There are some novels where the artistry hits you so hard that the soul seems submerged. It's as if you are pulled into a different world, completely captivated by the author's skill. Others, however, are just the opposite, lacking that certain something that truly grabs hold of you.

The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are perhaps Faulkner's greater artistic achievements. They are masterpieces in their own right, with complex narratives and deep characterizations. But it is the soul and humanity and beauty of Light in August that will probably bring me back to this novel again and again.

Light in August is a novel that resembles the ocean. It is vast and powerful, with waves of emotion and conflict crashing over you. It is so large in scope, so full of life and complexity, that it makes you perpetually wonder at its beauty, depth, and buoyancy. It is a novel that will stay with you long after you have turned the last page, leaving you with a sense of awe and wonder at the power of literature.

Faulkner's writing is like a force of nature, sweeping you up and carrying you along on a journey of discovery. With Light in August, he has created a work of art that is both profound and moving, a novel that speaks to the very essence of what it means to be human. It is a novel that I will cherish and return to for years to come.

Nella mia terra la luce ha una sua qualità particolarissima, fulgida, nitida, come se venisse non dall'oggi, ma dall'antichità classica.

E' proprio vero ciò che dice Faulkner. La luce descritta qui è una luce che risuona del periodo classico, una luce dal sapore antico, ma non per questo meno intensa.

Luce d'agosto sono piccole matrioske che racchiudono ognuna una storia, una storia con personaggi indimenticabili, unici.

Dall'Alabama al Tennessee, caratterizzato da strade polverose, seguiamo le vicende di Lena, una giovane innocente che cerca l'uomo da cui attende un figlio, il meticcio Christmas, che non è né bianco né nero, sino al reverendo Hightower che porta con sé il peso della morte della moglie.

I personaggi vanno incontro al loro destino aspro, crudo, difficile, in balìa della corrente del Sud, che porta con sé i pregiudizi, il bigottismo e molto altro.

Il bambino che nasce e che porta il nome del romanzo è la luce, il chiarore che porta la speranza e caccia via il pregiudizio da queste lande assolate, tipiche del profondo Sud. This story is a vivid portrayal of the complex and often harsh realities of the American South. The characters are richly developed, each with their own unique struggles and desires. The description of the land and the light adds a layer of beauty and mystery to the narrative. Through the eyes of these characters, we see the prejudices and bigotry that existed during that time, as well as the glimmers of hope and redemption that emerged. It is a powerful and thought-provoking work that continues to resonate with readers today.

Faulkner takes on the role of the prophet in this remarkable book. We are introduced to a cast of vivid and diverse characters. There is an indefatigable mother, filled with expectations. A man is seen grappling with his identity, driven by some mysterious force he doesn't quite understand. There is also a wise old ex-minister, an egoistic drunk, and many other colorful personalities. They all live in a seemingly flat pattern, which they mistakenly believe to be a straight line.

The novel is written in a unique style, as if it were being recounted by a local farmer who has witnessed the entire affair. However, within this simple narrative, there are bits of profound wisdom delivered with just the right amount of obscurity. It is truly an accessible work coming from an incredibly dense and complex writer like Faulkner.

Like some bemused god looking down on his creations with a trace of empathy, but also with a hint of disdain at their hopeless bigotry, indolence, and willful ignorance, Faulkner's keen, cool eye for the way humans can be chilly in its precision. He seems to dissect the human psyche with a scalpel, laying bare all the flaws and foibles. But there is no denying that Faulkner knows his characters and, by extension, his readers. This is a somewhat grim novel, with little evidence of hope for any of the characters who manage to walk away. The world he creates is a harsh one, filled with pain and suffering. But you will be hard pressed to find a more honest and unsentimental writer.

My favorite passage may provide an example of what I mean. It is a portrait of a wife who has been too patient for too long. \\"She was waiting on the porch--a patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation at all save the neat screw of graying hair and the skirt--when the buggy drove up. It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes.\\" And this is a minor character!

Not every reader will have the stamina to wander around in Faulkner's world for long. It can be a challenging and demanding place. But those that make the trip will come back with a richer, if more complicated, understanding of the people among us. Faulkner forces us to look at the darker side of human nature, but he also shows us that there is still beauty and grace to be found, even in the most unlikely of places.

Recently out of the deepest and most racist south of North America. How does Faulkner manage to draw you into his microcosm?

“(…) when the town knew that Hines was walking around the county to organize rallies in the black churches, when the town noticed that, from time to time, some blacks, who were carrying what could only be provisions, entered the back of the house where the couple lived and then left with empty hands, it was also surprised for a while and then stopped thinking about it. Since Hines was old and harmless, the town finally forgot and excused what it would have censured if it had been a young man. It simply said: ‘They're crazy, when it comes to blacks they go crazy. Maybe they're Yankees.’”

The beginning is very good. No one can make you feel as Faulkner does that what he narrates is authentic. Those such good and so characteristic descriptions, that relaxed writing, and that with just two lines he achieves a greater fidelity than others with page after page:

“He could be seen constantly wandering around the town, useless, without a goal, comfortably driven by B., who didn't really know how to play his role of an idle, dissolute, enviable man.”

It had been a long time since I read him and I didn't remember that feeling that only happens to me with very few like Dostoievski, Cervantes, or Faulkner himself, in the sense that they seem to know human nature to perfection even in its slightest nuances, and how they transmit it:

“(…) people are the same everywhere, but it is in small towns -where evil is more difficult to commit, more difficult to keep secret- that people come up with more stories about each other; all it takes is one thing: to have an idea, a single and unique idea, and whisper it in the ear of others.”

When you read Faulkner, you have memories of the best recent North American literary tradition. You realize that almost all the greats have had the master of masters as a reference: Marilyn Robinson and her recurrent theme of the ultra-orthodox religious rural North American society, those such sinister and God-fearing characters, or Philip Roth and the typical racial identity conflicts (The Human Stain) or even Carson McCullers with those complicated and literary sentimental relationships. And crossing the ocean, how could one not remember Benet and those temporal games and such Faulknerian descriptions of imaginary territories.

Another thing I didn't remember, that continuous temporal transition forward and backward, without prior notice. The ellipses and traps of a great narrator that he constantly sows for us throughout the novel. Or the continuous investigation of characters that you don't suspect will at some point be the protagonists. Faulkner takes us and brings us, the readers, as he pleases, with hardly any explanation, imbued by the magic of his prose, here certainly less fantastic than when he enters his natural, fantastic, and southern space of Yoknapatawpha.

This novel marks my first encounter with William Faulkner's writing. I was attracted to it for two main reasons. Firstly, one of my favorite novelists, John Steinbeck, held a great admiration for Faulkner's work. Secondly, I felt it was high time to bridge the gap in my literary education resulting from my unfamiliarity with one of the great novelists of the 20th century.

My research on which of Faulkner's novels to begin with suggested that Light in August is among his more approachable works. This turned out to be true, or at least, I found it extremely accessible. In this novel, Faulkner weaves together three stories. It commences with the tale of Lena Grove, a young woman who has journeyed from Alabama to Mississippi in search of the father of her unborn child. It then progresses to the story of Joe Christmas, an abused orphan fixated on his uncertain racial identity, and finally to the narrative of Gail Hightower, a disgraced preacher residing on the fringes of society. Their stories intersect in the fictional town of Jefferson, through which Faulkner explores themes such as alienation, religious intolerance, and race and gender relations.

Faulkner's narrative structure is truly captivating. It combines the omniscient third-person narrative with interior monologues and extended flashbacks. Additionally, Faulkner allows the characters to share parts of the story with each other, recounting their experiences of specific events and speculating about aspects of the action they have not directly witnessed. The point of view constantly shifts from one character to another, and the narrative traverses back and forth in time and place, enabling the same scene to be described from different perspectives.

As I listened to the audiobook, I was irresistibly reminded of the writing of Thomas Hardy. Over the past couple of years, I have come to appreciate Hardy's writing to a much greater extent than before. This makes me believe that I probably wouldn't have liked Faulkner if I had read him in my teens or twenties. When I read Hardy now, it feels as if I am reading Greek or Shakespearean tragedy in the form of a novel. That is precisely how I felt when I listened to Light in August. Although the narrative styles of the two novelists are quite distinct, they both set their novels in a fictional location based on a real place - Yoknapatawpha County for Faulkner and Wessex for Hardy. Other similarities between Hardy and Faulkner include their focus on characters living on the margins of society, whose idiom they capture in striking dialogue, as well as their use of powerful symbolism and imagery that is almost painterly in its intensity. Moreover, both Hardy and Faulkner were poets as well as novelists, and their poetry seems to be ever-present in their prose. Somehow, I think I will be as haunted by Joe Christmas as I am by Jude Frawley and Michael Henchard.

Will Patton narrated the audiobook, and his accent and speech rhythms breathed life into the characters. Listening to the characters' words rather than just reading them transported me into their world - a world that both shocked and moved me. Listening to this novel was a truly special literary experience.

Tanrı anlatıcı kimliğinin en çok yakıştığı yazar kanımca WF. Önce sesiyle ilgili bu:

Bilici - gösterici tahtından inmeden karakterlerinin iç sesi olup konuşabilen bir tanrı şair sesi. Bu şiirin büyüsüyle aynı anda tamamen kapalı ve tamamen berrak.

Dilin bir kutsallık olduğunu hissettiren bu sesle sürüklendim. Bütün toprakların acıyla piştiğini, insanın her zaman, hep aynı olduğunu duyuran bu aşkın sesle bir oldum.

Çevirinin ister istemez tıkandığı nefes alamadığı yerlerden etkilenmeden hem de.

In my opinion, the writer who best suits the role of a divine narrator is WF. Firstly, regarding his voice:

It is a voice of a divine poet who can speak as the inner voice of the characters without stepping down from the podium of knowledge and demonstration. With the charm of this poetry, it is both completely closed and completely clear at the same time.

I was drawn in by this voice that makes one feel the sanctity of language. With this voice of love that feels the pain of all the earth being scorched and that humans are always, always the same, I became one.

Also, without being affected by the places where the translation inevitably gets stuck and where one cannot breathe.

Joe Christmas, fleeing from what he perceives as his mixed-race identity, has been in Jefferson, Mississippi for three years.

Meanwhile, pregnant but unmarried Lena Grove arrives on foot from Alabama, in search of the father of her unborn child.

Their fates in the town's racist and misogynist society form the plot of this novel set in the 1930s.

Faulkner's vivid and creative prose details the turmoil of Christmas's journey to Jefferson, which includes stops in orphanages, a harsh foster home on a farm, and travels across a wide expanse of the country.

Lena's story, on the other hand, focuses more on her present circumstances and a hopeful future.

The rich cast of secondary characters enriches the narrative.

There's Rev. Gail Hightower, widowed, ostracized from his Presbyterian church, and haunted by his Civil War ancestors.

Joanna Burden, the last of a carpetbagging, New England family of abolitionists, and the secret lover of Christmas, who resides in a cabin on the grounds of her large home.

And Byron Bunch, a hardworking employee at the planing mill, who falls in love with Lena.

This is relatively accessible among Faulkner's major works and is well worth the effort to read.

Words. They stew in silent torment, weep and curse, howl in pain and outrage.

They spill from his pen and bleed onto these white sheets, tainting our neat black-and-white categorizations.

Universes stretch across the extremities of his fictional Jefferson, swallowing lives whole and spitting back all the folly men and women are capable of.

Images emerge in an unearthly chiaroscuro of mortal agony and transient joy.

Colors of spiritual disquiet, alienation, and uncertain footsteps towards expiation are daubed onto the empty canvas of Yoknapatawpha.

Words. They sing to the tune of all human frailty, not caring about readerly reception.

They neither bristle with indignation nor rage against injustice but flay open the heartbreak of it all.

The colossal human tragedy is shorn of its sheen of grandiosity.

Words. They do not merely align themselves in imperfect harmony to proclaim artistic triumph but are in communion with a sense of time and place.

Brimming with abiding tenderness even when speaking of cruelty, race, gender, and religious dogma segue into each other.

Not just the deep south is reconstructed but a panoramic view of all human vulnerability.

These words serenade endurance in the face of defeat.

They birth an opera of anguished voices asking for reprieve and redemption.

Words. They forgive the sins of the doomed, the exiled, the dispossessed, and those shrunken under history's weight.

Filled with hope in the August of their lives, these broken beings hope to survive decay and flow into a future that has severed ties with them.

Light arcs into this dreary abyss occasionally, flickering, wavering, and fueling anticipation.

The light of new life begets optimism.

Who knows if it will purge the darkness? But it may.

William Faulkner's soulful, mystical words whisper into the ears of eternity this dubious message of renewal amidst degeneration.

The sins of the father, the sins of the mother, the sins of the deep and the golden dark.

I've heard that "Light in August" is considered one of Faulkner's most accessible works. It's fitting that it's the second one I've read, after "The Sound and the Fury." In the first one, I thought I found something worth exploring further in his other works. But as you and many English Literature students know, "The Sound and the Fury" isn't a place for certainty. Here, I realized that Faulkner knew exactly what he was doing.

I can't just throw around terms like "Southern Gothic" because I don't really know much about the South or the Gothic. I've lived in the US, seen some specific architecture, and read a certain style of literature, but I've never been to the South. So I'll stick to what I recognize and let the bigger picture shine through.

Race, war, and religion; man, woman, and child. Faulkner knew and loved them, I imagine, much like a deity. The Bible is full of violent imagery and cries of peace, of humanity's brutal instinct and divine idea. It's no wonder he often drowns in its revelations while revealing his own. It takes a certain caliber of author to write with all the living beauty and horrific prejudice, with the truth that words can't fully express, and still come out with a powerful message wrapped around a bleeding heart. Where better for an American author to start than at the origin, no matter how raw and flawed it may be?

This is a work that fully understands its own terror. Writing with a conscience that it refuses to hide behind. That's what we have here, bound up in generations of creed and color, as complex as life itself and as inexplicable, yet not really, because what is literature if not an explanation of the murky depths combined with the brightest glow?

I could talk about the characters, but really, what more do you need to know beyond the result of the Civil War, the society of white supremacists, and the viciousness of Old Testament patriarchy? This book, for one.

I could say more about Faulkner, but there's not much else to say beyond the reputation he holds in the hallowed halls of namedropping. It's both a shame and a pleasure, the weight his name carries. Because, like every giant of experience, in his wake comes a gift to humanity as well as a pecking order. I will say, though, that he will be given much more leniency in my future readings than other authors. Because it's not so much a matter of personal preference as of recognized importance.

If you want to know both the US and the broader scope of humanity, here is Faulkner at his most accessible. I can't think of a better place to start.

  The organ strains come rich and resonant through the summer night, blended, sonorous, with that quality of abjectness and sublimation, as if the freed voices themselves were assuming the shapes and attitudes of crucifixions, ecstatic, solemn, and profound in gathering volume. Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music. It was as though they who accepted it and raised voices to praise it within praise, having been made what they were by that which the music praised and symbolised, they took revenge upon that which made them so by means of the praise itself. Listening, he seems to hear within it the apotheosis of his own history, his own land, his own environed blood: that people from which he sprang and among whom he lives who can never take either pleasure or catastrophe or escape from either, without brawling over it. Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks. It seems to him that he can hear within the music the declaration and dedication of that which they know that on the morrow they will have to do. It seems to him that the past week has rushed like a torrent and that the week to come, which will begin tomorrow, is the abyss, and that now on the brink of cataract the stream has raised a single blended and sonorous and austere cry, not for justification but as a dying salute before its own plunge, and not to any god but to the doomed man in the barred cell within hearing of them and of two other churches, and in whose crucifixion they too will raise a cross. ‘And they will do it gladly,’ he says, in the dark window.

3.5 stars rounded up. This is a truly heavyweight story that delves into big themes and features fascinating characters. However, for me, it was far from an easy read. I was thus glad to be reading it as part of a GR’s group, ‘On the Southern Literary Trail.’ Some in the group claim that this is one of the easier of Faulkner’s stories. I’m not so sure I’d want to attempt a harder one. Maybe. It feels as if multiple stories are intricately twisted together like a braid; and it’s not a loose braid either, but rather dense and tightly packed. There is some stream of consciousness that makes it challenging to follow precisely who the narrator is referring to. For example, in one chapter, Reverend Gail Hightower reflects on his own history, that of his grandfather, and of his father. It was incredibly difficult for me to discern which sentence pertained to which individual. This was the worst (for me) instance of the stream of consciousness. Most of the time, I could follow it. Sometimes Faulkner would write “thinking,” followed by what the character was thinking, and then “believing,” followed by the character’s beliefs. I found this interesting as our beliefs often govern our behaviors.

Many of the characters are burdened by their history. Joe Christmas, one of the central characters, was discovered on the doorstep of an orphanage on Christmas night, hence his name. His unknown parentage and a darker skin tone that Faulkner describes as parchment lead to him being bullied by the other children. When he is finally fostered out, it is to a harsh and abusive man, McEachern. We could call him hard luck Joe. Even when he gets a break, he reacts with disdain and occasionally violence, which only brings him more trouble. Reverend Gail Hightower has been ostracized by the town due to events in his past, and Miss Burden, who lives on the outskirts of town, is scorned by the townsfolk because she and her people are friendly to and attempt to assist black people. This is a story largely about society’s outcasts. The history of the Civil War and the era of slavery linger in many of the characters.

Faulkner is adept at creating a vivid reality of what racism, narrow-minded gossip, and censure were like in a small southern town. He also paints masterful visual pictures. This is how he describes Lena Grove, another central character, heavily pregnant and walking on foot from Alabama to Jefferson, Mississippi, to find the father of her child: “From beneath a sunbonnet of faded blue, weathered now by other than formal soap and water, she looks up at him quietly and pleasantly: young, pleasantfaced, candid, friendly, and alert. She does not move yet. Beneath the faded garment of that same weathered blue her body is shapeless and immobile. The fan and the bundle lie on her lap. She wears no stockings. Her bare feet rest side by side in the shallow ditch. The pair of dusty, heavy, manlooking shoes beside them are not more inert.”

“Pleasantfaced” and “manlooking” are not typos. Faulkner freely employs conjoined words, creating his own adjectives. Here’s another example: “He reached the woods and entered, among the hard trunks, the branchshadowed quiet, hardfeeling, hardsmelling, invisible.” They demand your attention. He also uses interesting narrative paradoxes. “He looked like a tramp, yet not like a tramp either.” Also, “His eyes ruthless, old, but not unkind,” and “Her eyes were like the button eyes of a toy animal: a quality beyond even hardness, without being hard.” It seems more than just an attention-grabbing device; it appears he is suggesting that there are thoughts and qualities in life that can only be described with impossible contradictions.

Perhaps the characters of Lena Grove and Joe Christmas offer the reader a more comprehensive insight due to their contradictions. Lena Grove, fertile like an orchard grove and pregnant with child, molds circumstances to suit her will. Joe Christmas, abandoned at birth and unlucky in love, has a conflicted and often contemptuous relationship with the women in his life and is thus unlikely to have children. Joe seems to be shaped by his circumstances. While Lena relishes food, by the end of the story, Joe doesn’t even feel the need for it; he derives no pleasure from it. Even though women judge Lena, the men are always kind, and she thanks them all, the men and women who assist her in her travels. Joe is an emotional island, lacking connectivity. I feel profound sorrow for Joe because Faulkner makes me understand him.

Although this is a challenging read, there are numerous aspects to appreciate about Faulkner’s narrative style, his deeply captivating characters, and the way he portrays southern life.

Faulkner does not simply show us the deep American South.

Rather, he makes us sink into his swamp of viscous and dark emotions, where the very characters end up drowning and being suffocated.

Thanks to deep and detailed psychological excavations, yet still crystal clear, we manage to traverse the events narrated as if we were in the minds of the protagonists and their thoughts were our own.

A South full of omens, like the classical tragedies in which Fate has already determined everything and the only way to survive is to continue one's journey towards the horizon.

Faulkner's works are like a complex web that entangles the reader, drawing them into a world of passion, tragedy, and the human condition.

His writing style is both beautiful and haunting, with words that seem to drip with emotion and meaning.

Through his vivid descriptions and powerful characterizations, we are able to experience the South in all its glory and its pain.

Faulkner's works are a testament to the power of literature to transport us to another time and place, and to make us feel as if we are a part of the story.