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david_rhee 's review for:
Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner
To further complicate the nonlinear narration of Absalom, Absalom!, my reading progress through the novel followed a staggered and irregular path. After about 70 pages initial progress, I left my copy at work and with my job requiring me to report to various locations day to day I would not get my book back for a week. In that gap, I had started and finished The Comedians and started Catch-22. I wasn't going to interrupt good reading progress through Catch-22 so I elected to chip away at Absalom on the side. This is the worst book on which to try something like this. I would be plenty challenged to comprehend this novel under normal conditions. With these circumstances, the text was virtually unintelligible to me at times. To be fair, I chose not to rate this book. I did the same when I read Joseph Conrad's Nostromo a year or two ago.
What stands out most, at least to me, is the nonlinear narrative darkened in added mystery by means of multiple speakers. Late in the novel, the most significant portion of the story is told by Quentin Compson from The Sound and the Fury (by the way, this goes a long way in explaining his meltdown in that book and is therefore a brilliant link to earlier work) to Shrevlin or "Shreve" his college roommate who can't resist inserting his own inventive and speculative additions to an account (he has never heard) of events (he did not witness) which unfolded in a cultural setting he understands little or nothing of. On top of all this, Quentin is summoning up all of this from the hazy memory of what his grandfather told him. Yeah. Unreliable narrator times a thousand. What the reader gets are shuffled fragments of a complicated story spanning about four generations with a ton of refraction. It compares to viewing one's reflection in a mirror in scattered shards on the floor. This gets weighed down by the stifling gravity of the darkest themes. Gruesome infanticide, searing racist language, and incest...it's all there. I had to backtrack to be sure I was understanding Faulkner correctly at times.
As much as I prefer a clean linear narrative, I can appreciate the merits and strengths of one like this. At some points, I was troubled because I was reminded of my attempts to read Thomas Bernhard ("where are the paragraph breaks? and when does this sentence end?"). The story drops the reader in the middle of an event sequence (I guess any point in time could be a middle) which is the mysterious 1833 arrival of Thomas Sutpen in Mississippi. The story then unrolls in both directions, past and future, and each timeline feeds the other. The earlier mentioned connection with The Sound and the Fury is ingenious. The explosive unraveling at the conclusion makes all the head scratching worth it. The good and bad seem rolled up into the same rug. At the end, I felt torn in an ambivalent indecision...I marveled at it yet was thoroughly glad it was over.
What stands out most, at least to me, is the nonlinear narrative darkened in added mystery by means of multiple speakers. Late in the novel, the most significant portion of the story is told by Quentin Compson from The Sound and the Fury (by the way, this goes a long way in explaining his meltdown in that book and is therefore a brilliant link to earlier work) to Shrevlin or "Shreve" his college roommate who can't resist inserting his own inventive and speculative additions to an account (he has never heard) of events (he did not witness) which unfolded in a cultural setting he understands little or nothing of. On top of all this, Quentin is summoning up all of this from the hazy memory of what his grandfather told him. Yeah. Unreliable narrator times a thousand. What the reader gets are shuffled fragments of a complicated story spanning about four generations with a ton of refraction. It compares to viewing one's reflection in a mirror in scattered shards on the floor. This gets weighed down by the stifling gravity of the darkest themes. Gruesome infanticide, searing racist language, and incest...it's all there. I had to backtrack to be sure I was understanding Faulkner correctly at times.
As much as I prefer a clean linear narrative, I can appreciate the merits and strengths of one like this. At some points, I was troubled because I was reminded of my attempts to read Thomas Bernhard ("where are the paragraph breaks? and when does this sentence end?"). The story drops the reader in the middle of an event sequence (I guess any point in time could be a middle) which is the mysterious 1833 arrival of Thomas Sutpen in Mississippi. The story then unrolls in both directions, past and future, and each timeline feeds the other. The earlier mentioned connection with The Sound and the Fury is ingenious. The explosive unraveling at the conclusion makes all the head scratching worth it. The good and bad seem rolled up into the same rug. At the end, I felt torn in an ambivalent indecision...I marveled at it yet was thoroughly glad it was over.