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One of William Faulkner's finest novels, As I Lay Dying was originally published in 1930, and remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren's family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through multiple voices, it vividly brings to life Faulkner's imaginary South, one of the great invented landscapes in all of literature, and is replete with the poignant, impoverished, violent, and hypnotically fascinating characters that were his trademark.
This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.
Worth the effort!
| Customer Rating:  | | I had to force myself to get through about the first third of the book, but then I was hooked about halfway through. Seriously, seriously warped family and depressing book.... but somehow strangely compelling. After a while you just HAVE to know what could possibly happen next. And every time, every event surprised me. Now that's what I call an amazing book! |
A Grim, Morbid, and Compelling Tale
| Customer Rating: | | Wow! This novel is quite morbid, and grim. Probably most analogous with some of Cormac McCarthy's more dark epics. You read on to see how low this family can sink into a depraved, stingy, and heartless abyss. Faulkner was certainly a genius. |
Now I can get them teeth...
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In *As I Lay Dying* the Bundren family is on a death-watch as Addie--wife and mother--dies. Within view of her deathbed, through the window, she can see one of her sons, Cash, building her coffin. With that macabre beginning, Faulkner tells a story as compact and grotesque as it is powerful and unforgettable.
It's giving away nothing to say that Addie soon heaves her last because the real story begins after she dies. Anse, the toothless, luckless family patriarch, has promised his wife he'd bury her among her own people in the cemetery across the river. Unfortunately, it's been raining real hard lately and the bridges are washed out. But a promise is a promise and Anse is going to see it through come hell and high water. So the Bundren's set out on funeral procession through said hell and high water, passing from one mishap to the next, eventually followed by a flock of buzzards as mom's corpse begins to immodestly decompose.
The novel is narrated in short chapters, each told through a different character's point of view, mostly the Bundren family, and all in a sort of heavy backwoods patois that will surely pose a challenge to some readers--and delight the rest with its flexibility, originality, and hypnotic power.
Faulkner is the acknowledged grandmaster of the southern gothic and *As I Lay Dying* doesn't disappoint. It's part tragic allegory, part black comedy, and, for high literature, surprisingly hard to put down once you get into it. Don't try to understand everything immediately. Let the story come to you; let the language infiltrate your way of thinking, and soon all the pieces of this ghoulish hillbilly road-show will fall into place like a bloody chainsaw puzzle.
A lot of novels by Nobel Prize winners are a real obligation to read. This one's a dark and bittersweet treat.
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Of no real literary worth
| Customer Rating:  | Reviews are by nature subjective. That said, their should be a common element, an underlying current that runs through all reviews which peg the book (in this instance) at a similar level. That established, here I find myself rather baffled as to how anyone can either dredge or salvage anything from this book that would elevate it beyond a three star rating at maximum; there must be an element of consensus, because this book (or indeed any) has a basic content and structure, characters and plot that are capable of evaluation and critique. Let us call a spade a spade and not a shovel, this is a shovel!
I teach literature at university level and I am astounded how this book finds its way onto numerous 'must read' lists that appear on the internet and periodically in print. I can only imagine that the editors of such list either fail to read the entire content of said list, or they are simply keen to perpetuate the tired myths that unfortunately ensure largely worthless texts like this still make college reading lists. Either that or they simply read the dust jacket and go by the advertising copy; which according to the 'Vintage Classic' version I bought, sells this book as being, 'a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the old testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn'. Categorically is not, and I defy, nay challenge the publishers or indeed anyone to substantiate such a claim.
How ever you spin it, what ultimately transpires is that for any of the above reasons or others equally illogical, perfectly good texts - especially modern ones, are constantly ignored as white elephants like this go through their umpteenth re-print.
To get down to brass tacks, this book fails for a number of reasons, but amongst those I would cite the following five as being the major points of contention:
i) It is simply VERY boring indeed. A dull tale if ever one was told.
ii) The characters are neither well-established or particularly well-drawn. Faulkner's literary skills presented herein are neither worth of his acclaim nor his many accolades and awards.
iii) Structurally it is a simple narrative (not necessarily a problem), however, his language (except the odd regional accent) is unchallenging and unprovocative.
iv) It essentially fails to offer the reader anything. No new ideas, no philosophical insights, no social observations and no historical documentary per se. I think I picked out and highlighted about four sentences in the whole book, that I felt were interesting.
v) Finally, it fails to establish a new genre, a new mode of expression. Likewise it also fails to re-establish a current mode or extend and develop a literary style. In plain terms that means it belongs nowhere, has no recognisable nor definable style and yet fails to take new steps in establish a new genre; it is amateurish and unaccomplished.
The only plus point that one can give is the use of parallel narration that is quite interesting and mildly revolutionary. That said, the characters are not well enough established, nor well enough drawn as to make full use of this technique and so it simply adds confusion to the overall structure.
I cannot see one logical or justifiable reason why anyone should waste their time or their money in reading this text. Unless it is prescribed reading, in which case I would question the teachers motivations for electing this a a core or supplementary text. I think if you are studying American Literature, literature of death and dying, family structures etc. there are MUCH better books out there than this. |
Homegoing
| Customer Rating: | One of the most important writers of the twentieth century in any country, William Faulkner could tell a rousing tale. Check your collective memory. You're sitting around the campfire and the the storyteller begins.
When it is Faulkner, expect the unexpected. As I Lay Dying. As Dead I Am Carried to My Homeplace. The first sentence: "Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file." When they get to the cottonhouse, Darl, the narrator takes the path around, Jewel goes straight--through one window and out the other. Cash, the oldest son, is making a wood coffin. (This is a very impoverished family in an impoverished South.) Their mother Addie is dying in bed and watching the building of the coffin through an open window. "It will give her confidence and comfort," Darl tells us through his first person thoughts.
If you want a study in dysfunctional families, go no further. Anse, the father, is a n'er-do-well, who is basically indifferent to the needs of those around him. Cash, the oldest, is a mighty fine carpenter, but a little slow on the uptake, while Darl, the only one who understands this family's pathos, is mentally ill. Dewey Dell, the only girl, is not conversant with the facts of life and makes this homegoing pilgrimage with hopes of doing away with the life she is carrying. Poor Vardaman, the youngest, will suffer the most in his total lack of understanding. His mother dies. She is in a coffin. He can hear her talk inside the coffin through the drill holes to give her air (she is decomposing in the hot Mississippi heat). And Jewel, the second youngest, is his name to Addie, the special son for a special reason.
When Faulkner wrote, he discarded all notions of what a writer is expected to do: tell a straightforward narrative. Sit where you are and go back in time to any episode. Plan a summer vacation in your mind. That's the premise Faulkner worked with. The mind is not a straightforward narrator. He depicts that backward and forward movement in his stories. He challenges the reader by never indicating where on the time line he is in telling the story.
In "As I Lay Dying," he goes a step further. He never tells who narrates the story until the reader figures out that the title of the chapter is also the narrator. The first chapter is entitled "Darl." He begins the story in his prescient, omniscient knowing.
Make no mistake. The story of the Bundrens taking Addie back to her homeplace for burial is a comic-tragic one. The person who most deserves punishment for his bad deeds is the one who is most rewarded. Faulkner was no optimist. But he was a chronicler of his times and of a defeated South and of resulting decaying values years after the fact.
If you are new to Faulkner, read this novel first, now that you know the secret to its puzzle in narration. Then imagine sitting around that collective campfire and hearing this story just as Faulkner wrote it. Puzzling on paper, clear in the telling. So Faulknerian! |
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