I suggest reading The Sound and the Fury before reading Absalom, Absalom! so that you are familiar with the main character, Quentin Compson. When you are, you understand his love/hate relationship to the South and to his ancestry. A book about changing ideologies, overcoming (or being engulfed) by the past, and establishing a personal identity, Absalom, Absalom! is definitely a novel you want to spend some time on. Be prepared for tough reading, but completely worth it if you have a guide or a professor to help you realize the importance of recurring themes. ( )

Not my favorite Faulkner. The narrative complexity seems inorganic and there is an elongated feel to the entire enterprise. The interplay between the two college chums is unconvincing, at least to me. On the plus side, there's Rosa Coldfied, a very fine invention and superbly characterized. ( )

Best opening paragraph EVER. ( )

1554 Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (read 10 Mar 1980) I could not get interested in this for quite a while--found myself annoyed rather than impressed at times by Faulkner's convoluted style. But as I devoted more attention to it, I came to finally be interested in the story of Thomas Sutpen, born in West Virginia poverty, who went to Haiti and married a part-Negro woman and had a son, divorced her, went to Mississippi and married Ellen Coldfield, had a son Henry and a daughter Judith, and then when Henry went to the University of Mississippi he became a friend of Charles Bon, who was his half-brother! The war comes and after the war Henry kills Charles Bon to keep him from marrying Judith. Much of this is told at Harvard by Quentin Compson in 1910. Well, it was worth reading, but really it should be read with Faulkner's other Jefferson County works, so one would be used to what is really Faulkner's rather tortuous style. ( )

My favorite Faulkner novel. Gorgeous, overwhelming, utterly deranged.