This book was a truly arduous yet highly rewarding read. One of the significant rewards is that I can now begin to fathom what everyone means when they label another novel as “Faulknerian”. I had a taste of it from the short stories assigned in a college lit class, and even with that small exposure, I felt the urge to use Cliff Notes to help me understand his rich Southern Gothic concoction. However, I am now more receptive to appreciating a tale that is chock full of allusions, convoluted motivations, and revelations regarding the sins of racism, class struggle, and the binding ties of family. I am in awe of how a sentence can be like stepping onto thin ice, filled with the fear of drowning in the rivers of the past and future. These sentences can bind you like quicksand, open a door to the Garden of Eden or Armageddon, or function like a magic loom, weaving a tapestry from threads drawn from numerous sources.

Very early on in the narrative, the reader is presented with the skeleton of the saga of the Sutpen family, which is rife with mysterious tragedies. The reader's quest throughout the rest of the book is to achieve some degree of understanding of what and why these events occurred. Your guide on this journey is a somewhat enigmatic character named Quentin, who comes from a point in time 60 plus years later. At first, he has little interest in the story, but as he discovers his grandfather's involvement with the Sutpen patriarch and gradually obtains different versions and pieces of the puzzle from several key characters associated with the tale, he becomes hooked on the mysteries.

A man named Thomas Sutpen arrives in a rural Mississippi town in the 1830s with a wagon full of “wild” slaves. Somehow, he manages to obtain 100 square miles of land from some Indians and spends several years in isolation building a mansion. Through marriage with a local woman and some credit gained from a businessman, he establishes a family and a successful plantation. When his son Henry is at college in nearby Oxford, he brings an aristocratic friend named Charles Bon home for the holidays. The mother has her sights set on him marrying the daughter, Judith. Sutpen opposes the marriage, and a dispute with Henry over this issue leads to Henry running away for several years. The Civil War intervenes. When Henry and Charles return after the war with marriage still in the plans, some sort of dispute leads to Henry killing Charles. Henry's flight as a criminal effectively shatters Sutpen's dream of building a dynasty.

For quite some time, it feels like wading through molasses to get a handle on the truth about Sutpen, who is labeled as an “ogre” or “demon” by some of the story's contributors. Looking back through so much time at a self-made man who revealed so little about himself, much of what we, as readers, receive is projection, speculation, and conflicting judgments from biased narrators. I am so accustomed to narratives in either past or present tense, but I have never experienced a whole book so filled with the subjunctive and pluperfect tenses, so much “should of”, “could of”, “would of” (and plenty of “must have” to boot). It worked a certain magic on me, drawing me into contributing to the storytelling and proving that history and memory are constructs. Even a letter from someone's direct experience can seem imbued with the threads of Shakespearean tragedy, mythic proportions, poetic overlays, and quantum uncertainty, and can push the English language into flights and forms never before imagined. Here, Rosa Coldfield recounts her reactions upon arriving at the scene where Bon has been killed, realizing she had dreams of love for him herself:

How I ran, fled, up the stairs and found no grieving widowed bride but Judith standing before the closed door to that chamber …and if there had been grief or anguish she had put them away… I stopped in running’s midstride again though my body, blind unsentient barrow of deluded clay and breath, still advanced. …That’s what I found. Perhaps it’s what I expected, knew …Perhaps I couldn’t even have wanted more than that, couldn’t have accepted less, who even at nineteen must have known that living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash. Or perhaps it is no lack of courage either: not cowardice which will not face that sickness somewhere at the prime foundation of this factual scheme from which the prisoner soul, miasmal-distillant, wroils ever upward sunward, tugs its tenuous prisoner arteries and veins and prisoning in turn that spark, that dream which, as the globy and complete instant of its freedom mirrors and repeats (repeats? creates, reduces to a fragile evanescent iridescent sphere) all of space and time and massy earth, relicts the seething and anonymous miasmal mass which in all the years of time has taught itself no boon of death but only how to recreate, renew, and dies, is gone, vanished: nothing—but is that true wisdom which can comprehend that there is a might-have-been which is more true than truth, from which the dreamer, waking, says not ‘Did I but dream?’ but rather says, indicts high heaven’s very self with:’Why did I wake since waking I shall never sleep again?’
Once there was—Do you mark how the wisteria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret and attritive progress from mote to mote of obscurity’s myriad components? That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.

It is now abundantly clear to me that no one else can truly be Faulknerian. However, a few pervasive themes that he explored can come together in the work of others (e.g. Cormac McCarthy), which can prompt the application of such a label:
--"The past is never dead. It's not even past" (from “Requiem for a Nun”)
--“The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children” (from Exodus)
--Everything is connected
--The rich are not really any better off than the poor
--A person’s life can be like a myth, and the memories of those who intersect such a life can diverge and yet be as true or real as the events in that life
--There is evil without God and the devil
--Free will may involve accepting fate, but you are likely to have trouble recognizing it
--The burden of slavery and the aristocracy of the South is a difficult path to tread

I had enough of a challenge convincing myself that I should read this book, let alone press it on other readers. However, you may surprise yourself with unexpected pleasures if you take on such a challenge yourself.

This work requires collection, time, and patience from the reader.

However, it is not one of those books that you would want to overcome just to prove your "reading ability." On the contrary, it is a very interesting work, and in my opinion, its greatest value lies in the aesthetic concept and the language that the author used to realize that concept.

I dare to believe that as a renowned and successful writer (the book was first published in 1936, six years after "As I Lay Dying"), Faulkner decided to write a novel that would break all the rules of literature; and I'm not just talking about the plot, because in the first half of the 20th century, it was fashionable to astonish with the plot. (And, by the way, the plot of "Absalom, Absalom!" is very well constructed! Therefore, I recommend not seeking pleasure and not reading the chronology and genealogy of events written at the end of the book until you have read the work.)

In the novel "Absalom, Absalom!", Faulkner breaks not only the rules of the plot but also those of language, dialogue, and character development; I counted five narrators, whom we can call unreliable, because none of them participated in the described events, and it is difficult to understand their relationship with the central characters of the novel.

Faulkner even abandons the traditions of punctuation; it took a little time to get used to his chosen punctuation logic.

Therefore, I highly recommend this book to readers who like to pay attention to details and outstanding works in all senses (not just in form).

P.S. Completely coincidentally, in the past few months, I have read several books that are similar in theme, atmosphere, and, in a sense, style - Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" and Toni Morrison's "Beloved" (to some extent, Morrison's "Sula" could also be included in this group). Both of these writers write about American identity and the wounds (slavery, racism, the Civil War) that have had a huge impact on both American social life and literature.

**Using That Word**

I am certain there are numerous well-meaning individuals who have tried to ban this book or have thought about releasing politically-corrected versions that avoid Faulkner's extensive use of the N word. And there will be many history-minded people who respond that the term is appropriate for the place and time and that nothing derogatory is intended by it. Both views are incorrect. The term is used in a derogatory sense, with the slaves it refers to being repeatedly described using animal imagery, such as dogs or livestock. It occurs much more frequently than I remember from The Sound and the Fury or Sanctuary, the only two other Faulkner books I have read so far. When opening a double spread in the middle of one of Faulkner's multi-page paragraphs, the repeated words appear as visible blots on the page, the double-gs darkening the print color like a stain.

However, it would be wrong to assume that the derogatory attitude was Faulkner's own. It takes a long time for the theme to become clear, but this is a book deeply concerned with race, not just in the casual treatment of colored servants but also in the hypocrisy that makes a beautiful octoroon highly sought after as a mistress in the salons of New Orleans but anathema as a wife. As in many of his other novels, Faulkner is dissecting the myth of the South, this time over a broad canvas from 1817 to 1909, with the Civil War in the middle. He is no sentimentalist looking back on a bygone era. Instead, he shows the shaky foundations on which the chivalrous idyll was built, when a man could reinvent himself through the acquisition of money and land (no matter how) and then marry advantageously to produce heirs, all achieved on the backs of slave labor.

Faulkner's narrative style is extraordinary. On the one hand, it is old-fashioned in the incantatory style of its sonorous language (everyone uses an unusually heightened register, regardless of who is speaking). On the other hand, it is completely modernistic in his treatment of voice and time. For at least the first half of the novel, there is no such thing as simply telling a story; it is only retold, with passing references to events that will only become clear towards the very end of the book. Faulkner filters the story through several narrators in turn, deliberately blurring the identity of the speaker, listener, or person being quoted, as well as the unspoken thoughts of any of them. With each telling, further layers emerge. What initially seemed like a simple tale of an adventurer arriving in town with a wagonload of "wild negroes" (but not that word) and a captive French architect to build the largest house the county had ever seen morphs into a story of love, jealousy, and betrayal, and then again into something much larger and darker that will take the Civil War and forty years of defeat to lay to rest—if that is even possible. The last lines of the novel suggest that a Southerner's feeling for his land is an agony of love and shame that may never be resolved.

This is an extremely difficult book (though not quite as difficult as The Sound and the Fury), dense, repetitive, hypnotic, steeped in ambiguity and allusion. But you never once feel that Faulkner has anything less than perfect control of his material or that his subject matter is not of the utmost moral importance. With overtones of both Genesis and Greek tragedy, this examination of American Original Sin is a true masterpiece.

Miss Rosa Coldfield rambled on circuitously, circling around and around in a convoluted manner. In her memory, she sometimes went backward, before the enemy thrashed her father and destructively demolished the Old South. As she spoke, Quentin watched the dust motes and wondered why she repeated herself endlessly without getting to the point. She constantly told the story of her long-dead sister and Sutpen, repeatedly emphasizing Sutpen's beard as the only thing differentiating him from the wild black men he brought when he came to perhaps destroy the honor of her or his or their families.

So,

She would undoubtedly say things like "It is crucial that this story never dies, so I'll reveal it to you in an obscure code that will take not just the rest of your life but the lives of many academics, funded by the taxes of both us and those who conquered us and tamed the wild men, destroying something precious yet perhaps a bit immoral along the way." And she'd break off, her voice retreating not precisely into silence but into a forced silence, a silence imposed on her and her race by the conquerors. Quentin would say "Yessum," which was as good an answer as any from one of the broken ghosts in this broken land.

The land was broken by conquerors who destroyed the honor of those whose only fault, if it was a fault at all (and who was to decide that question), was to tie wild men to posts and impregnate wild women. Some might say naming the offspring with silly names like Clytemnestra was the most wicked thing and a small justification for the destruction of these once-proud people, now wandering ghost-like through time with no calendar to tell them where they should be.

This brings us back to the point that the reviewer unfortunately forgot since their brain cells began deteriorating early on. By page 48, they had become a brainless, mumbling, mono-celled organism condemned to an endless circle of rambling, barely punctuated, and incomprehensibly-structured prose. The book was like an endless circle of destruction, leaving the reviewer feeling like a ghost in a land not thoroughly enough destroyed by the conquerors.

If FF had asked for recommendations for the Great American Novel Quest, no one, not even a ghost, would have suggested torturing themselves by reading this pretentious and repetitive book. It was to literature what WWE is to sport, with its only claim to fame being the longest grammatically correct sentence in the English language, getting it into the Guinness Book of Records, though this record didn't specify intelligibility. Michael Chabon had created a better one in Telegraph Avenue, making this work even more redundant.

The reviewer abandoned the book at page 92 with a feeling of joyous glee. The 1-star rating was given only because Goodreads didn't have a "Yeuch" rating.

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I feel like I'm supposed to give this a higher rating, and maybe the next time I read it I will.

It was like a dense and thorny thicket, a literary labyrinth that I had to force myself through. I flogged myself with the unwavering conviction that it must be good for me, since it's Faulkner, and Faulkner is widely regarded as being good for us.

And while I still firmly believe that it was beneficial in some way, I can't truthfully claim that I loved it. I read more out of a sense of obligation than a burning desire, which is not typically the most conducive motivation for reading a novel.

Sentence for sentence, it is virtuosic. Truly, it's utterly astonishing. There were moments when I was left breathless, I must confess. What he does with language is simply stunning.

The core story, a family tragedy crafted to epitomize the degradation and fall of the American South, is meticulously examined from multiple angles and retold from various perspectives as the novel unfolds. However, it's so cryptic and complicated that it shut me out.

I guess the problem is that I had a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. The characters are of mythic proportion, speaking in the epic gothic Faulknerian prose. Theirs is a tragedy rife with incest, miscegenation, bone-deep racism, desecration.

The structure is nonlinear and intricate, and it was extremely hard to sustain a committed interest. I stuck with it mainly for the beautiful sentences and managed to glean a sense of the story. Honestly, somewhere toward the middle, I had to resort to reading an online plot summary to string it all together.

One day, when I'm smarter and more intellectually equipped, I'll read it again and perhaps gain a deeper understanding and appreciation.

\\n  O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.\\n

The title of this novel is sourced from the Old Testament of the Bible. The narrative of King David and Absalom involves a son's rebellion against his father and a brother's forcible incest with his sister. Absalom! explores these very themes.

Thomas Sutpen's intense longing to be a great patriarch at the helm of a powerful dynasty has its roots in a humiliating incident during his teenage years. He was turned away at the front door of a plantation owner's "big house" and effectively told by a black servant that someone like him, considered trash, should use the back door.

'I have raised about me sons to bear the burden of mine iniquities and persecutions..that I might rest mine eyes upon my goods and chattels, upon the generations of them and of my descendants increased an hundred fold as my soul goeth from me.'

Faulkner delved deep into the psychological motives behind man's actions, examined the consequences of those actions, and the predicament of his own making. These are vividly revealed in the conflicts that Sutpen experiences in this novel, which is regarded as one of Faulkner's greatest achievements, a masterpiece that portrays the human heart at war with itself.

Themes such as slavery and racism, incest, miscegenation, fratricide, and the failure of the mores and morals of the Antebellum South are all reflected in Sutpen's ambitious plans to fulfill his life's "design."

Thomas Sutpen's story serves as a mirror to the downfall of the Southern plantation culture of the aristocratic old south. He embodies the flawed ideals that the South held so dear, for which they waged war and for which they would rather have died than secede. There are strong allegories between Sutpen, his family, and anyone associated with him, and the Civil War. Just as the family rises and falls, destroying itself and those around them, so too was the war lost, leaving all that it was fought for and against in ruins.

Then there is the irony of Jim Bond's existence and survival.

I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course, it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.

Faulkner was truly prophetic.

Not content with telling a story in a dull linear manner, Faulkner adopted a unique style of circular motion, circumventing and evading, looping back and forth between narrators, from the present to the past and back to the present again. It was effectively cyclical, predestined, karmic - much like the allusion to Absalom in the Bible where the sins of the father are visited upon the sons, "violence begets violence."

By presenting the family saga through four different narrators (Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson, his son Quentin Compson, and Quentin's Harvard roommate Schreve McCannon), where the past is constantly revised in the telling and retelling by people who each interpret the tale differently, Faulkner tantalized the reader with bits of information gradually. The reader would gradually become aware of motivations, events, facts, and the timeline; he would be left to explore, question, and distinguish speculation from 'truth' and form his own understanding of what actually happened.

The looping history is particularly evident in the Henry-Charles-Judith triangle, as well as with Sutpen-Henry-Charles: it's truly captivating. When all the pieces fall into place, one realizes that Absalom! is a work of art.

Faulkner is addictive.

I began reading Faulkner's novels over a decade ago when Oprah's Book Club was promoting The Summer of Faulkner boxset. These were more enjoyable and easier novels to read. So, I was ready for the challenge of Absalom! - it has the reputation of being one of the more difficult works, mainly due to its complex language.

Right from the start, Faulkner is like his own foreign nation with a unique and unrivaled language that some might call "Faulknerese" or "Faulknerian." This is extremely evident in Absalom! And just as a visitor would struggle with the language of an alien country at first, need to repeat sentences, spend time with it, ponder over words, assimilate, and absorb, so too does the reader of Absalom! Before long, the brain adjusts; the master's lexicon takes on rhythm, tempo, and lyricism. It becomes a poetic symphony to the eyes.

Revisiting Faulkner-land through Absalom! was gloriously frustrating yet immensely and equally gratifying. One of the narrators, Quentin Compson, is a major character in The Sound and the Fury - another addition to my growing Faulkner list.

I haven't learned many things, except that most actions, both good and bad, which draw applause, praise or rewards, within the scope of the application of human capabilities, have already been carried out and only through books could I get to know them.

This realization has made me truly appreciate the power and value of books. They are like windows that open up a world of knowledge and experiences that I might otherwise never have access to.

Whether it's learning about the heroic deeds of great historical figures or the mistakes that led to downfalls, books offer a wealth of information that can help us grow and make better decisions in our own lives.

To my dear book lover, I hope you can also discover the joy and wisdom that books bring. Let's continue to explore the wonderful world of literature together. [Dedicated to my book lover ;) ]

Apologies for previously having some snobbery in this review that I wrote 10 years ago which I have now edited. In the interim 10 years, a lot has changed in my life. I have had children, and now I find myself having to read books about cat mermaids. It seems that karma has bitten my ass aggressively. But you know what? Let's just enjoy this beautiful piece of writing:

“. . . and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust. Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish.”

This description is so vivid and detailed. It really brings the scene to life. You can picture Miss Coldfield sitting there, all dressed in black, with her rigid legs and that strange voice. It makes you wonder about her story and what led her to this point. It's the kind of writing that makes you stop and think, and it's one of the reasons why I love literature so much.

In the Name of Him

Another work of the great creator, with qualities such as wrath, hysteria, and goblin-like. William Faulkner is a very important writer for me. To the extent that if I were to choose another writer after the two Russian giants Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, it would undoubtedly be him.

The world that Faulkner creates is complex yet simple. The complexity of his stories lies within the characters, not the situations. The situations are not that complex, but the encounter of individuals (characters who are often strange) with them makes the story more complex. For this reason, his characterizations are few and far between, and this is exactly what he has learned well from Dostoyevsky.

However, Absalom, Absalom! This novel once again placed me in the mythical world of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha and once again confronted me with strange and unusual people and situations. I have to bear the same thing that I do with Dostoyevsky's stories every now and then. I sometimes like to see suffering, be hurt, and be in such situations. But this time, unlike those two memorable masterpieces that were enjoyable for me, Absalom, Absalom! was not. In my opinion, the complexity of its form, which did not have to explain the story, at least not to the extent that it does in masterpieces like Wrath and Hysteria. It seems that as Faulkner gets older, he pays more attention to the craft and becomes a bit more confused about his techniques and arts, and pays less attention to whether it is necessary to understand the story here or not. Let's just pass it by.

Finally, although Saleh Hosseini is not my favorite translator, I cannot deny that his translation of this book was very good and I enjoyed it :).

Sutpen's Hundred

An extraordinary novel, William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" (1936) tells the complex story of Thomas Sutpen and the Old South and its aftermath. Set in northern Mississippi's fictitious Yoknapatawa County, part of the story occurs in Jefferson, but centers on the 100-square-mile "Sutpen's Hundred" and its owner. The story has multiple voices, with Quentin Compson, 20, being prominent as he narrates to his Canadian roommate at Harvard in 1910.

The same story is told many times, each with more detail and different perspectives, making it difficult to read initially. There are three main familial groups: Sutpen's, the Coldfields, and the Compson's. Sutpen marries Ellen Coldfield and they have two children. The story begins in 1833 when Sutpen arrives mysteriously, acquires land, and builds his mansion. His earlier life is gradually revealed, with dark themes like slavery, incest, and miscegenation.

Sutpen's story is intertwined with that of the pre-Civil War South and the pride that led to the conflict. The reader gains a unique insight into the pre-bellum, Civil War, and post-war South. The book has a tragic feel, and Faulkner's attitude towards the South is complex. The Biblical title suggests his view of the old South as beloved but flawed. Quentin and Shreve offer different perspectives on the South and the tale.

"Absalom, Absalom!" is notoriously difficult to read due to its layered unfolding and baroque writing style. However, persevering through the obscurities reveals a more dramatic and accessible story. I was deeply moved by the book's portrayal of the South and the Civil War, and it belongs among the greatest American novels. I'm glad to have finally read it. Robin Friedman

A difficult book to read with all the interweaving stories told from different perspectives.

This American Southern story is not only complicated with its prose but also mesmerizing. The way the various storylines intersect and unfold is both challenging and captivating. It makes the reader constantly engaged, trying to piece together the puzzle.

I will have to read it again at some stage. There is just so much depth and detail that I'm sure I missed a lot on the first reading.

Supten, the protagonist, is driven and motivated by a seemingly small incident. When he is turned away from a mansion front door by a negro butler, it sets him on a path of perseverance and madness. The consequences of this incident ripple through his life and the lives of his family, both before, during, and after the American Civil War.

The story explores themes of race, class, and power in a deeply profound way, making it a thought-provoking and unforgettable read.

Half the time, I simply couldn't fathom what on earth was taking place. I constantly found myself getting lost within those enormous and complex sentences.

Nevertheless, Faulkner remains a deity in my literary pantheon. The manner in which he manipulates memory, weaves stories, and explores the nature of truth is truly astonishing.

After reading this work, I am highly likely to delve into "Light in August". His writing style, although challenging at times, has a certain allure that keeps drawing me in. It forces me to think deeply and engage with the text on a profound level.

I can't wait to see what new revelations and insights "Light in August" will bring, and how Faulkner will continue to amaze me with his literary genius.