I've been contemplating reading a William Faulkner book for years. His works constantly grace the lists of "best books of all time" and "books you should read before you die". However, whenever I'm in the mood for a classic or something "literary", I always end up choosing other authors over him, even those with extremely long and hefty tomes. Deep down, I think I always knew that Faulkner just wasn't my cup of tea.

The first issue lies in my lack of enthusiasm for stream of consciousness narratives. To be honest, I rarely find myself enjoying this style. I don't mind putting in the effort if a book is challenging, but this particular style of narration makes it difficult for me, personally, to get into the rhythm of the story. And Faulkner takes it to an entirely new level. He throws us into scenes and situations without any prior explanation. I truly felt as if Faulkner deliberately wanted to confuse his readers about the characters and ideas that could have been presented in a much more accessible manner. It seemed like confusion for the sake of confusion.
To be frank, I can't think of anything more tedious than having to endure every single thought, feeling, and instinct that crosses the human mind. I have my own mind that bombards me with randomness; I don't need to experience it from someone else's perspective. I desire an author to organize the language into a structure that is interesting, engaging, and thought-provoking. And for me, stream of consciousness rarely achieves any of these qualities.
But that's just my personal taste when it comes to the style. If we try to step back and look at the novel as a whole, I have to admit that I didn't enjoy the story. I also don't tend to enjoy books that have more than two or three perspectives, and this one had a whopping fifteen! In less than three hundred pages!
The plot revolves around the Bundren family after the death of their matriarch, Addie. Fifteen different perspectives are used to tell the story of the family's journey to Jefferson, where Addie is to be laid to rest. Hauling a wagon with Addie's decomposing body, the Bundren family embarks on a nine-day journey filled with frequent hunger and discomfort.
Faulkner does include important themes in his work, such as religion, poverty, and identity in the Southern United States. However, I still believe that other authors have tackled these themes in a more palatable way. I would much rather pick up a Steinbeck novel any day.
As one reviewer aptly put it about Faulkner's style, and I couldn't agree more: "It is easy to be confusing. It is easy to write something beautiful and understandable for yourself. It's hard to write universal words which we can all connect." So very true indeed.

Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Youtube

Unsettling, vivid, and gripping, this story presents a family with far more secrets than love. Each member is starkly different from the others, and they suffer the revenge of their wife/mother when they have to carry her rotting dead body for nine days across rural Mississippi to be buried. The trip reveals all their sins and pathologies.

The quotes in the story are profound and thought-provoking. For example, "It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end." and "My father said that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead." These words give a unique perspective on life and death.

The story also pulls back the curtain on traditional rural life, showing marriages that are desperate, shallow, and loveless, mothers who want to kill their babies, religious folk who lust and corrupt, men who lie and exploit, and school teachers who loathe children.

William Faulkner's writing is not only superb but also unique. It captures a culture and a way of life that reminds the reader of their grandparents in the deep south. At the same time, it reveals meaningful insights into the human condition, such as hypocrisy, madness, selfishness, and lust.

The other memorable quotes in the story, such as "Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit." and "Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way." add to the depth and richness of the story.

Overall, this is a story that will stay with you long after you finish reading it. It is a powerful indictment of a society that is rotten to the core and a celebration of the human spirit's ability to endure in the face of adversity.

Faulkner is indeed a brilliant writer. This work showcases amazing characterizations, with the language being truly on point. I fully recognize the brilliance of this piece. However, despite being impressed, I didn't like this story at all. Oh my lord! I almost gave up on it. I only awarded it 2 stars because of the author's brilliance.

This story is told from the perspectives of many characters, similar to how many TV shows present multiple viewpoints. I have to admit that I had great difficulty following the plot. I couldn't keep up, and there didn't seem to be much of a story. It mainly focuses on a character study of the reactions to the death of a family member. In fact, I skipped several chapters to get to the end.

This was simply not the book for me. While I can appreciate the genius of the work, I didn't enjoy the story. I haven't disliked a story this much in a long time. Wow! Also, I have a hard time with the southern accent. Growing up around it, it really bothers me. So, I'm moving on. I hope others can enjoy this, but I can't really recommend it.

A significant novel that once again shows that pleasure and value do not coincide. There are undoubtedly valuable books that are read without much pleasure. As for the bad ones that are read with delight, there is no need to talk about them...

To be frank, at the first reading, I didn't understand the novel. I read it at the urging of a friend (also at his urging, I read "The Sound and the Fury", then "As I Lay Dying", and then "Light in August"), but none of these books awakened in me the feeling that I had traversed the novels of a significant prose writer. Now I realize that I wasn't prepared for reading Faulkner. The monologues in "As I Lay Dying", often incoherent and in an ungrammatical language, require a patient reading, and patience was precisely what I lacked.

The action doesn't pose problems, it is linear, the 59 narrative "voices" follow the chronological thread: a woman, Addie Bundren, is about to die, and her son, Cash, who is a carpenter, builds her coffin. From the yard, the sound of the saw, the rasp, the blows of the hammer are heard. Jewell is dissatisfied, he would like more discretion. In the house, Addie's daughter, Dewey Dell, fans her with a fan. Before dying, the woman looks out the window and asks Cash to show her the coffin. Everything is strange and, at the same time, natural in a world of poor farmers, accustomed to death. The end of a person is inscribed in the series of natural events, of the rains that make the rivers overflow and the bridges be destroyed.

Addie has asked her husband, Anse, to be buried in the cemetery in Jefferson, Mississippi, next to her father. In a grotesque procession and with great delay, the family fulfills her wish. However, no member of the family seems normal. Vardaman, the youngest son, is a bit simple-minded and believes that his mother has turned into a fish, Anse is more concerned about getting false teeth than about the burial, Jewell is an angry individual, angry at everyone, Dewey Dell is thinking about an abortion, and Darl Bundren, in his 19 monologues, proves to be a visionary and a lunatic who ends up in the mental asylum.

In Darl's mind, the event takes on apocalyptic tones: the air smells of putrefaction, the sky is dark, crows gather menacingly above the house: "The vultures hang motionless in the air in widening circles, the flow of the clouds creating the impression that, in fact, they are moving in the opposite direction". It is he again who says: "The light has become the color of ashes: in the eyes, pale red, in the nose, putrid, it smells of lightning".

Paradoxically, the 59 interior monologues (one belongs to the deceased), often confused, become ironic in their primitive monotony and are sometimes remarkable for a shocking lyricism: "When I reach the spring and get down and tie the horses, the sun has just escaped... like a overturned cinder sifter there, up" (Peabody). Or: "And now she [Addie Bundren] is going so far away that I can no longer catch her... Then she wasn't and she was and now she is, yes she is no longer" (Vardaman).

Tull is not without a certain involuntary humor: "Sometimes, a man sits and thinks about that. True, not very often. Which is a good thing. Because the Lord left him on earth to do and not to waste too much time with thinking, because his mind is like a machine wheel: it doesn't hold if you keep working it... I said it and I say it again and again, that's always been the problem with Darl: he thinks too much".

William Faulkner has created a series of characters dominated by instinct, impulsive, inclined towards violence and hasty gestures. They cannot be easily forgotten...

I am truly experiencing a profound sense of inadequacy when it comes to the task of reviewing this book. It is merely the second work by Faulkner that I have delved into. While I did take pleasure in reading Absalom, Absalom, it did not manage to completely astonish me in the same manner as this particular one has.

I had anticipated encountering the run-on sentences and the outright dismissal of periods that I had found in the first book. However, to my surprise, I discovered short little chapters, and voices that spoke in terse sentences, which only served to hint at the deeper layers that lay beneath.

Note: The remainder of this review has been removed in accordance with the recent alterations in Goodreads' policy and enforcement. You can peruse the reasons behind my decision here.

In the interim, you are able to read the entire review at Smorgasbook.

Without a second thought, 5 stars! This book was written by Faulkner in just 6 weeks while he was working as a night watchman in a factory. For his time, it was an innovative work as for the first time we see separate chapters titled with the name of the subject from whose perspective we see the story. The different focus on the same event, along with the alternation from first to third person and back again without visible lines, develops the story and portrays each protagonist perfectly. I don't think anyone can claim to have loved the story, but the technique, the focused descriptions, and the underlying humor are enough to make one believe, closing the book, that they have read a diamond!

It is unreservedly recommended....for literary reasons....

Sì, viaggiare…

“Mi ricordo quando ero giovane credevo che la morte fosse un fenomeno del corpo; ora so che è soltanto una funzione della mente - della mente, dico, di chi subisce il lutto. I nichilisti dicono che è la fine; i fondamentalisti, il principio; mentre in realtà non è altro che un affittuario o una famiglia che se ne va da un appartamento o da una città.”

Le parole di Peabody, il dottore, una delle quindici voci narranti di questo romanzo corale, lette a ritroso, sembrano dare la chiave di lettura del tutto. It's like a long river of thoughts flowing continuously, and an unbroken series of still images that the reader takes leave of when putting down this classic of American literature. It had such a profound impact on young intellectuals growing up with resistance and books, across the ocean, in our land. And indeed, the land is the absolute protagonist of the narration. It's like a stepmother who turns against you throughout your life and slaps you in times of need. The mother died while watching her Cash, one of the five children, busy building her coffin. The poor wooden planks with impeccable geometry, a delicate game of level and square. The mother expressed the desire to return to Jefferson after death. The family sets off, but the downpour has swollen the river and the bridges have collapsed. The oxen harnessed to the miserable cart search in vain for the ford.

La morte viaggia con loro. It is inside the coffin, in the body close to putrefaction and attracting vultures. It is in the acceptance of an ungrateful destiny for each member of this disintegrated family nucleus. It is in the very fragmentation of the self of Darl, the crazy second son, the most quoted voice among the many, and constantly contrasted by the completely infantile delirium of the youngest of them, Vardaman.

La mamma è un pesce. La mamma è arrivata. Il viaggio è stato in fondo come la morte “un affittuario o una famiglia che se ne va da un appartamento o da una città.” to return as if nothing had happened. Everyone be quiet, Pa will take care of it.

Da leggere, perché è il vertice dello stile, è l’essenza del narrato, è mimesi assoluta.

Take life as it comes… Take death as it comes…

The quilt is drawn up to her chin, even though it is hot, with only her two hands and her face outside. She is propped on the pillow, her head raised so she can see out the window, and we can hear him every time he takes up the adze or the saw. If we were deaf, we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him. Her face is wasted away, so that the bones draw just under the skin in white lines. Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her.

She is dying; she lies still… But everything around her is in motion, all things are on the move, the world is spinning. The narration consists of the character’s fragmentary thoughts, feverish mental impressions as if painted with the bold strokes of a brush by the intrepid and furious impressionist…

\\n  I had a nightmare once I thought I was awake but I couldn’t see and couldn’t feel I couldn’t feel the bed under me and I couldn’t think what I was I couldn’t think of my name I couldn’t even think I am a girl I couldn’t even think I nor even think I want to wake up nor remember what was opposite to awake so I could do that I knew that something was passing but I couldn’t even think of time then all of a sudden I knew that something was it was wind blowing over me it was like the wind came and blew me back from where it was I was not blowing the room and Vardaman asleep and all of them back under me again and going on like a piece of cool silk dragging across my naked legs.\\n

As I Lay Dying is a road book… The road vanishes beneath the wagon as though it were a ribbon and the front axle were a spool, with the back running, tunnelled between the two sets of bobbing mule ears. It is an unimaginable chronicle of the long and calamitous funereal trek. Obstinacy combined with foolishness is a deadly force…

Aside from the fact that the title is taken from a line in "Agamemnon" (which makes it already unbearably cool), this is a breathtaking book. It took me about four chapters to get used to Faulkner's style of writing. The dialects he uses add a unique flavor to the story, making the characters come alive in a vivid way. Each chapter being from another character's perspective allows for a multi-faceted exploration of the events and themes. His way of having no narration, forcing the reader to figure out what is going on from the half-conversations the characters have themselves, is both challenging and rewarding. Once I adjusted to this style, I was completely floored. This is a beautiful, heart-rending book that delves deep into the human condition. It also seems to be a story which is honest and completely unembellished. The characters are presented as they are, warts and all. Even if they're unlikable at first or even banal, their flaws and imperfections make them more real and relatable. The honesty is refreshing and makes the book all the more powerful. After reading this, I've become convinced that there are two kinds of people in the world; those who like Faulkner, and those who don't.

Edit: After reading this book for the second time, I'm more convinced than ever of its power and genius. Faulkner's writing is like a masterclass in storytelling. His ability to create complex characters and weave a captivating narrative is truly remarkable. This is a book that I will continue to return to again and again, as it has the power to move and inspire me with each reading. Fucking Faulkner! This is a book necessary for life.

Elegia di un mondo primitivo e oscuro

It is difficult to formulate a synthetic judgment on a work that ultimately cannot even be evaluated with the criteria of a novel, considering that the actual "plot" is little more than a thin thread that can be described in a couple of sentences.

It consists of just a few scenes that represent the odyssey of the Burden family as stations of a secular (albeit there are numerous biblical references) via crucis: the agony, the journey, the river, the barn… However, the hieratic staticity of the narrative is accompanied by an extraordinary dynamics of the gazes that continuously bounce from one protagonist to another, creating a virtuosic ensemble constituted by the changing and kaleidoscopic mutation of perspective.

In this way, the points of view are consolidated in the course of the book, which are above all characters and existences, from the concrete Cash to the elusive and unbalanced Darl, from the sanguine Jewel to the naive Vardaman to the fragile Dewey Dell, all concentrated in her personal drama.

These are the five siblings who accompany their mother in a last exhausting journey, the fulcrum that is decomposing like the ties between the members of the family, while the father, dull and stubborn, is reserved a passive and resigned role that, although without prejudicing his authority (after all, it is still a family with the patriarchal values of a rural culture…), seems to attribute to his obtuse influence a good part of the misfortunes that loom over the heads of the Burdens like the omnipresent vultures that circle in the sky.

Once you manage to get past the initial impression of ungainly oddness and wild strangeness that assaults you from every direction, you can begin to perceive the deeper weirdness that lies beyond.

The story, which has a very strong and clear linear narrative, is wonderfully stupid. A backcountry family in Mississippi in the 1920s has their dear mama Addie Bundren pass away, and the lazy-ass daddy thinks he has to carry out her rather unreasonable dying wish of being buried with her own kin 40 miles away in Jefferson. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that it's the height of summer, there have just been bad rains and a flood, and the bridges over the river are down. Nevertheless, the whole group, consisting of four sons, one daughter, one daddy, two mules, and one horse, sets off to do the right thing. To say they encounter obstacles would be an understatement. One such obstacle is that before long, Addie starts to decompose, which many passing strangers take exception to.

So it's kind of a comic tale, but it isn't told comically. No sir. No ma'am.

The guides will say the same thing about this short but dense-like-a-black-hole novel: "As I Lay Dying is written as a series of stream-of-consciousness monologues, in which the characters' thoughts are presented in all their uncensored chaos, without the organizing presence of an objective narrator." That's from the online Spark Notes. Fair enough, except that it's just completely not true. All the short chapters are headed up with a character name, and it kind of naturally seems as if that character is narrating. However, a) only occasionally could you call anything in this book stream of consciousness, and even then it's nothing at all like our old beloved friends Virginia Woolf or James Joyce because these interior monologues come at you in perfectly formed and mostly graceful sentences; and b) The chapters obey no consistent rules or they change the rules all the time, which is the same thing, so that in the middle of a paragraph, it is suddenly the author's omniscient voice popping up.

And another thing - what Faulkner does all the time is bend the credibility of the characters' voices until they break.

Here are two examples of purely natural monologue: "Because be durn if there ain't something about a durn fellow like Anse that seems to make a man have to help him, even when he knows he'll be wanting to kick himself the next minute." And "Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it."

But here's an example of Faulkner's own voice breaking in. The narrator here is Vardaman, aged around ten: "I can cry quiet now, feeling and hearing my tears. It is dark. I can hear wood, silence. I know them. But not living sounds, not even him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity into an unrelated scattering of components." The last sentence is not Vardaman. It's Faulkner.

Here's the daughter Dewey Dell – her usual mode is like this: "About his head the print of his hat sweated into his hair. His shirt is blotched with sweat. He has not washed his hands and arms." But then: "The cow breathes upon my hips and back, her breath warm, sweet, stertorous, moaning." (even my spellcheck does not know stertorous, much less an uneducated 17-year-old country girl. So what is Faulkner doing here? Messing with us readers, I think.)

And now, here's Darl, one of the sons. Now, as this family is the purely uneducated rural poor, how is it that one of their sons (the one who narrates about half of the book) thinks in this lushly textured poetic and highly intellectual language?

"He looks up at the gaunt face framed by the window in the twilight. It is a composite picture of all time since he was a child…. For a while, still, she looks down at him from the composite picture, neither with censure nor approbation. … Then she flings herself across Addie Bundren's knees, clutching her, shaking her with the furious strength of the young before sprawling suddenly across the handful of rotten bones that Addie Bundren left, jarring the whole bed into a chattering sibilance of mattress shucks, her arms outflung and the fan in one hand still beating with expiring breath into the quilt. She looks down at the face. It is like a casting of fading bronze upon the pillow, the hands alone still with any semblance of life: a curled, gnarled inertness; a spent yet alert quality from which weariness, exhaustion, travail has not yet departed, as though they doubted even yet the actuality of rest, guarding with horned and penurious alertness the cessation which they know cannot last."

Check out these examples of Darl's vocabulary: "We go on with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and it." "How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant." "A cubistic bug." "Starkly re-accruent."

Don't sound like no poor white trash I ever came across, don't know about you. Sounds more like Marcel damn Proust than Hank Williams. Shoot, sounds more like this William Faulkner hisself talkin. Seems he didn't want to write no normal book but one of them whatchacallem modernist efforts but like he just couldn't help himself and had to get that there poetic jawbreakin stuff in there someways and so turned one of his ole country boys into some kinda god damn genius.

It doesn't really work, a few pages of Darl and my suspension of disbelief came crashing down and really bruised my left shoulder, I can still feel it now.

And there's another thing about old Darl. He frequently launches off into Deep Space, like this: "I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not."

I had to look round and ask here, who let Samuel Beckett in here?

Even so, and also taking into consideration a couple of apparent plot holes in the rather-too-neat O Henryish ending (how did bumbling Anse fix up all that in such a short space of time?), I still loved the bravery and confidence of this novel. It ramified my brain, and there is hardly any higher praise. It was great.

4.5 stars

Where should one begin with a literary masterpiece that is as concise as the space between two thoughts and as profound as the thoughts themselves? This is precisely one of Faulkner's genuine masterpieces: a bizarre road trip involving a decomposing corpse, narrated through the voices of the highly dysfunctional and at times insane family members. It is like Ulysses set in the Southern United States or a Georgian version of The Grapes of Wrath (Faulkner having been inspired by the former and surely influencing the latter). The writing is among the most powerful that Faulkner ever created:

...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

The words seem to jump off the page, simultaneously drawing you into the inner beauty of their language and repelling you with the violence he portrays. It is as visceral as a slaughterhouse (complete with awls piercing caskets) and yet more optimistic than this generation's The Walking Dead.

“I enter the hall, hearing the voices before I reach the door. Tilting a little down the hill, as our house does, a breeze draws through the hall all the time, upslanting. A feather dropped near the front door will rise and brush along the ceiling, slanting backward, until it reaches the down-turning current at the back door: so with voices. As you enter the hall, they sound as though they were speaking out of the air about your head.”

Isn't it amazing? And it feels so effortless as prose. It is one of the greatest American novels ever written and will remain as moving and relevant centuries from now, as it speaks eternal truth in the American vernacular. It is an absolute must-read.