also remember loving his short story, \\"A Rose for Emily.\\" Sometimes, less extreme, earlier works by an author we don't usually like can speak to us, or their extreme techniques work better in a more concise form.

But I can't imagine reading another of Faulkner's novels beyond The Sound and the Fury unless someone can recommend something by him that ordinary readers who are not doctoral candidates in literature can truly enjoy, with a semblance of a plot and characters that don't repel.

Faulkner employs a complex and distinctive method when presenting what is, in essence, a rather concise story. However, the charm lies in the execution. The characters and the atmosphere possess genuine substance, and there is a palpable sense of melancholy and futility that pervades the novel. Just as in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner generates intrigue by withholding information, subverting ordinary literary anticipations and compelling the reader to persevere, closely attending to details to complete the narrative image. This experience frustrates some, but I generally relish it. Nevertheless, there were several occasions in this novel when I felt this tactic was unskillfully implemented (such as simply withholding names for effect), and in those instances, I didn't feel as if I was actively solving a puzzle but rather just waiting for Faulkner to disclose the answer.

By using rotating narrators, Faulkner is able to craft some captivating characters. The pitiful Anse is a central figure and was the most outstanding for me. Nevertheless, there are certain aspects of some of the other characters that were a bit peculiar and didn't entirely make sense (I'm still not certain I fully understood what was going on with Darl). There is also a great deal of inconsistency in the voices of the characters, which seem to shift随意 between coarse dialect and verbose prose. While I believe that Faulkner had a vision and深思熟虑 about these voices, the effect of the inconsistency is to muddle the clarity of the characters and obscure whatever his intention might have been.

I have mentioned several negative points in this review, but my overall impression of this book is extremely positive. As I Lay Dying is a powerful and moving work. The execution is slightly imperfect, but it is bold, and there are more than sufficient truly brilliant passages to compensate for any deficiencies.