Go Down, Moses (1942)

more powerful than ever; the connections between stories are enhanced on the second reading; the sense of narrative and tragedy are heightened by foreknowledge

parts of this were much better than others. the first story was pretty hard to follow, and even though you figure it'll be clear later, it made for difficult reading.

*spoiler in this paragraph* i absolutely loved what he did in the story the bear when he talked about freedom and how the bear would risk his freedom each year with the hunters in order to more fully appreciate that he had it, and how his death and loss of freedom at the hands of the hunters is what killed sam. beautiful and impossible to do justice in a review.

i always like reading things about race, but a lot of this was hard to read, although he's coming from a place that would fit in better today than 60 years ago. ( )

Faulkner não considerava Go Down, Moses como antologia de contos, mas como um romance em episódios sobre a relação do homem com a natureza. Isaac McCaslin é um dos personagens mais interessantes do autor.
This delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and ursury and mortgage and bankcruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which nor cares…. No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! He thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge. ( )

William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses has a mind-blowing centerpiece in "The Bear", however the rest of the short stories fall short of this standard. "The Bear" ranks with the top of Faulkner's writing (As I Lay Dying and The Sound And The Fury) but the other stories show that this was an author who more or less got lucky rather than set out to distinctly create nothing but masterpieces. This is okay- after all, it worked for Shakespeare, but even he wrote a "Merry Wives Of Windsor", even he wrote "The Two Gentlemen of Verona." ( )

When I'm away from Faulkner's works, I always think of them as "hard", "confusing", "over-the-top". You know, that sort of thing that only intellectuals read and pretend to understand and enjoy. But when I start to read them...

The first chapter is mysterious and deliberately obscure. The reader is placed in the middle of some strange goings-on and must try to decipher both the characters and their convoluted family relationshiips, and the elusive plotline.

But keep reading. No matter how much you feel like you're lost in some maze, or hurtling down the hill acquiring more and more mass like that mythical snowball from your youth, just keep on reading. The prose, which seems at first glance to be so complex and without identifiable form as to be impenetrable, will soon charm you and draw you into ints web; you'll forget all about grammar constructs as you tumble over ideas, people, and events.

This is a sad, sad story of men's pride, women's degradation, the corrupting abuse of power, and the equally corrupting influence of having no power when one man can be considered to "own" another. It's a moving exposition of the American South, worth reading either to better understand both black and white culture in that South, or simply to be carried off into another world by some astounding prose. ( )