Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner

When I was in college I was given Light in August to read and thought it was incomprehensible. Of course at nineteen in college my interests when I was reading were more along the lines of Stephen King. And those were great books.

Even a couple of years ago when I decided to read some Faulkner, starting with his short stories I struggled to find his writing much more than the vegetables that we have to eat. Then I tackled the three classics in the Summer of Faulkner set. These were very challenging but somewhere along the way I started to understand the rhythm's of Faulkner's writing. The run on sentences, the punctuation from hell, and the having to keep a mental note of who is actually speaking at one time. When you get through the first two sections of The Sound and the Fury and feel like you understand the thoughts of the heavily autistic Benjy, and the suicidal Quentin you feel like you deserve a medal. The funny thing for me was that as I read, backtracking often to understand, it became less like work and more anticipation of what was going to happen. In that book when we get to section three and read the more straight forward account of Jason one feels nostalgic for Benjy and Quentin.

Reading some reviews on Goodreads of this book it is clear to see that Faulkner will always be controversial. Some cannot get by this writing style. I certainly understand that. Others will always be uncomfortable with the handling of race in his books and the frequent misogynistic viewpoints of the characters, they cannot be hidden, often they make up a large part of the story. For me though Faulkner is stunning in his use of the language. It is clear that he is telling tales that try to relate what he has seen, grown up in, and felt growing up in a Southern culture in which a great deal of the populace were veterans of the Civil War and or one generation removed. Growing up with the bitterness of defeat, the loss of a way of life, with the racial tensions that created is something those in the North could not understand than and factually none of us here seventy five years later.

So with this backstory in my mind and my growing respect for the work of Faulkner I kept seeing lists that showed Absalom as his greatest novel, the greatest Southern novel of all time, and in some lists as the best book of the twentieth century. Certainly armed with my understanding of Faulkner's rhythms I was ready. I was not quite as ready as I thought. If one reading those previous books feels challenged they pick up Absalom and suddenly realize there is one more level of Faulkner.

This is the Faulkner of legend. This is the Faulkner with a twelve hundred word sentence. This is the Faulkner with several different narrators telling the same story, each adding a little, peeling the onion of the story as it were a little deeper. Still even with the additional challenge in the reading one sees quickly, if they will be open to it, that this book in a perfect specimen.

The book tells an overview of the life of Thomas Sutpen and his descendants. Certainly not told in a linear fashion, this is Faulkner after all, we learn how Sutpen came to Mississippi, swindled 100 acres of land and built his castle and then his life. Over the course of the book we learn Sutpen's pre Mississippi backstory, what motivates him and how one story in his youth changed his whole life. We meet his son Henry and daughter Judith the children he built his whole life for and we see how even in the world of a man like Thomas Sutpen, a man with more ambition than any ten men, life does not move in the expected way.

The book features, as one of the narrators Quentin Compson. Quentin who will commit suicide just two years later ( than the time frame of his existence in this book) in The Sound and the Fury tells his roommate at Harvard one cold winter night how he came to know the story of Thomas Sutpen and Quentin's aunt Rosa and her sister Ellen and how sometimes we find out things in our family tree that might have been better left unknown.

Perhaps I was naive, as revaluations of Sutpen come to the fore in the book I still did not see the left hook that was coming. When finally the truth was known, the reason for the conflict that eventually burns so hot that it destroys nearly everyone, I felt like I should have seen it coming. It is after all a Faulkner book. I confess I did not see it all coming. As my wife said maybe I was so in love with the sentence structure, the sentences that I just could not digest the full meaning of the words.

She was not wrong about my love of the writing. Often at night as she was fading to sleep I would make her listen to a certain sentence, one that went on for three quarters of a page, and ask her to enjoy the luxuriousness of his writing. Safe to say that while my wife respects and supports my love of literature she does not get a chill in her spine at eleven at night from any writer.

Still it does make me feel like at least my teachers were trying to expose me to the greats when I was younger, I do worry that in today's society with the need to be politically correct ( by today's standards) Faulkner in another thirty years will be unread by anyone under 50. Perhaps all great literature fades away but to me if Dickens tells us about London in the first half of the 1800's, if Hemingway takes us to Spain in the thirties, then Faulkner is our best chronicler of the South in the first half of the last century. Just because we do not like what he puts in the mirror for us to see does not mean that we should not see the value in looking at the reflection.

I cannot speak enough praise for the works of Faulkner. Absalom is an incredible book, and if your lucky you, like me, will not see it coming until it hits you in the face.