Absalom, Absalom! was my first introduction to William Faulkner. It has become my favorite book. I rarely reread novels and I have read this novel twice and plan to read it again. Many readers find Faulkner very confusing. He often writes in stream of consciousness while jumping back & forth in time. However, it is for these reason that Absalom, Absalom! is my favorite novel. The story unfolds through the voices of several characters that are speaking from different years. If one presses through the initial confusion an intricate plot is revealed by dynamic characters. Faulkner's style and language are rich in meaning and depth. Absalom, Absalom! can be read as a mystery which helps bypass some of the confusion a reader may encounter. I have also read Faulkner's Sound and Fury which I found more confusing and did not engage with an much. However, I love Faulkner's style and hope to read all of his novels and short stories. Faulkner's works do require a lot of attention and time. One must be prepared to focus on the work, they are not books that can be set down for a few days and picked back up. So during a blizzard delve into the mystery and characters of Absalom, Absalom! ( )

There’s nothing like a good Faulkner novel[1] and this is my first, assigned in my Eng. 3336 Amer. Fict. 1930-ATM class @ Texas State Univ. (TSU) and as someone who regularly reads books from guys like Pynchon & Joyce & D.F. Wallace & c.—you know, regular authors of impenetrable voluminous tomes—and coming away from it I can only say that Faulkner is fucking hard. I am ashamed to admit what I expected was almost belletristic, that it’d be like, super easy compared to GR, and I’d be able to breeze through it despite the fact that the whole book is nearly one massive wall of goddamn’ s.o.c. text, and truthfully this made speed-reading easier (i.e., the s.o.c. written-in-two-weeks style), and yet left me missing huge parts of the story, incapable of following along, if you get what I’m saying—I even missed the super-obvious homosexual overtones b/w brothers[2] Henry Sutpen & Charles Bon[3], which I don’t know how especially after all the comparisons to Spartans and the billion times I read …and Charles loved Henry, and Henry loved Charles like really hard… and c., so thank you Mrs. Victoria Smith, prof. @ TSU, because without you—and even though you're not exactly my favorite professuh[4]—because without you I wouldn’t have understood a single part of this book, I wouldn’t have understood that it was some huge metaphor for the fall of the south, that it was told on a mythic level, heck, I wouldn’t have even noticed that this story was taking place not in Louisiana[5] but Mississippi, or that every character with a hint of an African lineage is never given a voice, or that most of the events recounted by Rosa, Mr. Compson, and especially those b/w college-mates Quentin and Shreve are likely complete crap, that large parts of this dusty, wisteria-filled southern history are based in the imagination of Quentin and Shreve, adding motivations, melodramatic sub-plots and whatever else to fill all the lacunae left by the sometimes conflicting non-linear accounts of the rise and fall of the enigmatic Thomas Sutpen[6] we (read: you, me & Quentin) are told in the first major chunk of the novel, which is largely about the stoical Quentin haunted by the south’s past history, pestering Rosa and his old man over and over again trying to unravel Sutpen’s life, and like I’m told this obsession with history he has as well as some unexplored (in this novel) incestuous desires he holds for his sister are the major causes for his suicide @ the end of The Sound and the Fury, which yes he’s also in, and t’wards the end of Absalom I’m starting to think, since the already-mentioned theory that most of Sutpen’s life is fiction even in the fictional eyes of the fictional Quentin, that a lot of the family melodrama, the homosexuality between Henry & Chuck, the incestuous relationship(s) b/w Henry & Judith & Charles, and cetera are really just Quentin projecting his own fucked up life on this history of the south, but whatever’s going on, it’s clear that the Sutpens never had any control over their lives, as it (their history) plays out like a fucking tragedy, that strings—the same strings—are holding every name tight and no matter what they do, no matter what their intentions and what their will desires, they can’t fight against these strings, their life’s set in clichéd stone to haunt future retarded generations incapable of dealing with this shit to kill themselves over, but really it’s because Sutpen (Thomas) is really just a dick, a really selfish dick and the embodiment of wisteria & the miasmatic 19th c. southern culture, and speaking of miasmas, you’ll see Faulkner use and overuse words like that (miasma) and death and dying and dusk and desolation and gaunt[7] and wisterias will be summoned at the very least 3 times per page for your imagination’s pleasure while Thomas sets up his property, to be known as Sutpen’s Hundred, completely without the help of anyone but his ‘wild niggers’[8], and like in doing this he’s escaping his past, rising up from nothing to something, which along with propagating his purely white and therefore perfect bloodline because that’s the thing to do in a southern home with traditional pre-Lincoln-ass-kicking values, yet is also the thing he keeps fucking up, e.g., Clytemnestra, appropriately-named daughter of Thomas & an unknown, unvoiced slave, and the already-mentioned Bon, whose mother like, totally deceived Thomas in keeping her partially-black background a secret from him even after they were married and had spawned lil’ Charles Bon, a totally uncool thing to do to a hip, brooding guy like Sutpen, and a guy like Sutpen always gets his way, so say Goodbye to Dear Wife #1 and Hello Ellen & 100% Aryan children Henry & Judith, whom with things work out swell until her death and you know all that incest and murder hoopla, &c., nothing else goes Sutpen’s way completely, the poor guy. There are numerous other subplots for the reader to delve into, and of course a tragic (fitting in with the whole Greek tragedy structure that I’m told and blindly believe like a good student) ending for Sutpen’s chivalric south—The South—and by God the ending is quite spooky, chilling, hair-raising, awesome, &c. when ye’re able to actually follow along with the s.o.c. mile-long sentences, and once again only about 5% of this, if that, I would have understood w/o the help of Prof. Smith of Eng. 3336’s help, and also thanks to her invaluable help, I’m looking forward to more Faulkner, and at some future date re-reading Absalom, Absalom!, because, seriously folks, this is not obviously a guy you get away with reading only once; his books demand much more of the reader, they demand to be studied at length over multiple perusals, &c., which is like, pain in the ass notwithstanding, way cool, so good luck, prospective/future readers; good fucking luck.

F.V.: 90%

[2,850]

[1] (except perhaps a good or even better novel from Cormac McCarthy[1a] [at least after his first stumble (i.e., The Orchard Keeper)])
[1a] Something I’ve been told via Internet forums for ages and never could truly agree or dis- with any sense of certainty until now.
[2] (spoiler)
[3] Whose name even after 170 pgs and two in-class essays I was still reading as ‘Bom.’
[4] I’m sorry.
[5] I had just read Toole’s Confed. of Dunces.
[6] I.e., the ‘chivalrous’ pre-Civ. War South.
[7] Which is abused in one of my favorite scenes 1/3rd thru the novel when Mr. Compson—I think it’s him narrating to Quentin, but it may very well have been angry old Rosa—when Mr. Compson tells us the reader about the mythopoeic confrontation b/w Charles and Henry when Charles is like trying to marry their (Henry + Charles) sister even though they both are fully completely aware she’s their sister having recently found out about their own blood relation and the dooming factoid that Charles is like oh Jesus 1/16ths black or something, so Charles trots up looking gaunt on his gaunt horse and Henry’s all like You shall not pass! standing at the gate of Sutpen’s Hundred[7a] and Charles has the nerve—the jerk—to defy this command and attempt to lay his sister in revenge against Thomas or Henry, I honestly can’t really remember but there was some sort of imaginary confrontation during the Civ. War b/w Henry and Charles and Thomas on the field telling Henry about Charles’ blood connection to himself (Henry) but this isn’t something to celebrate, b/c this blood is tainted, or something along those lines, but yes Charles, face a-gaunt, steps forward and Henry, face matching Charles’ gaunt for gaunt[7b] and then some pulls out what I like to imagine was a minigun and just absolutely mows that boy down.
[7a] It’s 100 square miles, and belongs to Sutpen.
[7b] Doesn’t really make sense.
[8] I.e., French.

(N.B.: The ability to edit and control footnotes in any way on LT is nonexistent [as far as I know], so excuse the ugly execution.)

(N.B. x2: Since writing this I've written like multiple more essays on it and had to study it a lot more and have come to really understand the mythological aspects of it [as that's where my major interests lie] and even came up all pretentiously w/ my own theories on it as a Barthian metamythological prologue to postmodern fiction and the advent of television's influence on literature--/proud /proud /proud /superfuckingpretentious.) ( )

This was absolutely my favorite Faulkner book that I've read. It's very similar to other books of his that I've read in that rambling, stream-of-consciousness style, but I also found it very different in terms of the kind of story it was. It was actually... suspenseful, which is not something I generally associate with Faulkner's writing. I often felt guilty that I didn't have more time to devote to this novel, and so it took me a long time to read it. There was never a time when I wanted to put it down, however, and I think if you've never read Faulkner before, this would be a great place to start as it was a somewhat less difficult read than other of his novels. Absolutely superb. ( )

http://wheretheresallison.blogspot.co... ( )

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. ( )