Absalom, Absalom!

Tom

Rating: really liked it
Apologies for previously having some snobbery in this review that I wrote 10 years ago which I have now edited. In the interim 10 years I have had children and now have to read books about cat mermaids so karma has bit my ass aggressively.

Let’s just enjoy this:

“. . . and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust. Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish."

Vit Babenco

Rating: really liked it
Absalom, Absalom! is a full of dark secrets and murky mysteries ghost story – the ghosts of the past rise and follow you everywhere.
All the human vices turn around the procreative instinct...
And a male instinct of procreation turns around a woman...

...the other sex is separated into three sharp divisions, separated (two of them) by a chasm which could be crossed but one time and in but one direction—ladies, women, females—the virgins whom gentlemen someday married, the courtesans to whom they went while on sabbaticals to the cities, the slave girls and women upon whom that first caste rested and to whom in certain cases it doubtless owed the very fact of its virginity...

But if a man erects his “economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage” then sooner or later a day of reckoning will come.

Jeffrey Keeten

Rating: really liked it


The picture above was used on the first edition dust jacket published in 1936 by Random House. It is the image I had in my mind of Sutpen's Hundred the plantation built by Thomas Sutpen. The hundred stands for a 100 square miles, the geographic size of the plantation. 100 square miles of land is equivalent to 64,000 acres. In other words it is a BIG PLACE. The gist of all this is that Thomas Sutpen built himself an empire. These plantations were so large that it required an unbelievable amount of human labor to keep them productive. Mechanical invention had not advanced enough to provide the machines that the plantation owners needed to work such a large tract of land. When you own more land than you can work and there is not a labor pool available to sustain your industry...what do you do?

Well, we know what they did, but what should they have done? Around 1800 when cotton became king is when the demand for slaves escalated exponentially. The potato famine in Ireland happened in 1845 which brought thousands of displaced Irish to the United States, but this wave of immigration came too late to keep the South from becoming too economically dependent on slavery. Now I'm not advocating turning the Irish immigrants or the Chinese immigrants who followed into slaves, but wouldn't it have been a better solution for our history if those plantation owners had adopted the flawed, but still better than slavery, system of tenant farmers?

Eventually technology would have caught up with the needs of large land owners which would have freed up the tenement farmers for the industrial work that made the North so strong. Maybe the availability of that labor pool would have encouraged manufacturing in the South. Some of the better tenement farmers would have become land owners themselves as plantations fell out of the hands of Southern aristocratic families due to the untimely death of a patriarch or because of mismanagement. Not a perfect world, but a better world and maybe, just maybe we would have avoided a costly Civil War for which the South to this day has never fully recovered.

But then would Southern literature be the same?

I have a grudging respect for Thomas Sutpen. As a boy he was asked to deliver a message to a wealthy plantation owner in Virginia. He watched the plantation owner lying in a hammock with his shoes off while a slave fanned him. Thomas was asked to go to the backdoor to deliver his message. He will never forget the slight. He lays awake at night thinking about what he can do about it. He does a stint in the West Indies and comes back to the United States, specifically Mississippi, with blacks speaking a strange language. "He wasn't even a gentleman. He came here with a horse and two pistols and a name which nobody ever heard before, knew for certain was his own anymore than the horse was his own or even the pistols, seeking some place to hide himself.

Quentin Compson is the thread that sews the plot together. As Rosie Coldfield and his father and a host of other people tell him stories about Yoknapatawpha County his head becomes filled with a convoluted history of his birthplace. "Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth."

Quentin spends more time with Rosie Coldfield than he really wants to, but she has memories that he needs to hear to fill in the gaps of the story in his head. "Quentin....sitting in the buggy beside the implacable doll-sized old woman clutching her cotton umbrella, smelling the heat-distilled old woman=flesh, the heat-distilled camphor in the old fold-creases of the shawl, feeling exactly like an electric bulb blood and skin since the buggy disturbed not enough air to cool him with motion, created not enough motion within him to make his skin sweat."

The families who have lived in this county in Mississippi for generations are also the same people who regarded this new comer, Thomas Sutpen, with bemusement. When he successfully rooked a drunken Indian out of some land they clucked about that, but then as he continued to gain influence and wealth, building a comfortable living out of nothing; they started to worry. This opportunity had been there for them their whole lives, but it took a man with daring from outside the county to see the potential (or have the immorality to make it happen). He took a wife descended from a good family and the community showed their disapproval by not showing up to the wedding. Undaunted, barely noticing that the community had turned against him, Thomas Sutpen forged forward siring a son and a daughter and building the life for himself he had coveted as a boy in Virginia.

The Civil War happens. Almost every able man is called up to serve. Thomas's son Henry is away from school and has become friends with Charles Bon who because of the encouragement of his mother has, at the advanced age of 28, decided to go back to school. He meets up with Henry and as the plot advances we find out that Charles Bon is Henry's half brother. Charles becomes engaged to Henry's sister Judith and of course she is also his half sister. As you might expect this causes much consternation in the family.

I really didn't think that Charles loved Judith. "It was not Judith who was the object of Bon's love or of Henry's solicitude. She was just the blank shape, the empty vessel in which each of them strove to preserve, not the illusion of himself nor his illusion of the other but what each conceived the other to believe him to be-the man and the youth, seducer and seduced who had known one another, seduced and been seduced, victimised in turn each by the other, conquerer vanquished by his own strength, vanquished conquering by his own weakness." I think he saw Judith as the only way of achieving his own birthright. (view spoiler)[Henry kills Charles to keep him from marrying Judith even though he really loved him...well...like a brother. (hide spoiler)]

The story is much larger than what I've touched on here. The book is riddled with incredible passages that would balloon this review up to megalithic proportions if I were to share them all with you. The layers of the story are frustrating and magnificent. I equate this book to going to a family reunion and spending time with a great aunt, an uncle, and a grandparent and asking them each the same question. The story is told with lots of repetitiousness because the narrators know a lot of the same information; and yet, from each storyteller is gleaned a few more nuggets because each person who is solicited for the story has a unique perspective and is in possession of different pieces of the life puzzle.

I had moments where I wanted to deconstruct this story, strain out all the redundant information and write this story out in a linear fashion, but then it wouldn't be a masterpiece. It would just be another book telling a story about a slice of Southern history. By writing this book, this way, Faulkner not only preserved a piece of Southern history, but also preserved the tradition of Southern oral storytelling.

I found that I read this book best late at night after my family was in bed and the only sound that I could hear were the goldfish coming up for air in our fish tank. I would always begin reading intending to only read a chapter, but once I landed in Jefferson, Mississippi I was soon caught up in the intricacies of the writer's web. I found myself reading chapter after chapter as if Faulkner's hand was giving me a gentle push to continue.

"Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit air they?"

I know this book is difficult, but my suggestion is to find a quiet place, while reading this book, so that you can achieve almost a zen like focus. If you can relax enough you might find yourself sitting on the porch with Quentin and hearing the Southern cadences of the voices of the people narrating this tale. Sometimes we all just need to let people tell us a story.

Bonus points to those that can actually smell the "wistaria".



If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
(Book 622 from 1001 books) - Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner (1897 - 1962)

Absalom, Absalom! is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. Taking place before, during, and after the Civil War, it is a story about three families of the American South, with a focus on the life of Thomas Sutpen.

Epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830's to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness.

Quentin Compson and Shreve, his Harvard roommate, are obsessed by the tragic rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen.

As a poor white boy, Sutpen was turned away from a plantation owner's mansion by a Negro butler.

From then on , he was determined to force his way into the upper echelons of Southern society.

His relentless will ensured his ambitions were soon realized; land, marriage, children, his own troop to fight in the Civil War...but Sutpen returns from the conflict to find his estate in ruins and his family collapsing.

Secrets from his own past threaten to ruin the lives of his children and destroy everything he has worked for.

ابشالوم، ابشالوم - ویلیام فاکنر (نیلوفر)ادبیات؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دهم ماه آوریل سال 2000میلادی

عنوان: ابشالوم، ابشالوم؛ اثر: ویلیم فاکنر؛ مترجم: صالح حسینی؛ مشخصات نشر تهران، نیلوفر، 1378، در 414ص، شابک 9644480864؛ چاپ دوم 1382، موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م

کتاب از دیدگاه موضوع و سرگذشت، به رمان دیگر «فاکنر»، با عنوان «خشم و هیاهو»، بستگی پیدا میکند؛ زیرا «کوئنتین کامپسون»، در این داستان، نقش بازجوی اصلی را بازی میکند، در حالیکه در رمان پیشین، ایشان خودکشی میکند؛ «آبشالوم»! از شاهکار پیشین «فاکنر» دور میشود، و با روشنای دیگری، برخی از مسائل فلسفی را بازمیگوید؛ چیزی که بهتر از هرچیز میتواند همین کتاب را معرفی کند، شکل مارپیچ آرامی است، که با ایست های ناگهانی کوتاه، در بگذشته، اندک اندک فراختر میشود، و سرانجام به افسانه، و سپس به اساطیر یا همان افسانه های کهن میپیوندد؛ «آبشالومی» که بر پدرش «داوود» میتازد تا پادشاهی وی را به زیر کشد

کمتر رمان همدوره ای، تا این اندازه بازتاب متاقیزیکی داشته، و بی زیاده روی میتوان گفت، که پهلوان راستین داستان «آبشالوم»! زمان است؛ هوش سرشار و بیمانند نویسنده، از این جستجوی همراه با دودلی، پوشانیده شده، و گاه آزار دهنده، رمانی پلیسی به هستی آورده، که در آن همه چیز، از اندیشه تا رخدادها، از مهربانی تا دریافتنها، به گویش مورد پسند «فاکنر»، «مادی» شده اند؛ پهلوان داستان، چهل سال پیشتر، در روزی از ماه سپتامبر سال1909میلادی درگذشته است؛ «کوئنتین» در دعای گشایش، نخستین عناصر خبری را، از دهان «کولدفیلد» پیر، که از راویان چهارگانه است، دریافت میکند؛ و ...؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 11/09/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 25/07/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Lisa

Rating: really liked it
How am I to put all the pain of this novel into a review?

The pain of the suffering characters? The pain of the reader suffering with them? There were moments when I felt I couldn't take it anymore, when the carefully built puzzle added another piece to the beautifully decorated and carefully furnished hellscape.

What makes you able to talk about that kind of pain, then, I could ask, following the path of Quentin and Shreve, the two dialogue partners who preside over the story in the story, trying to carve out truth in the muddle of prejudice, pride, hatred and occasional passion (mostly unaccompanied by love)?

Anger, I'd say.

Anger at the fact that a monster like Sutpen can walk the earth, admired as a godlike creature by the people who share his racist and misogynist revenge and entitlement thinking. Anger that he has the power to put children into the world - to CREATE like an evil mirror of the Creator of the Southern religion - whose only purpose is for his "glory and honour" to be perpetuated in a pure, male line. Female descendants don't count, and neither do sons if they have any trace of African American ancestry. Some women are just about good enough to give pleasure if the occasion arises, but their children are not even good enough to acknowledge their existence in front of the world.

Anger drove me, and one quote broke my heart: "So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you can't bear?".

As did the fate of Milly Jones and her baby GIRL! A human being, for Goodness Sake. No, not a vessel of Sutpen genes lacking y-chromosomes! Sutpen differs from his biblical source in that his heart is not broken like that of David confronted with Absalom's death. He is merely offended in his right to perpetuate his meaningless string of genes in a line of white-only male gorillas.

He pushed one old man over the edge and found his end in the most suitable way. His curse lives on, and on, and on, way beyond the magnetic closing lines, answering the question put to Quentin, why he hates the South:

"I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!"

Repeating the mantra in the same way a desperately caring person says: "I don't care, I don't care, I don't care!"

But we do, and therefore books like this hurt. A lot.

Henry Avila

Rating: really liked it
A great writer William Faulkner was, winner of the Nobel Prize yet not an easy read....This novel the name comes from the Bible could be his best, shows this. Seemingly just another southern Gothic book with erratic flashback after flashback revealing the truth ...layer by layer maybe, set both before and after the American Civil War 1861-1865, North against South... (620,000 soldiers died ) with different characters narrating the confusing story of Thomas Sutpen. A dirt poor man from what will become West Virginia leaving his family at 14, traveling to find a better life walking mostly across southern states and arriving in the fictional sleepy hamlet of Jefferson, Mississippi in 1833 at the age of 25. Not welcomed by the local population, trust never is given to the aloof stranger doesn't matter to the ambitious man wealth does, that is all to him. Mr. Sutpen is tired of poverty nothing can stand between his goal of riches even if a few get hurt... Somehow buying (stealing) a hundred square miles of Indian land "Sutpen's Hundred," his plantation. Having a few slaves he builds a large mansion but no furniture or windows money has gone, years later he does have and marries Ellen Coldfield , daughter of his only friend Goodhue Coldfield a small shop owner. Love match it is not, he wants respectability she a big house to run and impress the town, still there are secrets never talked about by decent people. Born to the unhappy couple are Henry and younger sister by two years Judith, crimes are committed by this family. Henry attends the new University of Mississippi at Oxford, later to be called ironically Ole Miss and meets Charles Bon, a few years older from New Orleans, becomes his best friend, nonetheless he is connected somehow to him. Taking Charles back home to Jefferson, he soon becomes unofficially engaged to Judith. This makes the mother Ellen ecstatic , Thomas her father isn't...why? The future couple strangely are quite calm, there must be a reason. But first war begins a glorious adventure for the young, cheers, congratulations naturally Henry and Charles join and battle together... disillusionment succeeded it. The old patriarch Thomas is made a Colonel in the rebel army too, fighting very bravely he never lacked courage not one of his many sins... The book will bore some, even irritate others but there is no denying its magnificence for those willing to read this.

Lawyer

Rating: really liked it
Absalom, Absalom!--William Faulkner's Novel of the Death of the Old South

Considered by many Faulkner scholars to be his masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! was read by goodreads group "On the Southern Literary Trail" in April, 2012.



And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son! Second Samuel, 18:33, King James Version

Interestingly enough, Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind were both published in 1936. Both were novels of the Old South. However, while Margaret Mitchell chose to romanticize that society, William Faulkner removed any element of fanciful romance from the story revolving around the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a man with a design to found a patriarchal dynasty, but who lost everything in his attempt to do.

Faulkner originally titled his novel, "Dark House," but as he wrote his complex story adopted the story of King David and his son Absalom as a more appropriate fit with the figure of Thomas Sutpen and his family. This was a novel that Faulkner struggled with through false starts, interruptions with his work as a screenwriter for Howard Hawks, and the death of his younger brother Dean who died in a plane crash in 1935. Further, his initial submissions to his publisher were returned to him as being confusing and incapable of being understood.

Faulkner's premise for Sutpen's story is no one person is capable of knowing what truth is. History is an amalgam of documentation, memory, and the telling of it. One lawyer colleague of mine has as his motto, "Perception is reality." For the reader of "Absalom, Absalom!" it is quite similar to being a member of a jury, listening to the testimony of multiple witnesses, weighing their demeanor, their testimony, their biases and prejudices, viewing the exhibits, and ultimately, as a group determining what is the truth of the case tried before them.

Faulkner had his characters and story in mind. His problem was how to tell the story of Thomas Sutpen and the lives of his children which occurred in the past by characters in the ostensible present of the novel. Among his working papers was a flow chart showing the sources of information and the basis of how his characters knew what they did. At the top was Thomas Sutpen, originally named Charles. From Sutpen, a line flowed to Rosa Colfield, who would be Sutpen's sister-in-law. Another line flowed to the right to General Compson, his only apparent friend, to his son Quentin Compson II. In the center at the bottom of the working page is Quentin Compson III, whom we originally meet in The Sound and the Fury. Quentin is linked to Sutpen by his direct connection to Rosa Colfield who tells the story from her perspective, and from information passed down to him by his grandfather and father. Quentin emerges as the central thread from whom we learn the "evidence" of the case of Thomas Sutpen. Then, in a masterstroke of structure, Faulkner provides the reader with Quentin's Harvard roommate, Shreve McCannon, an outsider, a Canadian, who provides questions and his own interpretation of the information Quentin provides him.

In essence, Faulkner's structure is much akin to eating an artichoke, peeling the delicate leaves from it, nipping the tender flesh from the base of the leaves, until we reach the unveiled heart, the ultimate delicacy, or in literary terms, what the reader discerns to be the truth.

Thomas Sutpen appears in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, in 1833. He is a mystery. He is a man without a past, without a lineage. Nor is he forthcoming about where he has come from, or the source of his wealth that allows him to purchase one hundred square miles of land from Old Chickasaw Chief Ikkemotubbe. With him, Sutpen has a band of wild negro slaves who speak in a language unknown to the inhabitant's of Jefferson. Sutpen also carries with him a French architect who will design and direct the building of Sutpen's big house.

This information is provided by Rosa Colfield, the sister of Ellen, whom Sutpen courts in peremptory fashion. Referring to Sutpen as man-horse-demon, Rosa reveals her biases and prejudices against Sutpen. For it develops that prior to her death, Ellen had put the responsibility of protecting her children, Judith and Henry, when she is no longer alive. Sutpen will curtly propose to Rosa to become his second wife, but she will leave after being insulted by Sutpen for reasons that will be made considerably later in the novel.

Not only is reading "Absalom" a bit like dining on an artichoke, it is also very much like peeling an onion, layer after layer. Through Grandfather and Father Compson we learn that Sutpen had come from the mountains of western Virginia, from a poverty stricken family. Sutpen is turned away from a Tidewater Virginian's front door by a slave. This rejection will deepen Sutpen's desire to be as rich as any man. Sutpen becomes an overseer on a Haitian plantation. He puts down a slave revolt. He is awarded for bravery by being given the plantation owner's daughter in marriage. However, he puts her aside upon discovering that her complexion is not the result of a Spanish mother, but a black descendant. Not only does Sutpen put her aside, but his son by her. The thought of a marriage of miscegenation does not fit in with Sutpen's design to be landed gentry in Northern Mississippi.

Sutpen's downfall is foreshadowed by the appearance of Charles Bon, enrolled as a student in law at the infant College, Oxford. Bon becomes fast friends with Henry, who idolizes the elegant older man from New Orleans. That Bon meets Judith during a visit to Sutpen's plantation is inevitable. Sutpen's wife, Ellen, considers Bon to be Judith's future husband. However, it would appear that Bon has more desire for Henry than Judith. The homoerotic electricity of the relationship is palpable, though neither man ever indicates the occurrence of a sexual act.

The coming Civil war prevents resolution of Bon's relationship with Judith. Henry and Bon join the University Grays formed at Oxford and head to war, with the belief that all the South held that defeat was impossible. Sutpen also went to war as a General. His bravery is never at question. However, as a result of a talk with Henry regarding Bon, Henry repudiates his position as heir to the Sutpen holdings. Nevertheless, although he say he does not believe what his father has told him about Bon, which is never directly revealed to the reader, Henry hope that the war will resolve the issue of Bon's marriage to Judith. Perhaps the war will remove one or both of them, making any confrontation unnecessary. But it does not.

Is Charles Bon the son of Thomas Sutpen? How will Henry resolve the propriety of Bon's marriage to Judith since the war left them both survivors? And what of Thomas Sutpen's fate? What will come of Sutpen's One Hundred when it becomes part of a conquered nation? What secrets do Thomas Sutpen's house still hold that Rosa Colfield demands that Quentin ride with her to that dark house before he leaves the South to become a student at Harvard?

"Absalom, Absalom!" is Faulkner's pivotal novel of the death of the Old South. In it he leaves no doubt that he considered slavery to be the institution that condemned it and destroyed it. Shreve McCannon, the outsider, the neutral observer, the Canadian, astutely observes that the descendants of those that once held no freedom would rule the hemisphere.

Faulkner's opinion of "Absalom, Absalom!" was, "I think it's the best novel yet written by an American." Random House, headed by Bennet Cerf, was excited by the novel, stating on the jacket that it was Faulkner's most "important and ambitious contribution to American literature." The novel was released October 26, 1936.

Typical of literary criticism of the time, Faulkner remained their favorite whipping boy. Clifton Fadiman, writing for The New Yorker/ said the novel was consistently boring, that he didn't know why Faulkner wrote it, and that he didn't understand it. Harold Strauss, writing for the New York Times said that "its unreadable prose should be left to those who like puzzles." Faulkner's Early Literary Reputation In America by O.B. Emerson, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan (1984)

What the critics of the 1930s did not recognize was that Faulkner had discovered modernist techniques already used by Woolf, Conrad, Kafka, and Joyce. Today, typical analysis of "Absalom" is that its sole competitors in contemporary American literature are Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. William Faulkner: American Writer: A Biography, Frederick R. Karl, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, New York, 1989, page 582.

I'd say Karl is right. And as for prose for people who like puzzles, think of peeling all those leaves off that artichoke. That succulent heart, dipped into drawn butter is worth the work.

Renato

Rating: really liked it
Starting to read Absalom, Absalom! might feel, at first, like walking into your friends having an important conversation but, because you missed the first half of it, you can’t tell whom it’s about and why they sound so absorbed by it - and they’re so concentrated that they can’t and won’t listen to you requesting that they please start over. All you can do is try to make sense of the clues and signs you’re able to grasp and try to figure out for yourself - at least for the time being - bits of the narrative. Of course, you could also excuse yourself and give them some privacy - but you’d be missing out on a great book.

Like the making of a pearl: mollusks depositing calcium carbonate in concentric layers, as a defense mechanism, against a potentially threatening irritant (such as a parasite inside the shell, or even a grain of sand in rare cases), isolating it from their mantle folds. That’s how I like to imagine William Faulkner wrote this novel: he idealized the plot and his characters, and then realized something tragic would have to happen to them that would be their demise - the threatening irritant: a crime - and instead of telling his tale conventionally, he slowly protected and isolated it with layers and layers of different perspectives from various unreliable narrators. In how many different ways can the same story be told? Can each one of these (co)exist on their own?

There are mainly four people - Rosa Coldfield, father and son Jason and Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon, the latter’s roommate - in this quest of trying to understand and ultimately make sense of what they’ve heard about the events that took place over the course of a century, as the fates of the Sutpen, Coldfield and Bon families are encapsulated from the 1800’s until the early 1900’s.

Each one of these four voices - which at some point are all narrators of the story - have some knowledge of what happened in certain periods of time. Part of that knowledge, though, is pure guessing or interpretations based on their own points of view, and so it’s up to us - who are reading a story from someone who’s heard of a story from others - to be careful as to what we can assume as fact or merely personal conclusion. While Miss Rosa, who's emotionally involved and was a living part of the tragedy, fuels her narrative with sentimentality and bias, Mr. Compson relies on a hear-and-say account, since he’s heard it all from his own father; Quentin and Shreve approach the subject more objectively - in black and white, ironically one might say considering this particular book -, just summarizing all the information they’d obtained from several sources, while still trying to attribute what were the underlying reasons in all of the character’s actions.

The novel’s plot is basically about the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a poor white man who has a project for his life since he was a teenager: to have a big mansion, a family and heirs to carry out his name. Arriving in Jefferson, Mississippi, he is able to obtain some land and through the course of a few years, builds up his sumptuous mansion. The next step is to find a wife: Ellen Coldfield, a local woman, whom he marries and gives him two children: Henry and Judith. It all seems to be working accordingly to his plans until Henry, who’s now in the University, brings home for Christmas his fellow student and best friend Charles Bon, whom Ellen Coldfield hopes will marry her daughter. The simple possibility of this wedding brings drastic consequences to the lives of the three families, and only through analyzing their past we can begin to comprehend why an unexpected killing took place and how that altered Sutpen’s schemes and how he felt he would have to try again.

Completing the merits of the book, Faulkner gives us beautiful and interesting analogies, long Proustian sentences and uses a lot of visual elements to portray the character’s feelings, and he’s still able to assign unique ways in which all of his storytellers can express themselves and stand on their own as singular voices. Not in all passages appears to be an obvious narrator, but through paying attention to detail and getting acquainted with their manners, it’ll be easier to identify whose voice it is you hear.

Rating: while the story is in fact very interesting and keeps you curious until the end to find out what really happened to the families involved and begging for a reliable narrator who will just lay out all the cards for you, the innovations in style and the narratives Faulkner employed here are what really grabbed my attention and impressed me the most. I found Absalom, Absalom! so well crafted and written that I just couldn’t help but wonder more than a couple of times “how did he ever idealized something like this?” For that: 5 stars, no less.

Richard

Rating: really liked it
Have you ever looked at one of Picasso's abstract females? You know the ones I mean. The woman has a head in which the prominently jutting nose splits the face into two sections with violently contrasting colours. Other body parts, hugely disproportionate, seem to bulge and dangle everywhere. You contemplate it for a while, shake your perfectly symmetrical head, put your elegantly tapered fingers pensively to your shapely chin, and think, "There's a human being in there somewhere. I can see all the body parts. But why does it look so incredibly bizarre?"

Well, that's sort of how I felt reading this novel. If I had to sum it up in one phrase it would be: Convoluted, convoluted!

Mind you, I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from trying this. I'm told by those in the nose know that it's much better on a second reading. If I went back to the Picasso, maybe all those skewed arms and legs and, well, you know, other things would shift around and suddenly look like a regular human being. And if I go back to the Faulkner, maybe all those characters, fragments, flashbacks, rehashings, and long drawn out italicized monologues will shift around and suddenly make sense like a regular novel.

I don't know, though, whether I'll ever go back. But that's just me.

Lyn

Rating: really liked it
I think every reader of Faulkner has a moment like this:

Reading

Reading

Reading

Wait … what?? Did I miss something?

(Goes back a couple of pages)

Read

Read

Read

What?? No, I didn’t miss anything but what in the hell is he talking about???

A more experienced reader will know to be patient, observant and what is immediately read as a mystery will make sense further along in the book.

Probably.

Considered by many scholars to be his masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom!, his 1936 publication, as does most of his best writing, challenges the reading skill of his reader. Telling the story of Thomas Sutpen, an early settlor in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the magic of the book is in the way the story is told, with multiple chroniclers of Sutpen’s history and with the various storytellers varying the story told and even commenting upon each other’s narration.

Quentin Compson (who we met in Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury), Quentin’s father, his grandfather (a contemporary of Sutpen’s) and Quentin’s aunt, as well as Quentin’s Harvard roommate Shreve, all join in on the tale of how Sutpen, born into poverty in Western Virginia in the 1820s, made his way from the West Indies to Jefferson, to found a sprawling plantation and a short lived dynasty.

Most notable here is Faulkner’s exploration of the relationship between truth and myth. Behind the several narrators to this tale of the Sutpen family is Faulkner himself, guiding the tales told and in doing so reveals to us the reader of all the stories the myriad and tangled streams of truth and speculation. There are first person accounts, secondhand news, hearsay and wild assumption. All this leading to the cold morning in Massachusetts where Quentin, himself not long for this world, struggles with his own feelings for the South he knows and the South in which he was made to believe. A careful reader will then, perhaps, re-examine his own rationale for belief and in a more universal sense, reevaluate ideas about truth and the veracity of legend. There is the truth, the truth we can know and the truth someone wants us to believe. Faulkner’s revelation about miscegenation exposes the absurdity of racism.

Absolutely one of his best if not his finest work.

s.penkevich

Rating: really liked it
A favorite in college days and can be summed up as your weird roommate a few beers deep insisting “so everything ended up fucking terrible and it was a horrible disaster but I want to impress upon you that I want to believe they meant well?” Also cool uses of punctuation.

Nathan

Rating: really liked it
I would marry this book if our proud nation didn't define marriage as being only between a man and a woman.

Perry

Rating: really liked it
"You can't understand it. You would have to be born there."
Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin Compson (referencing the South)
[revised 5/9/17]

The story of Thomas Sutpen, a poor white man born into poverty in West Virginia who arrives in north Mississippi in 1830 with a few slaves and a French architect. He buys 100 square miles of land from a Native American tribe which he calls the "Sutpen Hundred" and builds a gaudy mansion. He plans to become rich and create a family dynasty. By the early 1860s, he has a son Henry and a daughter Judith. Henry strikes up a close friendship with Charles Bon, a guy 10 years his senior, while attending the University of Mississippi. Upon bringing him home, Henry and Judith begin the quiet cha-cha and become engaged before Henry and Charles go off to join the Confederate Army and fight in the Civil War.


Private Sutpen's commanding officer, Colonel Angus

Sutpen discovers that Charles is his son born from an earlier marriage in the French West Indies to the plantation owner's daughter, who he abandons after learning that she was a Creole (mixed race). He tells Judith she cannot marry Charles because he's her half-brother and is part black.

Best not to give away any more, other than to say the novel details the sordid rise and fall of the bizarre and mad Sutpen family and, allegorically, the South, and also that the title refers to King David's beloved third son Absalom who rebelled against the Kingdom of Israel and was killed by David's commander Joab.

"...surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity..." Absalom, Absalom!

The complex, fractured narrative makes for a tough read. The story is told in flashbacks, mostly by Quentin Compson to his Harvard roomie, and through the narratives of Rosa Coldfield of her knowledge and remembrances of the events and of Quentin's dad and granddad. The onion is gradually peeled by the disclosure of events, in a non-chronological order and according to the biases and attitudes of the narrators, such that the reader reconstructs the truth through different narrators. For example, Miss Coldfield was the sister-in-law of Sutpen, and despised him, so her memory is slanted and her digressions unbearably long. In fact, this novel contains, at least at one time according to Guinness Book of World Records, the "Longest Sentence in Literature," a sentence 1,288 words long. Moreover, I had a really difficult time suspending my disbelief that Miss Rosa Coldfield or Quentin had a lexicon along the lines of a philosophy professor at Harvard.

A panel of Southern lit scholars and writers voted this the best Southern novel of all time (Oxford Am., 8/27/09). I cannot disagree; when I read it a few years back I was lost for about half the novel, at a time when I didn't have the time to look up half the words in Webster's which would take up a month reading a 320 page novel. I can give you a better idea if I ever have time to read it again.

Megan Baxter

Rating: really liked it
Its incredibly tempting to start this review with one long run-on sentence, with plenty of punctuation, but no periods, and particularly not apostrophes when youre dealing with words like "dont," but I find refraining from apostrophes incredibly difficult and everything I've written just looks wrong (but this is a hypnotic writing style after you've - dammit! - read it for a while, and to me, sounds like a horse's - I give up! - gallop, although I did find it slightly irritating that every single narrator (there are at least four) has exactly the same long sentences and cadence, which does seem to strain credulity, yet once you get sucked into the writing, it's hard to extricate yourself.)

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

Darwin8u

Rating: really liked it
“That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less; and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!



As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury are probably more important, and perhaps more influential overall. However, as novels, I prefer Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!. In many ways this novel, for me, belongs next to Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Great Gatsby, and a handful of other as some of the greatest written art America has ever produced. It captures, without over-doing it, issues of race, class, the American Dream, the South, family, memory, etc., all packed inside a nearly perfect novel that slowly unwinds and unwraps through multiple, unreliable narrators. I will need to come back to this review. I may also need to come back to this novel. It is that good.