Take a photo of a barcode or cover
brannigan 's review for:
As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
I have been keen to give Faulkner a go for a while now, not only because he is considered one of the American masters but also because his style is notoriously challenging - modernist, stream-of-consciousness, flourishing, in contrast to Hemingway's clean minimalism. As expected, As I Lay Dying is a 'difficult' novel. Luckily, I had a motorcycle accident this weekend which makes it painful to move around, so I consumed most of this book in one sitting.
As I Lay Dying is a simple story told in a complicated way: the Bundren family, poor, southern and dysfunctional, must take the dead body of their late mother Addie to bury her in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi. The practical and emotional difficulties they face are narrated through 15 different POV chapters - Addie's husband, her five children, neighbours, townsfolk, and even Addie herself. The heart of the novel is therefore the intertwining motivations, jealousies and prejudices harboured by these people, rather than the events per se.
My impression was that first and foremost this is a book about loneliness. These characters, the Bundrens, are hicks, poor white trash - but more than that, they're emotionally and intellectually impoverished, cut off from each other. Faulkner's paradox was therefore to channel the voices of those who do not know how to communicate. So we have Addie's husband Anse, who selfishly blames his poverty and the death of his wife on his own bad luck; daughter Dewey Dell, whose preoccupation with her illegitimate pregnancy clouds her ability to feel anything meaningful about her mother's death; eldest son Cash, who deals with the situation by obliviously obsessing over the construction of his mother's coffin, in full view of her death-bed. Addie's son Darl emerges as principle narrator, and he alone shows some reflective emotional depth (in the beginning at least). However, his lack of education and interaction with civilisation at large means that his existential introspection has no framework to be hung upon, and dissolves frustratingly into gibberish:
Yeah, that's why this is a 'difficult' book - there's a lot of that shit. But Faulkner's style demands a different approach. What he's doing is emulating the inner workings of a grieving, confused mind, incomprehensible even to itself. This sets on its head the notion of what a book should be, what writing is - communication from an author to a reader. The impression given here is that these characters are writing for nobody but themselves, that they are almost oblivious to their own thoughts. Each POV chapter is an island; each narrator digests their own individual worries and wants, trying to sculpt some meaning from a dead world, and so it takes a certain unfocusing of the reader's brain to establish an empathic connection with the narrator. This was perhaps made easier for me in my Paracetamol haze.
It is unlike anything I have ever read. It is a novel with no centre of gravity and no attempt on the author's part to engage the reader on his/her own terms. This pluralism and experimentalism was the source of my frustration and fascination with the novel. The story in itself was compelling - almost a black comedy, the farcical grotesquerie of a gang of backward farmers driving a rotting corpse into town. But the story was never the point. I can't say I enjoyed the book, but I don't think traditional categories apply in this case, so I don't know what to think. When I try to explain it I end up sounding like Darl Bundren. I'd say I'm glad I read it, I found it to be hard work and I'm not sure yet if it was worth it, I'm not sure if Faulkner is a genius or a hack. I'll try The Sound and the Fury sometime and make up my mind. But for now I'll hedge it at 2.5 thumbs up.
Character that should be played by Paul Dano:
Jewel, the eerily quiet horse-whispering illegitimate son. Dead behind the eyes.
As I Lay Dying is a simple story told in a complicated way: the Bundren family, poor, southern and dysfunctional, must take the dead body of their late mother Addie to bury her in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi. The practical and emotional difficulties they face are narrated through 15 different POV chapters - Addie's husband, her five children, neighbours, townsfolk, and even Addie herself. The heart of the novel is therefore the intertwining motivations, jealousies and prejudices harboured by these people, rather than the events per se.
My impression was that first and foremost this is a book about loneliness. These characters, the Bundrens, are hicks, poor white trash - but more than that, they're emotionally and intellectually impoverished, cut off from each other. Faulkner's paradox was therefore to channel the voices of those who do not know how to communicate. So we have Addie's husband Anse, who selfishly blames his poverty and the death of his wife on his own bad luck; daughter Dewey Dell, whose preoccupation with her illegitimate pregnancy clouds her ability to feel anything meaningful about her mother's death; eldest son Cash, who deals with the situation by obliviously obsessing over the construction of his mother's coffin, in full view of her death-bed. Addie's son Darl emerges as principle narrator, and he alone shows some reflective emotional depth (in the beginning at least). However, his lack of education and interaction with civilisation at large means that his existential introspection has no framework to be hung upon, and dissolves frustratingly into gibberish:
"And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not... And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not.Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be..." (p 71).
Yeah, that's why this is a 'difficult' book - there's a lot of that shit. But Faulkner's style demands a different approach. What he's doing is emulating the inner workings of a grieving, confused mind, incomprehensible even to itself. This sets on its head the notion of what a book should be, what writing is - communication from an author to a reader. The impression given here is that these characters are writing for nobody but themselves, that they are almost oblivious to their own thoughts. Each POV chapter is an island; each narrator digests their own individual worries and wants, trying to sculpt some meaning from a dead world, and so it takes a certain unfocusing of the reader's brain to establish an empathic connection with the narrator. This was perhaps made easier for me in my Paracetamol haze.
It is unlike anything I have ever read. It is a novel with no centre of gravity and no attempt on the author's part to engage the reader on his/her own terms. This pluralism and experimentalism was the source of my frustration and fascination with the novel. The story in itself was compelling - almost a black comedy, the farcical grotesquerie of a gang of backward farmers driving a rotting corpse into town. But the story was never the point. I can't say I enjoyed the book, but I don't think traditional categories apply in this case, so I don't know what to think. When I try to explain it I end up sounding like Darl Bundren. I'd say I'm glad I read it, I found it to be hard work and I'm not sure yet if it was worth it, I'm not sure if Faulkner is a genius or a hack. I'll try The Sound and the Fury sometime and make up my mind. But for now I'll hedge it at 2.5 thumbs up.
Character that should be played by Paul Dano:
Jewel, the eerily quiet horse-whispering illegitimate son. Dead behind the eyes.