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A review by angus_mckeogh
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
2.0
The Sound is what you hear in your head as your mind mulls over the style of the opening sequence of the book, and the Fury is what you feel upon finishing the book and realizing you wasted 8 hours of your life.
That’s the ideal opening to my review but I wouldn’t say the book was that bad. I landed right in the middle on this polarizing piece. From other reviews it seems like people either hate this book or they think it is the greatest novel ever written in the English language. I’d argue that it’s neither. Invariably the people that hate the book talk about the confusing opening sequence and the “dialect” or writing style of that section. It’s not revealed immediately but late in the first section it’s stated that the narrator is a 5-year-old “probably autistic” deaf and mute person. Unreliable narrator. That explains the difficulty and confusion which results from the narrative in the first section.
The latter sections are written more traditionally but they do naturally conflict with the first section. Now outside of the confusion of the former narrative, the plot was really uneventful and pretty boring. It hits on racism, misogyny, class, money, reputation, and prejudice; however, the story was not appealing. That’s where I would decrease my star rating. Possibly a “progressive” novel at the time, but otherwise bland as hell. Not the worst book I’ve ever read (All the Sad Young Literary Men by Gessen might grab that spot) but certainly not an “entertaining masterpiece”. Perhaps that last phrase is an oxymoron and doesn’t exist.
As an aside I did find it interesting that Faulkner has a juxtaposition between an apparently autistic narrator and the “measles room” these same kids slept in when they had the disease, well before the whole erroneous connection between these diseases and the MMR vaccine was thought to have cropped up 50 years or more later. He wouldn’t have known this would be relevant later in the century. The MMR vaccine was developed in 1971 and Faulkner is writing about an apparently autistic kid in 1929. Prescience.
That’s the ideal opening to my review but I wouldn’t say the book was that bad. I landed right in the middle on this polarizing piece. From other reviews it seems like people either hate this book or they think it is the greatest novel ever written in the English language. I’d argue that it’s neither. Invariably the people that hate the book talk about the confusing opening sequence and the “dialect” or writing style of that section. It’s not revealed immediately but late in the first section it’s stated that the narrator is a 5-year-old “probably autistic” deaf and mute person. Unreliable narrator. That explains the difficulty and confusion which results from the narrative in the first section.
The latter sections are written more traditionally but they do naturally conflict with the first section. Now outside of the confusion of the former narrative, the plot was really uneventful and pretty boring. It hits on racism, misogyny, class, money, reputation, and prejudice; however, the story was not appealing. That’s where I would decrease my star rating. Possibly a “progressive” novel at the time, but otherwise bland as hell. Not the worst book I’ve ever read (All the Sad Young Literary Men by Gessen might grab that spot) but certainly not an “entertaining masterpiece”. Perhaps that last phrase is an oxymoron and doesn’t exist.
As an aside I did find it interesting that Faulkner has a juxtaposition between an apparently autistic narrator and the “measles room” these same kids slept in when they had the disease, well before the whole erroneous connection between these diseases and the MMR vaccine was thought to have cropped up 50 years or more later. He wouldn’t have known this would be relevant later in the century. The MMR vaccine was developed in 1971 and Faulkner is writing about an apparently autistic kid in 1929. Prescience.