1. Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner
OPD: 1926
format: 350 pages within an ebook anthology: William Faulkner: Novels 1926-1929: Soldiers' Pay / Mosquitoes / Flags in the Dust / The Sound and the Fury
acquired: January 1 read: Jan 1-7 time reading: 10:12, 1.7 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: 1920’s Fiction theme: Faulkner
locations: mainly Charleston, Georgia, 1919
about the author: 1897-1962. American Noble Laureate who was born in New Albany, MS, and lived most of his life in Oxford, MS.

Faulkner's first published novel, one that no one read. 1200 copies sold before he became famous and this wasn't the first one anyone read once he got famous either. It's also a little unusual in that the setting is small town Georgia, not Mississippi (and that he wrote it while living in New Orleans, not in Oxford, MS). It's an interesting and complex novel, doing lots of things. It's also drawn out a bit and Faulkner clearly had trouble letting his characters go.

He's working within post-war America. WWI soldiers are returning home to wives, fiancés, and widows, and not everyone has been true, or wants to be. The soldiers are wild and girls have are working through a lot. The plot is a love-tangled story. A hot-headed veteran, Joe Giligan, takes to a seriously wounded air force veteran who is dying, and also going blind, and who has a nasty facial scar. The pilot has a fiancé waiting at home. Joe decides to help the pilot home, and gets help from a war widow he falls for; but feelings are kind but not mutual and she might have more interest in the dying man. Once they reach Charleston, GA, where the pilot was reported dead, we meet the wounded soldier's father, a rector who can't see that his son is dying, and his fiancé, who is young, gorgeous, and runs around in thin white silk dresses attracting and toying with a number of men, some pushing to uncomfortable lengths. It's a sexually charged novel throughout until it wraps itself up in a different way. It's also a southern culture charged novel, with "negroes" filling various roles, including as servants, drivers and musicians. They are always something foreign, other and mysterious, but never threatening. Faulkner seems to like African Americans in their second-class citizen roles.

But it's not simply a sex-charged and uncomfortably racist novel. Faulkner is doing a lot of different things. Most obvious is that he is straining normal prose styles, but not breaking them. He's itchy to jump around, become impressionistic, sketchy, curious. He spends many pages on various micro-dramas at a dance. But he also holds mostly to normal prose and always clearly designated speakers. His characters live and breathe and they grew on me and will hang around for me. I liked them. They are often funny, men literally fist-fighting over women, jealousy oozing, but often talking about it politely, before and after, and sometimes with a lot of humor.

I feel this is a novel that will reward rereading. There is a lot built it. A lot of subtext and richness that I'm sure I went right over, not knowing what he was doing. This is an interesting if forgotten and overshadowed immature work. (An OK first read of my year.)

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/356616#8348434 ( )

Though not as accomplished as his later novels, Soldiers' Pay still has moments of revelation, which reveal Faulkner willing to bend language to get at a feeling.

"They greeted him with the effusiveness of people who are brought together by invitation yet are not quite certain of themselves and of the spirit of the invitation; in this case the eternal country boys of one national mental state, lost in the comparative metropolitan atmosphere of one diametrically opposed to it. To feel provincial: finding that a certain conventional state of behavior has become inexplicably obsolete over night."

Like a rough house Proust. The vocabulary he pulls from doesn't suck either. At times, I couldn't tell if I wasn't getting a phrase because I was intellectually inferior or just not Southern. At other times, his stylistic daring worked better than others. He seems to be going along with the whole "make it new" dictum of the postwar period yet not fully buying into it.

There are amateur moments in the book as well. A lot of gorgeous descriptions of sunset... but like, a LOT of them. Many characters who don't fully flesh out and so become intellectual exercises, instead of insights into the human experience. The more moments like this I read, however, the better I felt. He's human, this Faulkner, and perhaps writing a novel can be learned after all.

I only recommend this book to Faulkner fans and those horrified at how paltry their first novel has turned out. ( )

Though not as accomplished as his later novels, Soldiers' Pay still has moments of revelation, which reveal Faulkner willing to bend language to get at a feeling.

"They greeted him with the effusiveness of people who are brought together by invitation yet are not quite certain of themselves and of the spirit of the invitation; in this case the eternal country boys of one national mental state, lost in the comparative metropolitan atmosphere of one diametrically opposed to it. To feel provincial: finding that a certain conventional state of behavior has become inexplicably obsolete over night."

Like a rough house Proust. The vocabulary he pulls from doesn't suck either. At times, I couldn't tell if I wasn't getting a phrase because I was intellectually inferior or just not Southern. At other times, his stylistic daring worked better than others. He seems to be going along with the whole "make it new" dictum of the postwar period yet not fully buying into it.

There are amateur moments in the book as well. A lot of gorgeous descriptions of sunset... but like, a LOT of them. Many characters who don't fully flesh out and so become intellectual exercises, instead of insights into the human experience. The more moments like this I read, however, the better I felt. He's human, this Faulkner, and perhaps writing a novel can be learned after all.

I only recommend this book to Faulkner fans and those horrified at how paltry their first novel has turned out. ( )

Personajes muy bien construidos. Diálogos buenísimos ( )

I've never been a big fan of William Faulkner, and this book, SOLDIER'S PAY, didn't change that. It seemed overly pretentious, verbose and pompous to the point of being boring. Faulkner's language has always been dense and ornate, but it simply did not work with this subject - a damaged and scarred veteran returning home to Georgia from the war. I'm always interested in reading books about the World Wars, but this one was just too tedious and did not work at all for me. I gave up on it after about 100 pages. My apologies to the late great Mr. Faulkner, but I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this book. (Although I did like the retro cover of this old paperback version.) P.S. I kept reading SOLDIER'S PAY, but it didn't get any better - too many characters, mostly unbelievable. Just a muddy mess of a novel, really. But it was his first one, and I know he got better, so ... ( )