Absalom, Absalom!

I would sooner drive a nail through my hand than read this book a second time. Faulkner's endless rambling sentences in endless paragraphs in endless chapters where all the action takes place forty or fifty years ago and it's just someone else's guess or secondhand narration about people long dead who no one is even related to anymore and we don't really care anyway make my head hurt. And that last sentence is as close to a Faulknerian sentence as I will ever write.

He had a good story to tell, with interesting characters and convincing motivations, but he obfuscated it so much that it's almost impossible to follow. If it weren't for the glossary of characters in the back of the book I would still be scratching my head. None of the action is immediate. All of it is narrated by someone else, some of it even guessed at. It's not told in chronological order either, but constantly skips back and forth.

The book does have a few moments that I admired, but they were few and far between. Some of his metaphors are nice, and that's about the only compliment I can personally give him.

Of course, plenty of people who presumably know better than I do think this is great fiction. Faulkner did win the Nobel prize and two Pulitzer prizes for similar work. I could never adopt this "stream of consciousness" style of writing - it would drive me nuts. I prefer to tell my stories simply and plainly.

It's about miscegenation. A big deal in the 19th century and enough to ruin this particular family. Here I am, a Southener of the 20th/21st centuries, and it's a little hard to imagine that it could be so important. But Faulkner does a good job of showing how the characters feel about it, even if he does do it over and over at length. The whole point of telling it at the distance of a generation removed is to show how important it was at the time? Possibly.

So I read this because it is another example of the Southern gothic style. If you like Faulkner's style then by all means read it. If you don't care for his style it will drive you crazy.