**"The Complexities of Faulkner's 'Absalom, Absalom!': A Deep Dive"**

In "Absalom, Absalom!", Faulkner weaves a complex narrative, much like the intricate wisteria that climbs and spreads over a building, covering it with beautiful yet sensuous flowers. This wisteria, mentioned several times at the beginning of the story, is an external metaphor for Faulkner's narrative. It is a story with branches full of fire for burning, which rise with uncertainty and wildness on the southern/architectural/dramatic surface that Faulkner and his characters have built with forgotten, neglected, and desolate materials. The lush branches of the wisteria/narrative cover the entire surface of this architecture/south/past and its inhabitants, so that the reader/Shreve and Quentin, in their first look/read/listen, do not see it face to face with its cruelty and darkness, and do not turn away from it in confusion before getting involved.

Faulkner's narrative lines are as intertwined as the branches of the wisteria. These branches seem to have passed through and over each other, making it difficult to trace the path of each one in the midst of this green and intertwined chaos. One must look away from the enchanting spectacle of the flowers overheated with sensuous heat in the southern summer, carefully and skillfully separate the branches and nodes with the eye, until finally reaching the place where they all meet, their main trunk. But isn't the story/tree nothing but these individual branches, nodes, and flowers?
Faulkner's narrative - apart from its rich and captivating content, which remains like the rich honey and scent of the wisteria flowers - is precisely in the arrangement of the storytelling, in this very complexity and play of lights that do not easily let go of the story line and its details. One must raise the curtains a little, and pass over the fragrant and charming trunk/story, become a partner in the search and the light and heavy weights of the narratives in the sweating narrators of Faulkner, and take advantage of this growing tree full of the juice of life.
Now let's see if the implementation of this complex form of narrative in "Absalom, Absalom!" is just a futile exercise, and a showy decoration in the narrative form of the story? The modernist writer believes that since the narrative of each narrator has a different relationship with reality, it cannot be accepted with certainty, and this narrative must be considered only as a partial and fragmented part of the puzzle of reality. Therefore, in order to define a story or an event, one must either accept the uncertainty of the story and reflect this feature in the narrative, or try to reach a fragmented and mosaic-like image of the essence of the story by defining the story from different perspectives and with the help of various narrators, like a Cubist painting.
In this case, since we are faced with a historical story in the recent past (with a time gap of 50 years), and many of the events have been forgotten, or have been turned into secrets due to the conservative spirit of the South, it is natural that a single narrator - who, due to possible friendship or enmity with the characters in the story, has the potential to distort the events - cannot come up with a complete, perfect, and of course, reliable narrative of the story. Therefore, Faulkner has no choice but to rely on different narrators with different biases and motives for concealment, judgment, and emphasis on specific parts of the story.
In this regard, Faulkner's narrative of the story of the Sutpen family is a set of intertwined narratives that are full of speculations, marginalizations, and judgments of his narrators - and it is precisely based on these characteristics of each narrative that one can and should draw the motives of the narrator from his biases and his relationship with the characters in the story. In fact, each narrative, along with the storytelling of the Sutpen family story, is also drawing a picture of its narrator.
In the ancient stories, David is a young shepherd who pushes Samuel aside and builds his own kingdom on the Israelites and the land of Judah. And when he sits on the throne of power and glory, he faces the rebellion of his son, Absalom, this young and wild man, and the inevitable indirect killing of him, in such a way that his family and his kingdom are on the verge of destruction and disgrace. In "Absalom, Absalom!" too, we are faced with a man/landowner full of ambition and greed, who nothing can stop him from building an architecture and a family/estate of his own, except his descendants.
Faulkner's South is a threshold; a southern/architectural on the verge of collapse, built on the basis of ethics and rules of a caste and discriminatory society, and its upholders, with their eternal ambition and pride, always stand firm and will remain so. But with the resurgence of some dark memories of their past (the Civil War) and the sudden rebellion of the young and wild sons, this architecture collapses, and only a lonely, burned-out/architectural skeleton remains in the South, and its only heirs are either cautious old men or half-crazy people who have lost their way to bring back the glorious past of the caste. In fact, "Absalom, Absalom!" is a story of youth who carry the brand of the disgrace of their fathers' deeds on their foreheads and struggle in vain to ignore this bloody and naked inheritance and rush into the destructive war of their fathers'/South's inheritance and their ethical system. But in the end, they are inevitably doomed to throw their fate into the hands of fate and judgment, the civil war and the destruction of their land/family.
While the South in the novel "Gone with the Wind" - which was published at the same time as this book - is a South where the young and passionate "Scarletts" must pull a piece of it out of the ruins of war and build and populate it, the South that "Absalom, Absalom!"描绘 is "dead since 1865 [the end of the war], and its inhabitants had taken on the appearance of the ghosts of the ancient and hated battlefield" (p. 17). A land whose soil cannot bear the growth and lushness and fertility of the green and young wisterias, and they are doomed to wither, and even the old Sutpen, who is proud of his work, cannot bring back the prosperity and glory of it.... Because the soil of the South and its people have been desolated; a desolation that is as long as its history of slavery.

p. N: All the pleasure and happiness come from my companionship with Rouhollah, Sohrab, and Saeed.

A masterpiece. A true literary masterpiece.

I took my sweet time reading this novel and I have no regrets, as it was absolutely worth the time and effort I invested into reading it. I set all the other books aside because I felt that this novel deserves my full attention.

This is one writer that does not shy away from difficult subjects, and this means that his works often can be and do feel emotionally draining. This novel is not afraid to explore some difficult themes, themes that could perhaps be said to be typical of Faulkner, such as isolation, incest, childhood trauma, bad parenting, racism, and family tragedy.

I have not read as much Faulkner as I would have liked, but I am no stranger to his style of writing either. I am of the opinion that nobody writes the stream of consciousness as well as he does. This can make reading challenging at times, but in the end it is very rewarding to see a wild and chaotic thought process captured on page. Previously, I had read and loved two of his novels, Light In August and The Sound and The Fury. I am happy to add this one to the list. These three novels have impressed me deeply and I can't wait to read more of Faulkner.

The writing is at times challenging, but nonetheless beautiful for it. The narrative itself is at times difficult to follow. There are quite a few narrators in this one, and they are not exactly reliable narrators either. As a reader, you are often left wondering what exactly is going on. To add insult to injury, the narrative is not chronological. The characters themselves are not only confusing in their talks, they also often do not sound credible. For example, you have this Southern woman who supposedly grew up in isolation and poverty, quoting Homer and seeming suspiciously familiar with Greek classics and mythology. At times, some lady characters seem to talk like University professors and it does not seem exactly credible, considering the time period and the limited education that must have been available to them. Yet none of it matters. Despite details like this one, all the characters feel incredibly real. It is like they are speaking from their soul, and Faulkner is translating their talk, shaping it, allowing it to remain chaotic and wild, but adding eloquence to it. Does that make sense? It is not easy to describe his writing style and technique, but it is possible to say that his portrayal of characters is most impressive. One feels like one has traveled back in time reading this novel, that feeling and atmosphere of a past time is so tangible one can almost grab hold of it.

The language employed and the narrative itself both feel chaotic, but there is method in Faulkner's madness, I am sure. I struggled a bit reading this one, I do admit it. Nevertheless, I would still claim that this tale of revenge and tragedy, this deeply psychological family saga is written beautifully and eloquently. The sentences often feel interrupted, the grammar is sometimes very simplified and the story telling confused, but even while you are struggling with it all, you can feel it is a masterpiece. A true literary masterpiece.

In 2021, I write the review of a novel that I read in 2020. Well, I don't really know why. Surely, this novel from the first half of the 1900s had to settle in me. Let me start by saying an obvious but not so obvious thing. Faulkner is not Steinbeck. Faulkner warns those who read him for the first time, perhaps those who have read Steinbeck before him. Faulkner says, "Listen,笨蛋/蠢货, here I don't tell a happy ending. If you thought you would find a second Steinbeck, you are on the wrong track. Steinbeck is a Californian, but I was born in the fucking South. So, around here, if you were born unlucky, you will die unlucky. From me, you won't find comfort, you won't find joy, you won't find mercy, nothing but death and despair. If you are looking for fairytales with a happy ending, go back to Steinbeck. From Steinbeck, death comes out of compassion, even out of love. One can even die of old age. From me, no. If one dies, it's because one is a son of a bitch."

Faulkner, like Tolkien, has created an entire world. Faulkner doesn't use Middle-earth but the county of Yoknapatawpha (pronounced ioknapatofa).

Faulkner is an extremely complex writer to approach. His books are not just a simple pastime but engage the reader intellectually and emotionally, subjecting them to a significant effort of attention and interpretation.

In this novel, as in "The Sound and the Fury", the homage to the most classic tradition and the boldest experimentalism coexist, markedly opposed yet harmoniously managed.

This is because thematically, the writer masterfully takes up motifs already explored by the great narrators of the past, also drawing deeply from the tones and contents of tragedy: fate, revenge, lust, pride, racial hatred, incest, war, and, of course, death...

The stories he tells are dramatic and desperate, and the way he does it is always unique, disconcerting, and at times dazzling.

The writing of this novel, in fact, reaches extremely high levels of lyricism and involves in an almost painful way. Scarce, essential, and at the same time redundant; metallic and exhausting, it is made up of continuous returns and repetitions of terms, concepts, and facts, and is articulated in extremely long periods that seem deliberately designed to prevent us from taking a breath.

The linear, or rather 'normal' and easily consumable development of the plot is completely disrupted by a vortex of points of view that alternate without clear indications of transition from one to the other and take up the same events in a different and sometimes contrasting way.

From time to time, a character recounts the events he has witnessed, or what he has been told by those who were present, or what he has only intuited, deduced, or imagined...

Particularly suggestive is the last part, in which the narration finds its conclusion and its definitive meaning, with the two interlocutors, Shreve and Quentin, who side by side and progressively identify with the protagonists of the story: Henry and Bon. And the decline, the ruin of the Sutpen family intertwines until it overlaps with the fate of the war and the dissolution of the South itself, a world destined for extinction precisely for the same reasons on which it had founded its own greatness.

Titanic.

There are certain things in this world for which three words are far too many, while three thousand words seem woefully insufficient. This is the paradox that William Faulkner often grappled with. Despite his own musings on the matter, Faulkner had a penchant for using a profusion of words when describing anything. His writing was dense, protracted, and filled with a richness that was both alluring and overwhelming. It was like a magnolia-scented, Spanish moss-draped landscape, sultry, stifling, and sweltering. This verbosity was both a major obstacle to reading Faulkner and the very reason why one should attempt it. His baroque style was oppressively brilliant, challenging the reader to engage with his complex and nuanced ideas.

In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner weaves a tale of a world haunted by its own downfall. He repeatedly employs ghost imagery to convey the profound stupefaction of a Southern culture that is moribund in its own mythology. The story of Thomas Sutpen's rise and fall is told and retold by multiple narrators, each adding their own biases, first-hand accounts, second-hand observations, and even hearsay and conjecture. This layered approach not only illustrates how myths are created but also exposes the lies that lie beneath them. Sutpen's tale becomes a metaphor for the corrupt and false mythology of the post-war South, a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked ambition and the consequences of a society that clings too tightly to its past.

Absalom, Absalom! is a brilliant work, widely regarded as one of Faulkner's greatest achievements and one of the five greatest American novels. However, it is not an easy read. It requires patience and attention, as it reveals itself slowly, layer by layer. As the reader delves deeper into the story, the relationships between the characters become clearer, and one learns to navigate the fertile swamp of Faulkner's prose. But for those who are willing to invest the time and effort, Absalom, Absalom! offers a breathtaking literary experience that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally satisfying.

So, I am about to embark on something a bit unusual here. This is more for the sake of clarifying my thoughts than anything else, so please feel free to disregard the following meanderings.

I aim to limit myself to only writing critiques of this novel that I have read twice now and unhesitatingly awarded five stars.

Because I believe there are numerous aspects that don't quite work here or fail to achieve what I think they are attempting to do. And these are all things that I think Evelyn Scott, in her trilogy of the South, has been more successful with (most especially The Wave which can be found on abebooks for $3 and can be read independently - in other words, go and buy a copy, read it, and then tell me why everything I say below is incorrect).

The fundamental issue for me with this text is that Faulkner is attempting to use Myth and the abstract, generalizing language of myth to approach a historical truth about the South. He has stated that the work is allegorical, as is evident from its title. As such, we probably shouldn't be surprised to find that all the characters speak in the same voice, write letters in the same voice, a voice that is self-evidently that of the author (the elaborate and complex sentences are, of course, wonderful). The problem here is that if the text is designed to demonstrate the impossibility of one “true” historical representation, the fact that there must be stories (always plural, never singular), and the desire to construct the past from our perspective, one cannot discount the importance of language and voice in creating such a perspective. By forcing Rosa, Quentin, etc. to speak in his voice, I would argue that he fails to allow the full range, the full, dangerous complexity of these different viewpoints to emerge. Paradoxically, in seeking to emphasize the ambiguity of language and meaning, Faulkner arguably limits, restricts, or orders meaning through his stylistic choices.

Quentin tries to form the past into a narrative, to make it coherent. Faulkner structures the novel to show that this is impossible and yet tells reviewers and critics that there is a “truth” of what happened that can be discovered by the reader somewhere beneath the text. It just feels somewhat false to me for an architect to create a plan for a work that aims to demonstrate the impossibility of plans.

One could also criticize how narrow the world this novel inhabits is. While there are characters from different social groups, their presence is minimized, and the locus of meaning in the novel is very much that of the white "elites" (or at least a certain portion at the lower end of this group, regardless of their relative "poverty" - I don't think Sutpen's childhood or his "riff-raff" status truly widens this perspective). The myth that Faulkner explores touches only a very small portion of the Southern population. To speak of it as “The South” is to disregard the vast, unheard majority.

What impresses me so deeply about Evelyn Scott’s The Wave is how quickly and fluidly she moves between the different minds of the hundreds of characters in her novel - how the language, thought, and spoken words change, the opinions and worldviews shift and blur. She gives equal respect, equal place, and equal relevance to the voices of the prostitute, the homeless, the slave, and so on. The perspective of Absalom Absalom is very much that of the privileged white male, despite the fact that so much of the tale is told “by” Rosa (who, we should note, states that she “should have been a man” and is decidedly androgynous, if not downright “masculine”).

The problem with all this is that Faulkner intended the text to be an “indictment” of Southern (white) culture, and this agenda shapes the novel. Rather than attempting to let that culture “be” and thereby allow the reader to do the interpretation, we are already primed to follow only the path that Faulkner wishes to set out for us. I have an innate tendency to resist being guided too strictly down such a narrow path of interpretation.

His focus on the issue of race and the “taint” that even the slightest hint of non-white ancestry can cast over an individual is admirable. However, again, I find the complexity of Eugenia in Scott's trilogy to be much more powerful. Scott deliberately subverts the trope of the tragic mulatto and engages in a much more subtle investigation of identity than Faulkner (and remember that Migrations was published in 1927 - almost ten years before Absalom). It's all well and good for Faulkner to critique the racism of the South, but I think he only truly focuses that criticism on the belief that a drop of negro blood is sufficient to remove an individual from society. His anger seems more directed towards those who would deny an ostensibly “white” (i.e., one capable of “passing” - and remember that Nella Larsen wrote her most famous novel in 1929) person legitimacy, rather than at the racist mindset itself. Fundamentally, I guess I'm arguing that when one places this book in its proper context (including those forgotten, ignored, and buried authors that I've been spending the year trying to uncover), it seems much less radical, much less a work of “genius” towering above the literary landscape of its time. It is a great work of art, don't get me wrong, but there are others that came before whose work I love more.

Fundamentally, do I feel that I understand something about the South that I didn't before reading (or, in this case, re-reading) the book? I'm not sure I do. Ordinarily, that wouldn't be an issue when critiquing a novel, but here it is clearly the author's intention to say something profound and powerful about why the South lost the Civil War and why it is so fundamentally flawed and headed for self-destruction. And so we are shown how messed up the racist culture has become - to the extent that the incest taboo is less important than that of miscegenation. But I'm not sure I buy that. Is it really the case that in the South of the late 19th century, marrying a quadroon would be considered a worse crime than marrying one's sister? Again, I submit that Scott's exploration of these issues in her trilogy is better reasoned, explored in more depth and subtlety, and tells us more about the various and diverse Southern mind-sets of the period and (most importantly) the complex ways they interact.

I would also say that, despite the fact that it is essentially a Gothic Myth, the plot is rather ridiculous. The bare bones of it wouldn't be out of place in a telenova. Were it not for his language and his sentences, one could almost laugh at it. But that, of course, isn't a fair criticism - such melodrama was clearly part of Faulkner's design.

So, to conclude this rambling, I'm not sure how well my arguments above would hold up to thorough testing, especially by someone more knowledgeable about Faulkner and this book. Nevertheless, if this encourages even one of you to go and buy a copy of The Wave, then I will be happy.

Obviously, this book is an incredible work of art, and Faulkner is a genius, but then so is Evelyn Scott.

Which characteristic suits this book the most;;; … Masterpiece? Exquisite work of art? Magical? Wonderful? Incomparable?

Perhaps all of the above together and maybe something more… Through a concise and long-winded writing style (as if trying to fit the whole world into one sentence), Faulkner gives us the story of Thomas Sutpen and his cursed family…

The story of Sutpen and his descendants is presented through the prism of different narrators, who are in one way or another connected to the family and the lives of its members. Faulkner shows us that no story can be told in only one way. Through the elaborate writing style and the monologues of the narrators, the reader gets lost among the events and Faulkner demands our absolute dedication. Quentin and his roommate Shreve try to complete the incomplete puzzle of the different narrators, and the author, with a delicate narrative capture, puts us right into the story and brings us as close as possible to the cursed Sutpen…

Moreover, Faulkner seems to have been deeply influenced by ancient drama, although the title refers to literary characters and mythologies. The ambitious Sutpen commits hubris and, of course, after that, he and his family will receive punishment. Just like in ancient drama (Oedipus, Agamemnon, etc.). The tragic hero will gain everything but also lose everything… He will rise to the zenith and end up at the nadir, showing that no one escapes the nemesis that follows hubris…

Although the whole story unfolds during the American Civil War, Faulkner does not seem to focus on the war itself but on the conditions that prevailed in the US before, during, and after the end of it. Racial discrimination and the origin of the heroes play a crucial role in the development of the story. As the story progresses, we see the love of the Southerners for their place but also their adherence to a "false" racism that holds them back and prevents any development of theirs (characteristic is Shreve's prognosis for the Catholic and global domination of the black race)…

UG1: I loved the book even more since the roots of the work lie in Gothic literature. The rise and fall of the Sutpen household, the "ghost" of the house, the dark mansion are characteristics of Gothic writing… Also, another characteristic is the sins (greed, racism, revenge) that torment and plague the characters of the story.. According to Faulkner, the original title of the book would be "The Dark House"…

UG2: The group reading in the LTB was enjoyable!!!!!! One of the best I have participated in!!! Personally, I think it was the main reason I managed to get through the difficult paths of this book…

5/5 stars without a second thought...

I was nearly stammering when I finished it. It is a text so thick, so full of beauty that to describe it at all is daunting.

First of all, Faulkner is always doing things like this: “He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.” He keeps doing THAT. It isn't even a great example, as I don't have the book (borrowed to read) on hand to find a really knock-you-down passage.

Alright, review, gather your facilities! This narrative is relentless. It is a constantly roiling spiral, one that keeps picking up and dropping off details and elements as it grows wider. There is a submission to the narrative that must occur, similar, but much more difficult, to the submission required to get through the opening 50 - 60 pages of As I Lay Dying. Except that this one takes about 200 pages to settle in fully. And instead of confusion, every moment of the reading is stunning and engaging up until that point. Then after crossing into the rhythm and cadence and gaining fuller comprehension, you are suddenly frightfully stuck with Quentin in the devastating heart of the South and Sutpen and Quentin and Caddy and the war and so many other pieces of this mosaic, this vast terrible mosaic Faulkner is finally able to fully articulate.

Sutpen is the disease. He holds himself up as a mirror to his contemporaries without conscience. They in turn are disgusted by him, his nudity, his wild niggers, his windowless mansion. Yet they are fascinated by him. Sutpen is kept close, nearly from the start in one capacity or another to his southern gentlemen counterparts.

Yet, this is a love story, as Salinger wrote in Franny and Zooey "pure and complicated". And in a sense I think that is the most important part. That these multi-page sentences, the spiraling plot, the description and re-description and re-description again of the very air surrounding the events of the story are the closest I have ever seen to being wholly purely, truly, complicated. It's as if his layering and re-layering and re-re-layering and his endlessly unfolding and stacking metaphors are the ONLY way for Quentin, and for us, the readers, to understand the South, and to understand Quentin's desperate self-loathing and destructiveness, and Caddy, and Henry and Bon and Judith and etc...

Then elements of the story that connect with the lineage of Agamemnon are also fascinating and incredible. And I don't really understand most of them, so I recommend coming in better prepared then I was.

I would only recommend this to someone who has read at least 3 other Faulkners - I did As I lay Dying, Sound and the Fury Unvanquished then this one. I think Sound and the Fury is necessary BEFORE Absalom. I will be going on to read the rest now...god help me.

I am forty-three years old and this is the best book I have ever read.

Perhaps the words will come to me to express so much pleasure in reading and astonishment at such enjoyment. This book takes me on a remarkable journey. Set in 1936, in Mississippi, with the author W.F. who lived from 1897 to 1962 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949. The story unfolds in a way that keeps me completely engaged from start to finish. The vivid descriptions of the place and the characters bring everything to life. I find myself completely immersed in the world that the author has created. It's not just a book, but an experience that I will cherish for a long time. The way the plot develops and the themes explored are truly masterful. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's a literary gem that everyone should have the opportunity to read.

Absalom, Absalom is my initial encounter with William Faulkner's works. It stands as one of the most intricate novels I've ever delved into. Given the author's penchant for experimental styles, I anticipated a convoluted plot intertwined with a complex narrative structure. Fortunately, I was somewhat prepared. Otherwise, I might not have had the perseverance to reach the conclusion.

This is among Faulkner's renowned books, yet my rating doesn't align with the popular consensus. To placate disappointed Faulkner enthusiasts, I must clarify that my assessment has no bearing on his literary brilliance. There's no doubt that he is a highly talented writer. My rating simply reflects my personal response to this particular novel.

The narrative structure of Absalom, Absalom is indeed complex. It unfolds the story of Thomas Sutpen's rise and fall through the perspectives of two distinct narrators. Subsequently, the narrative is reiterated and dissected by one of the narrators and his friend. I've read numerous stories with multiple narrators, but this was the first instance where a story was presented partly as an analysis of narratives. It was an entirely novel concept for me, and it took some time for me to fully grasp.

The story is recounted in flashbacks by two individuals who have different connections to Thomas Sutpen. These two narratives are then retold and analyzed by one of the narrators and his friend. Faulkner employs the narrators to illustrate the unreliability of narratives. One narrator, Sutpen's sister-in-law Rosa, harbors intense dislike and contempt for him. Her anger and resentment towards Sutpen are palpable in her account, leading the reader to question its authenticity. The other narrator, Quentin, is providing a secondhand account of a story that has been passed down through generations, first from his father and then to him. The accuracy of such an account, having traversed two generations and a significant amount of time, is highly questionable. This experimental narrative structure, along with the experimental writing style, which constantly switches narratives without prior warning or paragraph breaks, showcases Faulkner's genius. However, it is precisely this genius that prevented me from fully engaging with the story.

I deeply admire Faulkner for his bold and innovative writing. Nevertheless, I struggled to immerse myself in his story. I didn't take to Rosa's biased narrative, nor did I find Quentin's seemingly neutral account particularly appealing. Moreover, the analysis between Quentin and his friend Shreve was overly drawn out and tiresome. None of the characters managed to endear themselves to me either, as I couldn't find myself liking any of them. The story is purportedly an allegory of the Southern history of America. Had I been more knowledgeable about the history and the American Civil War, perhaps I would have perceived the novel in a different light. As it stands, there was nothing to firmly anchor me to the story.

Judging an author based on a single book is unjust. Therefore, I'll be on the lookout for more of his works. However, I'll need to be more discerning in my choice if I'm to have any future with Faulkner. Another similar experience would undoubtedly bring my exploration of his works to a halt.

More of my reviews can be found at http://piyangiejay.com/

Look, I can't say I disliked it.

To be honest, it was beautifully well written. The author's command of language was truly remarkable.

However, it was so terribly difficult. It was extremely hard to follow the story and to know precisely where one is in the narrative.

I constantly found myself forgetting who was talking and who they were talking about. There was an abundance of back story, and it seemed that the entire plot was based on it.

There were so many characters, all more or less the same, which made it even more confusing. Everything was so complex and detailed that it was overwhelming.

I became completely lost and, unfortunately, I gave up.

I can see that it is probably worth the effort to understand this story, but I also know that it requires more effort than I can put in at the moment. Maybe one day, when I have more time and energy, I will give it another try.

Since the review I wrote is very long and may not be read until the end, I will first put the appreciation ceremony in place.

We read this amazing novel in unison with the group of hooligans (Arman, Sepher, Saeed, and myself), which turned into the best, most educational, and most useful unison of my life. I thank all of them for teaching me a lot and tolerating me.

Next, I would like to thank dear Saeed, my very good friend, who, when he realized how much I love Faulkner, gave me this famous book as a gift.

All the red hearts in the world are dedicated to my best friends.

Now, if you have the courage, read my review about the book too.

__

"Absalom, Absalom!" is the title of the most difficult novel by Faulkner, and perhaps for someone who is inexperienced in reading Faulkner and wants to start with this novel, it will be the most unreadable book in the world. However, I can promise that if someone has a little patience and practice, in the end, they will understand why many critics consider this novel to be Faulkner's greatest work.