So I bought Absalom, Absalom! less than a couple weeks ago and I finished it today. I read it while travelling on the bus to and from work. It's the third or fourth Faulkner book I've read in the past year. I was amazed by how different it was structurally, but it still had the same tone and themes I've come to know from old Bill. Basically it's one person telling another a story, but at a glance it can be extremely long sentences and paragraphs that sometimes leave two facing pages with no anchors for the eyes, no pause or rest from a paragraph break. Essentially, it was like drowning in words.
Every so often, I would have to stop reading. I'd still have lots of time left in my bus ride, but I just couldn't do it anymore. Midway, right before I was just about ready to toss the book aside completely, Faulkner connected the dots between the characters that had me flipping through the next chapters earnestly. It was probably the hardest book I've read in a while. But it was worth every frustration.
I realize that reading a book makes me no better than anyone else. It's not like I read Moby Dick, which I hear is beastly to slog through. I think one of the things about reading that I love is that I so often finish the books I start, which I rarely do in other arenas. I have loads of unfinished projects and floundering attempts at things. I even have a few books I've abandoned in my library. So I do feel a small sense of accomplishment when I actually finish a book, especially a Faulkner.
2 comments:
Absalom, Absalom! is a great book, though for my money there is no better American novel than The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner’s ambition with the sentences that go for pages, as he put it, was to balance the whole universe on the head of a pin. Truly the man had a vision, and his vision has been echoed in the pages of his imitators (most notably Garcia Marquez), though never as well. Then again, his style is comparable to other modernists, notably Woolf and Joyce, but I digress.
Really, for me, Faulkner is where it begins and ends with American fiction. Sure, Moby Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are classics, but there’s just nothing other the big 4 Faulkner books that I can gather the same enthusiasm over. That’s probably why I read a lot of literature in translation. Who knows?
Anyway, you’re right, reading a book makes you no better than anyone else, but what is alarming is the manner in which we regard reading in this country, a manner that implies that we ought to feel a congratulatory or honorable sentiment accompany our completion of a book. This probably strikes other parts of the world as ridiculous.
I wrote that disclaimer just for you!
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