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3.87 AVERAGE
3.87 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
dark
slow-paced
Once I got accustomed to the rhythm of the book, I was engrossed. The book seemed only tangentially to be about the characters and more about the way the story was told. I particularly liked the Quentin/Shreve dual narration at the end, the changing speculative nature of their attempts at the story really shine a light on what and how the story had been told thus far.
This is a very Faulknerian novel, and one that I was assigned to read for the first time ten years ago. Over the past ten years, I've stopped and started this book many times. And now I've gone all the way through.
The writing here is outstanding, though at times definitely too tangled up in style. The narrative structure is great, and it serves as an awesome companion to Sound&Fury. This reminded me of Shadow Country, which was 3 times the length and a bit better. Overall, I'd say read it if you loved Sound&Fury and want more of a knotted narrative.
The writing here is outstanding, though at times definitely too tangled up in style. The narrative structure is great, and it serves as an awesome companion to Sound&Fury. This reminded me of Shadow Country, which was 3 times the length and a bit better. Overall, I'd say read it if you loved Sound&Fury and want more of a knotted narrative.
Dark, dense, confusingly written, ambivalent and ambiguous - Faulkner's novel is complex and problematic, and yet also compelling, poetic and rich. While ostensibly the story of one demagogue, Thomas Sutpen, who rules the lives of family and neighbours in small-town Mississippi, it is more fundamentally a fractured dirge for the 'Old South'. Through a number of unreliable/reliable narrators, it digs into the painful and twisted ways in which sex, family and race are corrupted in that time and place, among the mutilated, abandoned or misbegotten characters who populate it. It's a confrontational novel: confronting the reader, and evidently the author, with the ways in which the unpleasant features of human desire and hate can consume families and communities within a culture and history of oppression and violence.
Read for Love and Hate in the American South. I can see why this is considered one of, if not the, greatest American novel(s) of all time, but it just didn't do it for me. Faulkner knows the story he wants to tell, and tells it in the finest capabilities of the Southern tradition, weaving myth with fact until they are impossible to tell apart. That said, I can appreciate Absalom, Absalom! without loving it. It's dense, impossible at times to follow, and repetitive; the very things that make this novel phenomenal are those that I find least appealing.
challenging
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Racism, Slavery
Moderate: Incest, Murder
Minor: Sexism, War
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes