Abşalom, Abşalom!

The picture above was used on the first edition dust jacket published in 1936 by Random House It is the image I had in my mind of Sutpen s Hundred the plantation built by Thomas Sutpen The hundred stands for a 100 square miles, the geographic size of the plantation 100 square miles of land is equivalent to 64,000 acres In other words it is a BIG PLACE The gist of all this is that Thomas Sutpen built himself an empire These plantations were so large that it required an unbelievable amount of huma [...]

I like to think that Faulkner, were he alive, would ve broken an empty bourbon bottle over the head of JRR Tolkien, and spit some tobacco juice on JK Rowling for their candy ass prose and their contributions to increasing the laziness of readers everywhere I further like to think that after he wrote, 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 [...]

Absalom, Absalom William Faulkner s Novel of the Death of the Old SouthConsidered by many Faulkner scholars to be his masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom was read by group On the Southern Literary Trail in April, 2012 And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son Second Samuel, 18 33, King James VersionInterestingly enough, Absalom, Absalom a [...]

Starting to read Absalom, Absalom might feel, at first, like walking into your friends having an important conversation but, because you missed the first half of it, you can t tell whom it s about and why they sound so absorbed by it and they re so concentrated that they can t and won t listen to you requesting that they please start over All you can do is try to make sense of the clues and signs you re able to grasp and try to figure out for yourself at least for the time being bits of the narr [...]

Have you ever looked at one of Picasso s abstract females You know the ones I mean The woman has a head in which the prominently jutting nose splits the face into two sections with violently contrasting colours Other body parts, hugely disproportionate, seem to bulge and dangle everywhere You contemplate it for a while, shake your perfectly symmetrical head, put your elegantly tapered fingers pensively to your shapely chin, and think, There s a human being in there somewhere I can see all the bo [...]

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Its incredibly tempting to start this review with one long run on sentence, with plenty of punctuation, but no periods, and particularly not apostrophes when youre dealing with words like dont, but I find refraining from apostrophes incredibly difficult and everything I ve written just looks wrong but this is a hypnotic writing style after you ve dammit read it for a while, and to me, sounds like a horse s I give up gallop, although I did find it slightly irritating that every single narrator th [...]

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 dauntingrst 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 back [...]

Maybe you cannot know when you first approach a novel to reread if it will live up to your recollection or sink like dead weight Maybe it won t do either maybe it will just hover in that No Man s Land between the title you added to your favorite list in 2010 and the one you plod through, ever so slowly, in 2012 Maybe, it will haunt you.First time around, this one sailed stream of consciousness, no problem convoluted, page long sentences, bring em on There s a problem with multiple narrators I do [...]

I would marry this book if our proud nation didn t define marriage as being only between a man and a woman.

You can t understand it You would have to be born there Absalom, Absalom , Quentin Compson referencing the South revised 5 9 17 The story of Thomas Sutpen, a poor white man born into poverty in West Virginia who arrives in north Mississippi in 1830 with a few slaves and a French architect, buy 100 square miles of land from a Native American tribe which he calls the Sutpen Hundred and builds a gaudy mansion He plans to become rich and create a family dynasty By the early 1860s, he has a son Henry [...]

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 , no less and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury are probably important, and perhaps influential overall However, as novels, I prefer Light in August and Abs [...]

This book was a difficult but rewarding read One reward is I can now begin to understand what everyone thinks they mean when they call another novel Faulknerian I had some taste from short stories assigned in a college lit class, and even with that small dose I felt the temptation to use Cliff Notes to help understand his rich Southern Gothic brew But I am receptive now to appreciate a tale chock full of allusions, twisted motivations, and revelations about the sins of racism, class struggle, a [...]

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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 a dense and thorny thicket, and i flogged myself through it with the conviction that it must be good for me, since it s faulkner, and faulkner is good for us and while i still believe that it was good for me i can t claim that i loved it i read out of a sense of obligation than desire, which is not usually the most productive motivation to read a novel sentence for sentence, it is virtuosic re [...]

The most difficult novel by Faulkner that I ve read Loved it anyway Or maybe loved it because of that Whatever I ll be reading it again sometime, should be interesting to how I react to it half a century or so after the first read.

Rereading this was definitely the right decision On a second reading, a book that had been knotty and confusing, became crystal clear perfectly constructed as Faulkner proved actually to be holding all of the threads firmly within in his hands The book IS constructed like an onion, with Faulkner skillfully pulling apart layer by layer all the passages about Quentin and Shreeve around the table are mere narrative interludes, intended merely to allow the reader to regather himself before beginning [...]

Come si fa a commentarlo Avevo letto Luce d agosto, epico, grandioso, biblico Molto meno ostico rispetto ad Assalonne, Assalonne , un romanzo che obbliga a non distrarti, a fare la massima attenzione ai salti temporali che portano a spasso avanti e indietro nel tempo, che ti costringe a leggere senza prendere respiro i periodi lunghissimi inframezzati di incisi e di parentesi su parentesi, con una scrittura ricchissima, lirica, vorticosa, che avvolge il lettore come il cobra viene incantato dal [...]

An enigmatic, nameless nightmare crawls silently out of the southern swamps and declares itself gentry With stark and horrible inevitability, it creates its legacy in the same image as the mud from which it came, black, masked, impenetrable, yet reaching into a horror stricken and helpless community to entwine a bride like a leviathan of the Mississippi marsh, drawing her back into its antebellum lair, she not wholly unwillingly Mystery and strength entice no matter how shadowy and undignified, [...]

Ho quarantatr anni e questo il miglior libro che abbia mai lettovorranno venirmi, forse, le parole per esprimere tanto godimento alla lettura e stupore per tanto godimento 1936, W.F Mississippi 1897 1962, Nobel 1949

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I say this based entirely on my own free will, I think this could be the best book ever.

So, I am going to do something a little odd here which is for the benefit of my thinking through than anything else, so please feel free to ignore the following ramblings I intend to restrict myself to only writing criticisms of this novel which I have read twice now and unhesitatingly give the full fathom five stars Because I think there are lots of things which do not work here, or which fail to do what I think they are trying to do And these are all things that I think Evelyn Scott, in her t [...]

Faulkner Thomas Sutpen, , Sutpen Faulkner , , , , Rosa Quentin Compson, Quentin Shreve 17 , , , , , Faulkner , , , , , , , , 260 the South would realize that it was now paying the prize for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage , Faulkner , , , , , , , , , , Fate, destiny, retribution, irony the stage manager, call him what you will, , there was something about a man s destiny or about the man [...]

Absalom, Absalom ChronologyGenealogy

I usually don t find it so difficult to write about my reaction to a novel But this one has defeated me What a complex, layered work it is I ve sat in front of the computer for about an hour now, writing and deleting sentences, trying to analyse what I feel about it, and I can t quite find the words The narrative, which moves back and forward in time, concerns Thomas Sutpen, who arrives in Mississippi with a band of wild slaves to fulfill his obession to create a dynasty He builds a large estate [...]

Tell about the South What s it like there What do they do there Why do they live there Why do they live at all Our social systems in particular capitalism are such that some qualities such as bravery, courage, hard work, physical strength, cunning, intelligence etc are rewarded while others the softer ones like compassion, kindness, honesty etc not only remain unrewarded but also come with a price for one of who possess them In fact, only incentives, besides a clear conscience which is a hardly [...]

Am I going to have to hear it all again he thought I am going to have to hear it all over again I am already hearing it all over again I am listening to it all over again I shall never have to listen to anything else but this again forever so apparently not only a man never outlives his father but not even his friends and acquaintances do.Yes he could see it all again in his mind as if he were there in front of the grave plots the tombstone pillars rising out of the misty ground thoughts of if y [...]

William Faulkner s thesis through Absalom Absalom and The Sound and the Fury novels that share characters and setting goes something like this The South fell because it was built on the blood and sweat no tears from these men of extremely ambitious men who lacked any compassion for others Their utter disregard for others leads to theirs and ultimately the South s fall Enter Thomas Sutpen in Absalom Absalom , the lowest of low characters ever created He happily does things to relatives and close [...]

Sul canone gentiano Ci sono scrittori dei quali, una volta terminato un libro, mi viene subito voglia di leggerne un altro e poi un altro ancora Questo non vale per Faulkner, almeno non nel mio caso Perch non trovo consolatori e neppure piacevoli i suoi libri, piuttosto impegnativi e amari e spesso ho la necessit di intervallarne la lettura con qualcosa di differente.Assalonne, Assalonne non fa eccezione alla regola, anzi pu essere considerato paradigmatico in questo senso Faulkner scrittore che [...]