As I Lay Dying

Here, in grief, things tumble into their constituents, into inanimacy, an unknowing, or in some instances a knowing too well that supercedes reductive language. Pride and vanity bear through carrying out a woman's revenge, one metted towards all but the man upon whom it was fixed. While it is not allotted so much direct pronouncement as other concerns, the tragedy and sorrow of womanhood is perhaps the most pronounced theme, everpresent as undercurrent, rising occasionally to wash away the bridge or drive a rushing log through the ford. After some chapters I had to set it aside and go for a walk. Impeccably written, at times genuinely visceral.

34. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
OPD: 1930
format: 182-page hardcover (no ISBN or publication date, but maybe 1960's?)
acquired: 2006 read: May 25-27 time reading: 6:42, 2.2 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: Classic theme: Faulkner
locations: 1920’s Mississippi
about the author: 1897-1962. American Noble Laureate who was born in New Albany, MS, and lived most of his life in Oxford, MS.

I cannot capture or adequately post on this one. It's bigger than my ability to express. It's just doing a whole lot of stuff, from many different approaches, and it all works. I was absorbed. I was reading at a crawl, slowly wading through words that were demanding to me that I slow down and wade through them, and experience them, think of their sound. show more Meanwhile they were doing other things. This book isn't exactly a wow, but it has a presence, once you begin, that fills a lot of your mind, that hangs out there as some big thing. And I can't tell you what that big thing even is. But I have something like an awe there. In some non-emotional but deep way I find myself very attached to this.

It's all voices, in 1 to 4 or so page chapters titled by the speaker/thinker. Vardaman tells us, "My Mother is a fish." That's a whole capture. Here's his mother, Addie, speaking about her husband, Anse:

"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; lover or Anse: It didn't matter."

The story is about the death of Addie Bundren on her husband's poor farm isolated in rural Mississippi. She has made her husband promise to take her body to the town she came from, Jefferson, MS, about 40 miles away. They don't have a car, so this would by animal cart. When she dies, the weather breaks and the local river swells and tears down all the old bridges. But Anse is a weird guy, and a promise is a promise. He takes his three sons, his daughter, Dewey Dell, and a friend to help transport her. So, in a sense the book has two parts, the anticipation of Addie's death, where she looks out a window to watch her son make her coffin, the sounds of his sawing and hammering running through the text, and then a journey, their own odyssey.

But, it's the voices. That's everything here. From the opening line. They are just so distinct, that as a reader, my mind melded with their southern rural slang. Somehow, they take on their own reality, and they are the book. It's a kind of stream of conscious, with a repetition that should be irritating, but works, giving us a variety minds, sometimes compromised, sometimes religious, sometimes so coldly or even silently practical. It's almost doesn't matter what they say (or how funny it might be. The humor is superb). They have a rhythm and experience, that, itself, lingers.

This is a non-overrated wonderful classic. Recommended to the Faulkner curious.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/360386#8549381 show less

The impoverished and somewhat mule-headed farmer Anse Bundren has promised his wife Addie that she can be buried in Jefferson, where her family comes from. But that's several days' wagon journey away, even when the rivers aren't in flood. Anse and his children set out nonetheless, coping with dangerous fords, burning barns, untreated injuries, and a whole host of other personal difficulties along the way.

The text switches around between the viewpoints of all the family members (including the deceased Addie) and a number of outsiders, each with their own distinctive style. It's often hard to follow what's going on and how people are connected to each other, and the language of some of the speakers is so deep in eccentricities of dialect show more that you have to read it three or four times, but despite that it's beautiful and strange and often deeply shocking.

Faulkner was obviously showing off when he wrote this (he later claimed — falsely — to have written it in six weeks without any revisions at all along the way), but you can't help being drawn in by most of his characters, appalling as they are, and sympathising with their problems. Good stuff, in small doses. show less

I persevered and I was rewarded...

I have a strange history with the author and the book. Having struggled somewhat to get to the end of The Sound and the Fury a few years back, I wanted to have another conversation with Faulkner.

William is not easy to talk to. He insists on using this southern dialect that is barely recognizable as English at times. He does not tell you the story in a straightforward manner, he keeps jumping back and forth, always digressing, he tends to forget the voice of some character, himself stepping into their shoes.

I borrowed As I Lay Dying from a library three times. First time, I only leafed through a few pages and decided I was not in the mood for deciphering the dialogs. Second time, I earnestly started show more reading and got as far as boy's obsession with the fish. The going was tough, it did not seem like the book had anything new to offer, I decided I had enough of Faulkner and the book went back to the library.

It was under fortitions circumstances that I picked up the book again in a couple of months. I had just finished this monster titled The Tin Drum. Despite enjoying it quite a bit, I needed an antidote to the humorous and the hysterical in the Drum, I needed something that was not satirical and was not cynical, I needed something dry and monotonous. When my eyes fell on As I Lay Dying on the library shelf, it was like a stroke of fortune. This is it! I could not think of a more humorless book. Besides, after completing Grass's colossal tome I had no justification for abandoning Faulkner's slender volume.

The book came to life as soon as the person who lay dying finally died and the journey began. It was not that suddenly the story jumped into action, things were still moving along slowly, matter-of-factly. By the time you get to this point you at least understand who the characters are, they are developed beyond the names in the chapter titles, you know their thoughts, their fears and their wants. Getting to that point is hard but after that the story flows seamlessly, like the river they need to cross.

The voices of characters become very distinct and recognizable, you could even drop the chapter titles at some point and it would be clear who is speaking. It is under the guise of feeble-minded Darl that Faulkner himself chooses to hide, chooses to release his poetic urges that come out in stark contrast to the stammering expressions of the clear-minded members of the family. This poetic flights of fancy are necessary for the book to proceed, they ultimately provide the balance that holds the storytelling together.

United by the grief and driven apart by their diverging needs, the characters clash. The sad journey, the family on the verge of collapse, an impending disaster absorb the reader. The tension mounts with vultures circling overhead and reaches the breaking point with the past reflections from the newly dead. This chapter almost ascends to the height of a myth. It might leave you shaking, it might take your breath away, it might force you to question who you are. All the chapters before it are in preparation for this point, the pinnacle you briefly and fleetingly reach, the reason for reading.

After that the story rolls downhill, it gathers pace, it races towards its yet unclear but inevitable ending, where you finally recognize that Faulkner has a sense of humor after all. show less

"My mother is a fish" is the only sentence in this entire book where Faulkner is not silently laughing at these white trash folk behind the white of the page. This book is a comedy, not a tragedy, but Vardaman doesn't get the joke. If you squint hard enough at Chapter 19, you can see Vardaman standing in the door, watching the heat rise off the gravel. His eyes are sad and confused. His mother is a fish.

Faulkner is an author I discovered in high school and come back to periodically. I think his writing is pretty close to brilliant. I also find it difficult to really understand one of his novels with only one reading. [As I Lay Dying] is no exception.

In this novel Addie Bundren, mother and wife, dies, and at her request the family is tasked to bring her body to her home town of Jefferson, Mississippi for burial. For this poor, large, rural family, this is a large undertaking. It's a slim novel, but so much happens - destroyed bridges and dangerous river crossings, a broken leg idiotically set with cement, a hard-earned horse sold by a shiftless father, an arson and arrest, and a quest for an abortion. Seriously, all of that. But I show more didn't even realize how much I was learning about the family until the short book ended and I reflected back.

The story is told by 15 different narrators and each has a distinctive voice and point of view to add. It did make it hard to get in the flow of the book, but it also works very well. show less

The vernacular this is written in made it a little hard to get into. Also the multiple viewpoints and lack of linear story telling make it a little confusing in places. The trials and tribulations of the Bundren family taking their mother/wife to be buried with her people are very vividly drawn and quite comical at times. I think there are a lot of biblical allusions going on that passed mostly over my head. But its very human and funny as well, so I'm glad I read it.