OMG, spare me from ever reading Faulkner again!!! I suffered through this whole story because of the hook -- I just had to know where in the hell they were going to bury the mom! But never again! The language was awful, like wading through mud. What was Faulkner trying to prove?

I implore all teachers to *please* drop this book from their assigned reading list. Do not torture students and turn them off to reading forever. I'm a life-long book worm who loves classics, but this book would have cured my "bibliophilia" way back when. ( )

I did not like this one a ton. Parts were fascinating like the change in main narrator and the surprise monologue near the middle. This was an interesting commentary on toxic family dynamics, that's for sure. I very much disliked the dad, particularly his final antic.

Faulkner tends to write in a confusing manner and it feels like he does it to try and sound smart, almost contrived. I did not appreciate 15 different points of view. This added to some of the parts that left me puzzled throughout - saying "what?" "why are they saying that?" and "who is this?". In the end, the character who goes "off the deep end" felt too surprising. There were no hints, clues, or foreshadowing at all.

The youngest character was confusing as it was difficult to determine if he was a young teen who was quite off or a younger kid who was just a little bit off. "My mother is a fish." What? Is this how you're grieving? Are you just odd? ( )

I read this book first in college, and I loved the multiple points of view and the quiet horror of the story. You know nothing good is going to happen, but you can't stop watching it. ( )

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. 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 ( )