Oh dear. I’m not going to say that I hate this masterpiece of a classic. It’s more like a stockholm syndrome thing where, by the time you get to the end of it you’ve pieced the bits together, but you’re kinda too exhausted to care. The title is from Macbeth, because of course it is. “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an […]
My, my. A body does get around.
This is yet another Faulkner reread for me. I took a Faulkner class my junior year of college and did my best, but it turns out being 15 years older just makes these things easier. I also took my time more with this one, so there’s that. A Light in August is a more thematically challenging novel than say As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury, and it’s somewhere in between in terms of difficulty in reading. This novel is “straightforward” in a sense, in […]
The Subjective and the Objective
I inadvertently picked up three novels that have a lot to say about authorship, narration, and the nature of reality as pertains to stories and storytelling. This novel is a small mystery (but a 500 page novel) about a maybe cursed diamond that was (definitely first stolen from an Indian village in British colonial India in the 1840s and then) maybe stolen from its “rightful” heir, Rachel, who was passed down the Moonstone by a hated and derided uncle who either was trying to win […]
Just another old reread of Faulkner for this Veets
I read this years ago for a Faulkner class and I can clearly remember being “prepped” to read it. The grad students in the class who had read it before basically scared us into thinking it would be a hugely difficult novel, and to some extent it is, but it’s not Finnegan’s Wake and it’s not Absalom Absalom, even. It’s challenging but with the right approach there’s a clear narrative. The structure is four sections; three first person narrations, and a third person narration at the end. The […]
That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
I would call this book one of my white whales, and it is, but that’s a strange category given how many times I’ve read Moby-Dick. Instead, this book is my Absalom Absalom!. I was supposed to read this for a Faulkner class in college and I still have the same copy, where I stopped on page 30 and made a mark. I also still have the various underlinings I made all those years ago to fake my reading journals due with the book. I remember being called […]
This is the kind of man Boon Hogganbeck was.
The Reivers by William Faulkner
This novel is about an older man telling his grandson about the time that he and two of his father’s help/hands run off to Memphis in a car no one wanted in 1905. It starts there and then gets pretty crazy. It’s been probably 15 years since I have read a new Faulkner. I teach As I Lay Dying from time to time in my senior class as well as “A Rose for Emily,” but this was one I had never read before. I think when […]