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mamimitanaka 's review for:
Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
An infernal American masterpiece, probably the best of the Faulkners I've read so far. Doesn't only explore mythology from an observant perspective but actually Becomes Real Myth through its structure and telling, the first half of the novel's obliquity is so well-justified by the way every domino falls into place perfectly in the second half that the whole thing is retroactively enriched once you've read the entire thing. Faulkner does this really weird thing of every voice sort of blending into one another, in a way that at first made me wonder why all these Southerners of different race/class/gender backgrounds were as loquacious as the author, but Faulkner makes it work; it ends up feeling almost ritualistic, like these characters are being possessed by the story being told [and essentially, they are], and thus they are being "possessed" by their own author. It's a story that truly feels like it could have been told thousands of years ago as much as it is told specifically about the post-Civil War South, and its themes of the unrelenting and inescapable haunts of the past are refracted well with the way the book explores the creation of myth to help us understand the brutal chaos of the universe. This is by no means an easy puzzle to suss out but once everything begins to click, there are few novels I've read that are as narratively compelling. Unlike Faulkner, I can't write for shit, so just read the book.