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A review by tits_mcgee
Light in August by William Faulkner
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
A Southern Gothic masterpiece. Faulkner is one of those authors who can captivate you with his prose no matter what the subject, but his descriptive, complex and intelligent sentences lend themselves harmoniously to the bleakness and poverty stricken post-war deep south, creating an atmosphere that I’m completely addicted to.
Light in August introduces us to a varied cast of characters ranging from the stoutly optimistic yet naive, to the hysterical, to the depraved and downtrodden. The character writing is some of the best I’ve ever read, it was a real joy to follow their meandering plots that act more like individual themes to illustrate the injustices and ugliness of Deep South racist culture, a topic that Faulkner is clearly passionate about.
It’s easy to lose yourself in the depth of Faulkner’s themes and metaphors, the racism, the identity, the faith, but don’t let that deter you from enjoying this book for the moody, beautifully written feat of literary genius that it is; you can easily read it, if you choose to do so, for its setting and superb character writing.
“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.”
10/10
Light in August introduces us to a varied cast of characters ranging from the stoutly optimistic yet naive, to the hysterical, to the depraved and downtrodden. The character writing is some of the best I’ve ever read, it was a real joy to follow their meandering plots that act more like individual themes to illustrate the injustices and ugliness of Deep South racist culture, a topic that Faulkner is clearly passionate about.
It’s easy to lose yourself in the depth of Faulkner’s themes and metaphors, the racism, the identity, the faith, but don’t let that deter you from enjoying this book for the moody, beautifully written feat of literary genius that it is; you can easily read it, if you choose to do so, for its setting and superb character writing.
“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by ten food steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant in the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.”
10/10