Absalom! 1st (first) edition Text Only, Absalom

I know William Faulkner is one of our most celebrated writers, so disliking this book goes against the worshipful crowd. However, I found Absalom, Absalom to be so dense, byzantine and chock full of non-stop ENDLESS run-on sentences (otherwise called stream-of-consciousness) to be nearly impenetrable. If I wanted this much work, I'd sign up for a road crew.

I have a fairly fluent acquaintance with the English language, but I had to read a synopsis to understand the story. I know it may seem chic to love this book, but UGH! I'm on to something else.

This was an incredibly difficult,complex novel. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started it, my only previous Faulkner experience being The Sound and the Fury.

Reading this novel is much like walking into and breaking up a fight: you don't know why people are fighting, but they are and you're thrown into the mix. Here, it is the Sutpens. At first, we hear of a drifter (Thomas Sutpen) riding into Jefferson, Miss. Miss Rosa is telling Quentin Compson about the Sutpen story, and it is obvious this woman despised this man who we really know nothing about. Through the course of the novel, Faulkner has various characters go over the story again and again, revealing more and more and essentially proving to the reader how little she/he really knows. What you think is one thing is actually quite another, quite more complex than you had even thought possible at the outset.

The narrative structure here is very, very difficult. I found it hard (at times) to read more than a few pages in any sitting, but then something happened: I stumbled upon a new revelation and all of a sudden I was voracious again. Just when you're about to burn out, Faulkner throws fuel on the fire. Faulkner's long, serpentine sentences are often hard to follow, but just stick with him. Reading Faulkner is an experiment in trust: if you don't know something or can't figure something out, it's most likely because Faulkner doesn't want you to know yet.

ALl in all, this novel is genius. I recommend it to anyone interested in modernism or just good literature in general.

I well remember when I first read this 1936 novel; I was a freshman in college and I bought a used copy at my college bookstore. I had heard of Faulkner, of course, but I had never read any of his novels.

Boy, was I unprepared. I was overwhelmed by the flow of the language; I couldn't always figure out who was talking and even the narrator kept shifting on me; I was confused as new versions of the events kept popping up and assumed I had just missed something earlier; I couldn't even always figure out the "when" of the story, as time kept swinging back and forth. But I persevered, and when I finished I realized that I loved the novel in spite of being sure that I had missed some important clues that would explain the meaning of it all.

It was the language that captured me, probably because I am one of those who love words and their sounds and their rhythms and the way they can create a mood all by themselves. I really did not understand the novel intellectually, but I felt it -- the sense of impending inevitable doom, the darkness at the heart of the story, the guilt and tragedy of the South. And I realized that if I abandoned my expectations about conventional punctuation and grammar and linear plot and just let the words carry me along that the language actually sounded familiar to me. My grandmother told stories in exactly this way. Even today, my next-door neighbor from Tennessee talks to me in the same stream-of-consciousness fashion.

Subsequent readings have allowed me to better understand Faulkner's message, his themes, even the events portrayed. This is a novel that can be read more than once, with new revelations each time.

The novel tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, who appears out of obscurity in Mississippi in 1833 and carves an empire, "Sutpen's Hundred," out of virgin land (perhaps) stolen from the Indians who owned it, and sets about creating a dynasty. As storyteller after storyteller relates their understanding of the how and why of the failure of his grand design, the reader gradually learns (perhaps) the inescapable truth of the matter, and along with it, the reason for the inescapable defeat of the South.

For readers new to Faulkner, I would suggest entering his unique world with another book, perhaps The Reivers or
The Unvanquished, for they are closer to the conventional than his others. For those brave souls willing to jump into strange waters, I would recommend reading at least some of the book aloud to yourself. Story-telling is a lasting Southern tradition, and I believe Faulkner wrote this just as he would have told it orally.

For those familiar with Faulkner, I'm sure you are captivated already or you would not be considering reading this.

This novel contains one of my favorite lines: "It was a summer of wisteria." You must read the book to truly understand the significance.

"Absalom, Absalom!, in my opinion the greatest of Faulkner's novels, is probably the least well understood of all his books..." so begins Cleanth Brooks essay History and the Sense of the Tragic in his fine collection of Faulkner criticism William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country Experience.

The problem frequently comes in getting a handle on Thomas Sutpen, who seeks to build the image of the great house after he and his father suffer the humiliation of being denied entry at the front door and are instructed to go around to the back. From that moment, Sutpen, in his terrible innocence sets out about constructing the vision burned into his mind. Brooks points out that Sutpen's innocence is that of the modern man, with links to characters such as Oedipus and Macbeth.

In my estimation, Sutpen's innocence is that of the characteristic that distinguishes America and like a crazed karma leads us into impossible pursuits: the innocence that we can recreate ourselves in an image that is divorced from our history and our true selves. Brooks no longer is among us, so I'm safe in saying I don't think he would disagree with my take. Sutpen's innocence is the innocence that views Vietnam as a domino that can be redefined in America's image, or Iraq or Egypt as potential Jeffersonian democracies, or the recreation of America without poverty as achievable aims.

"It is this innocence about the nature of reality that persists, for Sutpen 'believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of a pie or cake and once you had measured them and balanced them and mixed them and put them into the oven it was all finished and nothing but pie or cake could come out" (p.236), Brooks quotes old man Compson's take on Sutpen. Sound like some recent American leaders who think that to bake a democracy you set up a legislature, some courts, an executive body; hold some elections and voila: democracy?

For Sutpen the ingredients were: "I had a design. To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family - incidentally of course, a wife. I set out to acquire these asking no favor of any man" (p.263).

Not unlike Ahab, Sutpen's endeavor ends in an unmitigated failure.

For just Sutpen's story, A,A! would be an incredible book. But Faulkner wove into this Sutpen's spawn, including the illigimate and inter-racial Bon, who acts as a foil to help define his father, and Bon's son Charles Etienne de Saint Velery Bon, and Charles' son Jim Bon/Bond, who is unleashed upon the world and a threat to western society's existence according to Shreve, Quentin Compson's roommate at Harvard. The Compsons also importantly are included as is Henry, Sutpen's son by the wife in his recipe.

But the women characters are particularly outstanding, especially Clytie the slave mother of Charles, Judith (Henry's sister), and the octoroon (Bon's mistress), who to varying degrees manifest feminine qualities - especially compassion and mystery - in contrast to Sutpen's unbending pursuit of his design, and the universe of men characters orbiting around Sutpen.

One final observation: A,A! was published seven years after The Sound and the Fury, which deals with the decay of the emblematic Compson family, culminating in Quentin's suicide. A,A! and TSatF are inextricably linked and inform one another. That A,A! was published so long after TSatF indicates to me that Faulkner wasn't finished with the allegory that put him on the literary map. That he placed A,A! preceding the events of TSaTF is further indication that he meant Sutpen's tale to precede and inform the later story of the Compsons, especially Quentin Compson's suicide.

Quentin loses his bearing in time as indicated by the scene in the clock shop ("clocks slay time" from TSatF) shortly before he drowns himself. In A,A!, Faulkner significantly conflates Sutpen's time/space with Quentin's at Harvard. Or, as Faulkner put it (in Requiem for a Nun): "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text
Faulkner uses "cheap" artistic devices like: 1) referring to a new character as "He" for a quarter of the book before naming him; 2) using a left bracket which I thought was a typo before I saw the closing right bracket dozens of pages later. The worst feature is that all major characters speak and write in the same voice! I could only follow the plot by continuously referring to the synopsis which Faulkner inserted at the end. I believe he is unjustly famous because he was the first white southern writer to show the horrors of the South. The French love to criticize America, so, they gave Faulkner a literary award.

Absalom, Absalom! (the title relates to the return of the central character’s son, Charles; Absalom, according to the Jewish bible, was the third son of King David. A handsome, high-living man, Absalom killed his older half-brother for the rape of their sister) is set in the early to middle 19th century, mostly in Mississippi. The central character, Thomas Sutpen, a rough, ungentlemanly fellow, appears in a small Mississippi town with 20 slaves and considerable funds of suspect origin. He acquires 100 square miles of property 12 miles outside the town, builds an enormous mansion, grows cotton, marries the town shopkeeper’s daughter, and has a son, Henry, and a daughter, Judith. Sutpen had married the daughter of a Haitian sugar planter, who bore him a son whom he named, Charles Bon. When Sutpen discovered that his new wife has negro blood, he pays to have the marriage annulled under obscure circumstances. In his mid-twenties, Charles Bon suddenly appears at the U of Miss. where Henry is attending and the two become friends, though Henry does not learn Charles’ identity until later, when Charles begins to realise who his father is. Henry and his mother begin to promote the marriage of Judith to Charles. Sutpen travels to New Orleans (where Charles first appeared) and learns who he is. On his return, he tells Henry that Charles is his half-brother and the marriage will not be permitted. Henry refuses to believe that Charles is his brother. The Civil War intervenes. Charles decides to break the impasse by marrying Judith, and Henry kills him. Other deaths follow until there is no mansion and no living heirs to the Sutpen name.
This is an intriguing story, deeply coloured with the culture of the Old South. Falkner’s story-telling technique is quite oblique: he makes use of different narrators to illuminate parts of the story that they know first-hand, have heard from others, or suspect, so that the reader is able to gradually pick up the thread. This technique creates a sense of mystery, uncertainty and ambiguity about a story which was nearly a century old. Faulkner’s writing is a poetic, erudite, stream of consciousness by the narrator, particularly when the subject is what a character is thinking or feeling; not infrequently, these dissections of a character’s motives can go on for two pages or more, and they are not easy to read, because they lack fluency and are full of parenthetical statements. Sentences can go on for half a page. Nonetheless, a careful reader will, at thinking and feeling levels, understand the character. There is almost no dialogue in the novel; nearlyh all is revealed by the narrators. Interestingly, the narrators never set the scenes: what the town, the battlefield, the mansion looked like.
The characters are all clearly drawn. I found it somewhat surprising that all of the female characters were presented as passive. One gets a clear sense of what life was like in the Old South, particularly before the Civil War, from the point of view of the wealthy few, the middle class and the slaves and poor whites. The slaves themselves had various classes. As a literally minded person, I found it difficult to accept that Thomas Sutpen could have acquired the wealth he had as the overseer of a Haitian sugar plantation: something is missing. Similarly, it is doubtful that Sutpen, 20 unskilled slaves and a French architect could have built the huge, elaborate mansion ‘Sutpen’s Hundred’.
Absalom,Absalom! is not an easy read, but it should not be overlooked if one is interested in distinctive American writing – particularly about the Old South.

This is a challenging but outstanding book. It is challenging in that Faulkner’s writing style reflects speech and thought patterns, flowing and sometimes appearing to be disconnected, rather than a narrative meant to keep the reader informed at all times of the plot. It is outstanding in that it attempts to relate the story of the settlement of Mississippi and the destructive effects of the Civil War as well as telling a tragic tale of the rise and fall of the Sutpin family. Faulkner relates the story of the old South in a brutally honest way that breaks through all the myths of masculine white chivalry and elegant white feminine grace and reveals the building of Mississippi with all its theft of Mississippi land from the Chickasaw Indians, the rough forging of plantations with near wild slave labor, and the physical cruelty and sexual oppression practiced on the slaves by powerful white male settlers. The novel plays no Gone with the Wind games with the reader but reveals the hostile challenging conditions as the Mississippi territory first becomes a state and then a little over 30 years later becomes part of the Confederacy and then after the devastation of the Civil War is thrown into a period of abject poverty and social chaos as white communities found ways to suppress the freed slaves. This is the background context on which Faulkner builds his great novel of rise and fall.

The novel is challenging also in its writing style. We are taught in school that each sentence should express a complete thought. However Faulkner spins his tale through three narrators who deliver the tale in long, conversational, tangential sentences that may stretch over a page and have 400 or more words in a single sentence. Because the book is related by three narrators who know their listener, pronouns abound, and thus careful reading is required to ensure the ‘he’ at the beginning of the sentence is the same ‘he’ at the end of the long sentence. The sentence structure is more akin to rambling human thought with its many tangents.

The plot of the novel revolves around a tragic family where racial sexual relationships, suicide, potential incest, violence, and murder propel the family members into their life experiences and trajectories. It is a tragedy of the highest order, reminding me of pre-Christian-era Greek tragedy, where fates and passions mix to bring about disastrous results for some family members and sad resolution for those that survive.

The narrators include old Rosa Coldfield, sister-in-law to Thomas Sutpin, the demonic ambitious wild man that forges a 100 square mile plantation from Chickasaw land bought on the cheap from corrupt federal officials after the Mississippi territory becomes a state. Quinton Compson is her listener as this smart and sensitive young man, a native of Jefferson Mississippi, is trying to make sense of the defeat of the South and the social and economic chaos that followed. They also include Quintin Compson, later as the bright young Harvard student from Jefferson Mississippi, and his Canadian college roommate. It is the quest of Quinton to understand the true unvarnished narrative of the creation of the old South in Mississippi and its destruction and what that destruction means to those that follow. His family is one of the few educated, genteel families in Jefferson and these are the very folks who must either face the history of violence that created the old South or else spin a nostalgic narrative of tea and roses and well-treated slaves in a world where no white plantation owner would overpower a black slave woman just because he desired her and just because she belonged to him as property, like a cow or chicken.

In a society built upon slavery, very strict lines must be drawn between black and white and those that are of mixed racial heritage are often the victims of this societal demarcation. Yet in a society that is built upon slavery the male masters have considerable sexual control over the female slaves and Faulkner deals with this issue with a degree of honest that some other southern writers avoid.

Whereas Thomas Sutpin could be said to be the primary character in the novel as he builds his empire, fights his slaves in boxing matches, and attempts to create a dynasty with his two white children; the unfolding of the motives and psychology of his son by his first marriage, Charles Bon, becomes a central theme in the middle of the book. The motives of Charles Bon is unfolded for the reader, much like a mystery, revealing incidents and thoughts until the reader understands the reasons this 30 year old man has entered the lives of his half brother and half sister. Parallel to this exploration of Charles Bon’s motives is the gradual unfolding of the motives that explain the murder committed by Henry Sutpin.

This is a rich book, rich in history and human pain. Faulkner recognized that the injustice of slavery was a tragedy that would bear down on Southern consciousness for generations. Yet there are hints as to the resolution of this tragedy as Judith Sutpin brings Charles Bon’s racially mixed son to live with her or when the plantation home is burned by the racially mixed daughter Clytemnestra, symbolizing the fall of the Southern myth so that the rebuilding can finally occur.

William Faulkner was a brilliant novelist. His command of written English is unparalleled in my reading experience. His work was fraught with wonderfully original images, metaphors and turns of phrase. In Absalom, Absalom, Faulkner turned his talent to portraying the 19th Century Deep South, a society at war with itself on many fronts. His language is profoundly moving and deeply insightful, leaving the reader uncomfortably changed after confronting the Gothic complexity of the costs and injuries to people of strength and character wrought by the convoluted and self-defeating social and cultural character of the Deep Southern context.

Faulkner's authorial gifts, however, sometimes lead him into linguistic excess and occasionally even carelessness. His page-long sentences, recurrent allegories, and creative literary devices bespeak his mastery of prose fiction and the novel form, but they are too often overdone. It's hard to avoid the judgment that Faulkner indulged himself in remarkably skillful but unduly verbose constructs while being carried on by the knowledge that he was aware of his talent and loathe to miss opportunities to put it on display. As a result, this undeniably fine and original novel is needlessly dense and, now and then, brutally long-winded. It's all well and good to make the same brilliantly insightful point emphatically and repeatedly in different ways, but not infrequently Faulkner's presentation devolves into excruciatingly prolonged wordiness. Nevertheless, the reader who has worked through this richly exaggerated material will come away seeing the history of the Deep South, and perhaps the nature of the human condition, in a substantially different, better-informed way.

The notion that the Deep South was at war with itself is in some respects obvious. A plantation society built on the agricultural labor of slaves is antagonistically bifurcated from the very beginning. Tractable and productive as the slaves may be, their interests and the interests of the slave-owning class, while inextricably intertwined, are inevitably at odds. In an economy as lacking in diversity as that of the Deep South, the only source of economic strength is increased production for markets that planters hope will expand and increase in number. It's a fragile set of circumstances, inherently lacking in durability and hopelessly ill-suited to manufacturing the implements of war, in sharp contrast to that of the rapidly industrializing North.

Faulkner is at his best when showing us that race was not the only source of unbridgeable social gaps, fraught with tension and discord, that rendered the Deep South inherently unstable, riven by internecine conflicts. Thomas Sutpen and his family came to Virginia from the mountains of what is now West Virginia in 1817. Sutpen's father worked on a plantation in an unspecified capacity when Sutpen was in his early teens. In his first and only encounter with inhabitants of the baronial mansion that housed the owner and his family, Sutpen learned what it means to be relegated to the status of what some then and today call white trash.

Sutpen left home and set off to secure the wealth he would need to emulate the world of the wealthy and decadently comfortable planter. Through means and methods not befitting a Deep Southern gentleman, he succeeded in building an opulent plantation house and securing one hundred square miles of farm land that when cultivated made him rich. Had he not succeeded, however, and for those of like backgrounds not sufficiently foolhardy to try, the Deep South was a place in which he and they they had no stake. Nominally free, they lived in poverty and had no claim to pride or honor, and certainly nothing worth fighting for.

Sutpen is the most conspicuous and influential character in Absalom, Absalom. The other characters -- acknowledged kin, unacknowledged offspring, products of miscegenation, wives, ex-wives, dead wives, would-be wives, an androgynous but bellicose grandson -- are tied to him in ways that reflect, perhaps even seem inevitable, in a slave-based society where patriarchy is the sub-text. This is the sort of world that drives men mad, leads brother to kill brother, and renders women stoic and bitter, manifesting cross-sex conflict in a set of circumstances where antagonism is already deep-rooted and pervasive in a variety of ways.

All this seems wildly irrational unless one shares the assumptions that were most important in the Deep Southern ethos. Then it can be as rationally calculable as the legally codified, precisely measured difference between a quadroon, an octaroon, or some greater or lesser fraction of blackness. Sutpen took these distinctions sufficiently seriously that their existence sometimes defined the difference between possibility and impossibility, in ways that those not imbued with the Deep Southern mindset could never appreciate or understand.

History has taught us that the Civil War destroyed much of the material wherewithal of the Deep South, but Faulkner makes clear that the ugliest aspects of its socially constructed reality lived on. The ambivalent relationship of Deep Southerners with their heritage took its toll, and was eventually distilled and noxiously purified into an evil essence in the form of the most objectionable contemporary red necks, or so it seems to me.

Absalom, Absalom is a long, difficult, and clearly imperfect book. But anyone who takes its full measure will be a different person from the one who started. Whether or not that makes it worth the effort is a question each of us answers alone. American society today seems to be at war with itself as manifest in the red state/blue state dichotomy. Whether or not we can survive the internal discord, or fail after the fashion of the Deep South, remains to be seen.

The obfuscation of William Faulkner’s 1937 novel Absalom, Absalom! is immediate, so that by the end of the first paragraph I was like a cat with back raised and hackles up:

“From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that — a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wisteria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quite inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.”

Whew — it makes Cormac McCarthy seem like Fun with Dick and Jane, doesn’t it?

After the longest sentence in the book (1,289 words), often cited as the longest on record by any writer, I remembered with admiration the seven-word, one-sentence paragraph that opens the second chapter of Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden: “The brain of a fish isn’t much.”

Tucked away in all the dead weight are some quotable clarities. Before Sutpen’s arrest in the second chapter: “Because there was stilll no warrant for him, you see: it was just public opinion in an acute state of indigestion.”

Au fond, I am not a student or a professor in an English department in a college or university, so I am not required to revere Faulkner, and I don’t. As with other Faulkner novels I’ve read, there is a compelling and significant story here, but too much of the time it is buried in self-imitative hogwash language. Never have adjectives and adverbs behaved more disgracefully.

I unapologetically began skimming about halfway through, and I believe I am now finished with Faulkner for this incarnation.

An aside: You have to wonder how much some readers are willing to put up with without squawking. Reading a sentence that went on for more than a page in Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses, I encountered the recurring phrase “by who’s decree,” which surely should be “by whose decree.” What — even the proofreader dozed off? Years later, I took a paperback copy of the book off a bookstore shelf to check if the typo was still there. Evidently the paperback publisher used the same plates from the hardbound edition, because there it was — “by who’s decree” — after an extraordinary number of printings in both hardbound and paperback.

An additional aside: The spelling and grammar checking functions in IMac Pages go berserk when you’re quoting Faulkner.

Even recognizing "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying" for the literary masterpieces they are, ABSALOM, ABSALOM! is William Faulkner's greatest novel. It is a stupendously protean and complex novel, such that one could (as many have) go on and on about it. Here, I will briefly mention four aspects of its greatness.

First, there is one of the most raw yet enigmatic characters of American fiction - Thomas Sutpen. Born in 1807 in primitive frontier conditions in what was then western Virginia and then gradually moving with his father south and west, Sutpen was raised as white trash. The turning point in his life occurred when, at age fourteen and wearing patched clothes and no shoes, he was charged with carrying a message to the plantation house, where he knocked on the front door and was told by the uniformed, silk-stockinged Negro (the novel uses another word beginning with an "n") to never again come to the front door and to go around to the back. Sutpen vowed to transform himself, to overcome his heritage, and to have sons and grandsons who never would suffer the humiliation he suffered. With tremendous energy and single-mindedness he carved out of the primeval forest of Northeast Mississippi a plantation of one hundred square miles - Sutpen's Hundred - and then set out to spawn that son with a female of respectable background. But he ends up being thwarted time and time again - for example, when he learns that his first wife (after she gave birth to a son) had Negro blood, when the Civil War breaks out and the Confederate army calls him away from Sutpen's Hundred for four hard years, and when the son his second wife bore him disappears after murdering the disowned, part-Negro son of his first wife. When the life of Thomas Sutpen finally comes to an end it is via the most grim and unlikely Grim Reaper (replete with rusty scythe). The character from world literature Thomas Sutpen most reminds me of is Sophocles's Oedipus. Incidentally, a rough model for Thomas Sutpen was Faulkner's great-grandfather William C. Falkner (1825-1889).

Second, ABSALOM, ABSALOM! embodies a great story - a detective story of sorts, but one that is singular (rather like Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" is a singular detective story). I cannot begin to enumerate all the mysteries that Faulkner poses and then gradually unravels, some to a final denouement, others only partially or ambiguously.

Third, there are the grand and tragic themes of the novel. History, including the settlement of the frontier, the Civil War, slavery, and the South. Human conduct in extremis, including incest, miscegenation, fratricide, and rape. (Which, by the way, is worse - incest or miscegenation? That is one of the unanswered questions of Faulkner's detective story.)

And then there is the magnificent prose. Faulkner's voice is so confident, so omniscient. He is prone to inventing words, and even when he doesn't his preferred vocabulary is often fusty - words such as "effluvium", "abnegant", "suspiration", "durance", "implacable", and "adjunctive"; but it works, it brings home that you are reading something extraordinary, almost Biblical. Again and again, he tosses off memorable phrases: for example, "that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality"; "necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride"; and "your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory".

To be sure, ABSALOM, ABSALOM! is a dense, demanding, and difficult novel. But it more than repays the time and effort required to read it. I first read it forty years ago. I hope to read it yet once more in my life. But first, I intend in the near future to re-read "Moby-Dick" and determine for myself which of the two is the greatest American novel. To my mind, they are the only two contenders.

Faulkner at the height of his powers, and here he solidifies that he is not only the greatest American author to live but also one of the top 5 greatest authors ever. Nobody has written with the symbolic mythic power Faulkner did. Yes you might have to read each paragraph several times, but it'll make you a better person and reader each time. Southern Gothic at its best.

An extraordinary novel, William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" (1936) tells the story of Thomas Sutpen and of the Old South and its aftermath. The book is set in northern Mississippi in Faulkner's fictitious Yoknapatawa County. Part of the story takes place in the small town of Jefferson, but the story centers on a large 100 square mile plantation 12 miles from the town, "Sutpen's Hundred" and on its owner and builder, Thomas Sutpen. The story has multiple voices, the most prominent of which is young Quentin Compson, 20, who narrates Sutpen's story to his college roommate, Shreve Mccannon, a Canadian, during a snowy night in 1910 in Harvard.

In the course of the book, the same story gets told many times, each time with more detail and by speakers with different perspectives. The manner of the unfolding, among many other things, makes the book difficult to read especially at first, as the reader is thrown unprepared into a complex, shadowy past world. There are three basic familial groups in the book: Thomas Sutpen's, the Coldfields,a small mercantile family in Jefferson, and the Compson's. Thomas Sutpen married a Coldfield daughter, Ellen, and the couple had two children, Judith and Henry. The Compson were friends of Sutpen's and narrate much of the story.

The story begins in 1833 when Sutpen arrives mysteriously, acquires land, and builds his large mansion. He remains an outsider to the town. The reader learns a good deal of his earlier life as the story unfolds. The story is dark, passionate and brooding, with themes centering around slavery, incest (resulting from the institution of slavery), and miscgenation. Before arriving in Mississippi, Charles Sutpen had married in Haiti and had a son, Bon, and cast wife and son both aside. When Henry attends the University of Mississippi, Bon mysteriously befriends him and ultimately becomes engaged to Judith Sutpen. The story develops around this proposed marriage, both incestuous and across racial lines.

Sutpen's story is fused to a story of the old South before the Civil War and to the pride that led the South to engage in that disastrous, ruinous conflict. The reader sees the pre-bellum South, the Civil War South, and the defeated, conquered South following the War with a strange insight. The book has the feel of high tragedy. The author's attitude towards the South resists summarization. The Biblical title of the novel suggest that Faulkner sees the old South as David saw his son Absalom: dearly beloved but fatally flawed. Faulkner shows a society doomed by its dependence on slavery, while he shows love for its toughness, independence, and passion. At one point, one of the characters says in describing the Old South:

"Yes, for them: of that day and time, of a dead time; people too as we are and victims too as we are, but victims of a different circumstance, simpler and therefore, integer for integer, larger, more heroic and the figures therefore, integer for integer, larger, more heroic and the figures therefore more heroic too, not dwarfed and involved but distinct, uncomplex who had the gift of loving once or dying once instead of being diffused and scattered creatures drawn blindly limb from limb from a grab bag and assembled, author and victim too, of a thousand homicides and a thousand copulations and divorcements."

Quentin Compson and his Canadian friend Shreve offer differing perspectives on the South and on the tale.

"Absalom, Absalom!" is notoriously difficult to read. Part of the difficulty arises from the layers through which the story unfolds. But the larger difficulty lies in the baroque, bravura, and wordy writing style of this book with long, almost endless sentences, wandering clauses and digressions, and full vocabulary. Styles make books. In this case, the style is integrally tied to the story and the meaning that the author conveys of a distant, difficult world, that is opaque and hard to understand. The story and the world and life it shows can be seen only through a glass darkly. In coming to the book for the first time, I was frustrated together with many earlier readers. I think the best course is to persevere and not to linger overlong over the many obscurities and hard passages as the story unfolds. The book becomes more dramatic and accessible with the telling.

I was greatly moved by this book and by its portrayal of the South and of the Civil War. The novel tells of the human condition in ways that cannot be found in histories. "Absalom, Absalom!" belongs in the front rank of American novels. I am glad to have read the book at last.

Robin Friedman
(Originally posted July 21, 2012)

Surely the argument about whether or not this is the greatest American novel of all time comes down to taste. If you like Faulkner, truly find joy in tackling his overtly-complex yet rhythmic meanderings, his highly structured chaos, then there is no doubt that "Absalom! Absalom!" is that novel. It is a purely American masterpiece rising from the ashes of the South and questioning, in bold, inventive ways, the legacy of those who lost the Civil War. At the story's heart, one man and his attempt to make a name for himself, in ways mysterious and possibly unethical. Racism, slavery, the aftershock of slavery's demise, Faulkner confronts the South's deepest and darkest flaws, explores them from a variety of viewpoints that thoughtfully muddies the already confused waters.
And if you don't like Faulkner, then you will still appreciate the slice of American history that Faulkner has captured in these pages. Half of our nation experiencing a severe identity crisis while confronting the clash between their ideas on race and those of the evolving culture, America was in danger of falling apart and the Stupen clan around which "Absalom! Absalom!" revolves represent that struggle in ways more informative and infinitely more poetic than history text ever could.
William Faulkner has written at least two other undeniable classics. "Absalom! Absalom!" may be undeniably perfect. No amount of praise will ever suffice.
Seriously.

An extraordinary novel, William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" (1936) tells the story of Thomas Sutpen and of the Old South and its aftermath. The book is set in northern Mississippi in Faulkner's fictitious Yoknapatawa County. Part of the story takes place in the small town of Jefferson, but the story centers on a large 100 square mile plantation 12 miles from the town, "Sutpen's Hundred" and on its owner and builder, Thomas Sutpen. The story has multiple voices, the most prominent of which is young Quentin Compson, 20, who narrates Sutpen's story to his college roommate, Shreve Mccannon, a Canadian, during a snowy night in 1910 in Harvard.

In the course of the book, the same story gets told many times, each time with more detail and by speakers with different perspectives. The manner of the unfolding, among many other things, makes the book difficult to read especially at first, as the reader is thrown unprepared into a complex, shadowy past world. There are three basic familial groups in the book: Thomas Sutpen's, the Coldfields,a small mercantile family in Jefferson, and the Compson's. Thomas Sutpen married a Coldfield daughter, Ellen, and the couple had two children, Judith and Henry. The Compson were friends of Sutpen's and narrate much of the story.

The story begins in 1833 when Sutpen arrives mysteriously, acquires land, and builds his large mansion. He remains an outsider to the town. The reader learns a good deal of his earlier life as the story unfolds. The story is dark, passionate and brooding, with themes centering around slavery, incest (resulting from the institution of slavery), and miscgenation. Before arriving in Mississippi, Charles Sutpen had married in Haiti and had a son, Bon, and cast wife and son both aside. When Henry attends the University of Mississippi, Bon mysteriously befriends him and ultimately becomes engaged to Judith Sutpen. The story develops around this proposed marriage, both incestuous and across racial lines.

Sutpen's story is fused to a story of the old South before the Civil War and to the pride that led the South to engage in that disastrous, ruinous conflict. The reader sees the pre-bellum South, the Civil War South, and the defeated, conquered South following the War with a strange insight. The book has the feel of high tragedy. The author's attitude towards the South resists summarization. The Biblical title of the novel suggest that Faulkner sees the old South as David saw his son Absalom: dearly beloved but fatally flawed. Faulkner shows a society doomed by its dependence on slavery, while he shows love for its toughness, independence, and passion. At one point, one of the characters says in describing the Old South:

"Yes, for them: of that day and time, of a dead time; people too as we are and victims too as we are, but victims of a different circumstance, simpler and therefore, integer for integer, larger, more heroic and the figures therefore, integer for integer, larger, more heroic and the figures therefore more heroic too, not dwarfed and involved but distinct, uncomplex who had the gift of loving once or dying once instead of being diffused and scattered creatures drawn blindly limb from limb from a grab bag and assembled, author and victim too, of a thousand homicides and a thousand copulations and divorcements."

Quentin Compson and his Canadian friend Shreve offer differing perspectives on the South and on the tale.

"Absalom, Absalom!" is notoriously difficult to read. Part of the difficulty arises from the layers through which the story unfolds. But the larger difficulty lies in the baroque, bravura, and wordy writing style of this book with long, almost endless sentences, wandering clauses and digressions, and full vocabulary. Styles make books. In this case, the style is integrally tied to the story and the meaning that the author conveys of a distant, difficult world, that is opaque and hard to understand. The story and the world and life it shows can be seen only through a glass darkly. In coming to the book for the first time, I was frustrated together with many earlier readers. I think the best course is to persevere and not to linger overlong over the many obscurities and hard passages as the story unfolds. The book becomes more dramatic and accessible with the telling.

I was greatly moved by this book and by its portrayal of the South and of the Civil War. The novel tells of the human condition in ways that cannot be found in histories. "Absalom, Absalom!" belongs in the front rank of American novels. I am glad to have read the book at last.

Robin Friedman
(Originally posted July 21, 2012)

While reading "Absalom, Absalom!" (which, by the way, is the only book of Faulkner's that I have read), I found that I was not enjoying the book like I enjoy most books. "Absalom, Absalom!" is tough, rough, and hard. Faulkner uses the English language in a way totally unlike normal speech or writing and even more dissimilar to the kind of language that one would expect his characters to use. He is erudite and perhaps even pretentious. But what might ward off some is what makes the book so strong. The unusual words that he uses fit his meaning snugly and bring gravity to the lives of some lost, wayward Mississippians.

The plot of the book is excavated like an archaeological dig. One character tells the story of Thomas Sutpen through his eyes, then another tells it from another point of view, and so on. In this, Faulkner highlights an important truth of storytelling: it is not always what happens, but rather how and why something happens. Each character sheds new light on the truth and gives the reader a story that goes deeper than just relating a series of events. "Absalom, Absalom!" resonates because its characters feel real.

As it would be unfair to disclose more of the story of the book, I will leave it at that. I highly recommend "Absalom, Absalom!". The book is certainly difficult to read, but it passes one of the most important tests of good literature: it sticks with you.

I am sure there must be plenty of well-intentioned people who have attempted to ban this book, or have considered bringing out politically-corrected editions that avoid Faulkner's copious use of the N word. And there will be plenty of historically-minded folks who reply that the term is appropriate for the place and time, and that nothing derogatory is meant by it. Both would be wrong. For the term IS used in a derogatory sense, the slaves to which it refers being repeatedly described with animal imagery, like dogs or livestock. And it occurs much more frequently than I recall from THE SOUND AND THE FURY or SANCTUARY, the only two other Faulkner books that I have read so far. Opening a double-spread in the midst of one of Faulkner's multi-page paragraphs, the repeated words appear as visible blots on the page, the double-gs darkening the print color like a stain.

But it would be wrong to assume that the derogatory attitude was Faulkner's. It takes a long time for the theme to emerge with the clarity that it finally does, but this is a book deeply concerned with race, not merely in the casual treatment of colored servants, but the hypocrisy that makes a beautiful octoroon (one eighth black) highly to be sought after as a mistress in the salons of New Orleans, but anathema as a wife. As in many of his other novels, Faulkner is dissecting the myth of the South, this time over a broad canvas from 1817 to 1909, with the Civil War right in the middle. He is no sentimentalist, looking back on a time when gentlemen were gentlemen and ladies ladies. No, he shows the shaky foundations on which the chivalrous idyll was built, when a man might totally reinvent himself by the acquisition of money and land (never mind how), followed by advantageous marriage to produce heirs, all achieved on the backs of slave labor.

Faulkner's narrative style is extraordinary, on the one hand old-fashioned in the incantatory style of its sonorous language (no matter who is talking, all use an unusually heightened register), on the other totally modernistic in his treatment of voice and time. For the first half of the novel at least, there is no such thing as telling a story, only retelling it, with passing reference to events that will only become clear towards the very end of the book. Faulkner filters the story through several narrators in turn, deliberately blurring the identity of speaker, listener, or person being quoted, and the unspoken thoughts of any of them. With each telling, further layers emerge. What had seemed to be a simple tale of an adventurer coming into town with a wagonload of "wild negroes" (only not that word) and a captive French architect to build the largest house the county had ever seen, morphs into a story of love, jealousy, and betrayal, then morphs again into something much larger and darker that will take the Civil War and forty years of defeat to lay to rest -- if indeed that is even possible. The last lines of the novel suggest that a Southerner's feeling for his land is an agony of love and shame that may never be resolved.

This is an immensely difficult book (though not quite as much as THE SOUND AND THE FURY), dense, repetitive, hypnotic, steeped in ambiguity and allusion. But never once do you feel that Faulkner has anything less than perfect control of his material, or that his subject matter is not of the utmost moral importance. With overtones both of Genesis and Greek tragedy, this examination of American Original Sin is a true masterpiece.

The greatest of all American novels, Absalom, Absalom is essentially the Oresteia transposed to the American South, with a touch of Old Testament rough justice (check the title) thrown in for good measure. The fall of the House of Sutpen echoes the fall of the House of Atreus. Both ostensibly spring from a woman scorned. But of course, both go much deeper, into the nature of justice, retribution, family ties and, in Faulkner's case, racism and miscegenation.

It it were more readable Absalom, Absalom would make a great potboiler--ambition, power, incest, murder, sex. It's all there, buried under Faulkner's exacting, intricate, voluminous prose which at a few points veers toward the ridiculous but for the most part is utterly brilliant.

If you've never read Faulkner, don't start with this. End with this. It is his greatest work, the culmination of a progression that produced Sartoris (1928), The Sound and the Fury (1928), As I Lay Dying (1929), Light in August (1932) and the stories published in magazines in the mid-1930s that would later be collected as The Unvanquished (1938). All of those are easier reads, even the famously abstruse The Sound and the Fury. In Absalom, Faulkner uses language to the nth degree--parenthetical phrases inside parenthetical phrases, metaphors that spin off into astonishing directions, sentences without end (sometimes literally)--to dissect a complex multi-generational tale of deceit, ambition, hubris, bigotry and sexual jealousy that becomes a metaphor for not just the American South but for the canker at the heart of the American experiment. It's the ultimate racism-as-America's-original-sin novel.

Read slowly. Don't be afraid to re-read sentences. In fact, you'll often have to because Faulkner will break into a sentence at any point with an aside that may itself produce its own litter of asides before getting back on track. And those asides can go on and on...

But that's just one level. On another level is the plot, which is complicated by a timeline stretching from the 1820s (when Sutpen was a child who loses his "innocence" after a perceived social snubbing from a black house slave) into the 20th century, when it all finally goes up in flames (literally). Key incidents take place decades apart and you have to be careful about knowing where you are at any point because it's not always obvious.

And this is complicated even further by the fact that the narrative is given by a series of speakers who don't all have the whole story, and in fact may all be wrong. There are long passages of second person narration where Narrator A is quoting the story told him by Narrator B which includes extended narration from a Narrator C.

I would strongly suggest that you read a plot synopsis before you begin if this is your first time with Absalom, Absalom (Wikipedia has a good one). Yes, it will spoil the surprises but it will make the reading a lot easier. And, frankly, one doesn't read Absalom, Absalom for the shock revelations just as one doesn't watch Oedipus Rex to be surprised by the plot twist or Hamlet to see if it ends happily. This is high tragedy and the pleasure for the reader is in experiencing Faulkner's slow, exacting peeling back of layer after layer of the story. It is very slow going but worth every minute. The only stylistic comparison I can think of in the American literary canon is the late period Henry James of The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors and the Wings of the Dove.

Finally, I can't help but note that Absalom Absalom came out in the same year (1936) as that other great American novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Gone With the Wind (wonder what Faulkner thought of Mitchell's book sales: GWTW came out about five months before Absalom and was already a publishing phenomenon by the time Absalom came out toward the end of the year). They couldn't be more different and yet on some levels so much the same.

Margaret Mitchell is disturbingly unbothered by slavery and racism while Faulkner is obsessed with them. Tara is Sutpen's Hundred without the ghosts because Mitchell doesn't recognize the Original Sin at the heart of the Southern Antebellum society. On the other hand, Scarlett O'Hara and Thomas Sutpen have more in common than one might first assume. Scarlett's "I swear I'll never be hungry again" is Sutpen's "I'll never be turned away at the front door by a house slave again." Both pursue success obsessively and aren't afraid to flaunt social conventions to do so.

Absalom is clearly the much greater work, and that's not slighting GWTW, which I would at least include in the discussion when talking about the Great American Novel (the movie does the book no favors by giving the impression that it is only a glorified chick-lit bodice ripper).

In Absalom, Absalom Faulkner stares brilliantly and incisively into the heart of darkness and comes away with one of the greatest novels ever written. Check it out, but only when you're ready.

THIS BOOK WILL MAKE YOUR BIBLE STUDY SEEM EASY!

It is strongly suggested that, unless you teach literature, you read about this book before attempting it, for Faulkner's style is complex, convoluted, and requires a dictionary to be kept within arm's reach--not to mention the long, often-interrupted sentence structure (accomplished usually with parenthetical comments spanning many lines of narrative) that is made much more palatable if one has become familiar with the character descriptions and chronology that Faulkner makes available for the reader; and do not despair the first time reading the first chapter, for it will make little sense until reviewed during a second pass once the plot is absorbed and the characters are familiar; and also, somewhere along the way, read 2 Samuel in the Bible about David and his rebellious son Absalom, plus a summary of Aeschylus' legend of Agamemnon, killed by his vengeful wife Clytemnestra for sacrificing their daughter (to get a favorable wind for his Greek ships to attack Troy); then, with these endeavors in your literary pocket and focusing your mind on nothing but the narrative, prepare to be enthralled by Faulkner (at least for those parts that you find understandable in this at times complex narrative that may require more than one pass for a true appreciation of Faulkner's skill) who tells the emotional story of the 19th century South through the eyes of Thomas Sutpen, a former Haitian plantation overseer who (leaving Haiti after a slave revolt with twenty slaves, a French architect, and his soon-to-be-divorced wife Eulalia Bon--daughter of the Haitian plantation owner--Eulalia who raised their son Charles in New Orleans) builds a dynastic enterprise in Jefferson County, Mississippi, called "Sutter's Hundred" only to see it threatened and destroyed, not only by events resulting from the Civil War, but also from failures to maintain family loyalties--failures that, like the biblical relationship between David and his son Absalom, inevitably evolved from ingrained prejudices and class antagonisms in a culture that was in moral decay: the end result being a tragic loss of social cohesion within the extended family and in relationship to the larger communities that can only lead to despair and annihilation (note: chapter 6 also contains the longest sentence in the English language, relative to which this review is a limping imitation).

Holy S#$%! This is incredible. Faulkner's prose here is on a totally different level from anything else I've read by him. The huge sentences that make up Absalom Absalom are some of the densest, strangest and headiest things I've ever read. My eyes were literally watering at several points from the bizarre, fevered intensity that he uses to show the sad old south. And God, how sad it is, the entire Sutpen family tree (which takes work to sort out, but not nearly as much work as The Sound and the Fury does, I think) is like a monolith of guilt, revenge, incest, miscegenation, failure and bitter destruction. Every character is just so incredibly, so intimately fleshed out. You feel the rhythms of their minds, of their hatreds, histories and vulnerabilities. The delirious time shifts are brilliantly layered, probably more so than in any other of the Faulkner I've read. Faulkner seems like he gets short shrift these days for whatever reason, which is too bad, because this alone feels to me like a cornerstone of modern American literature. The guy published this, 'The Sound and the Fury', 'As I Lay Dying' and 'Light in August' all within 7 years of each other. Look, lets be honest, most authors are lucky if they write one really strong, really stylistically and structurally innovative novel in their entire career. Faulkner whipped out four in under a decade. Four. This book makes me feel genuinely privileged as a speaker of the English language, that I get to read first hand something this rich and syntactically ambitious. Consider this line:

"Perhaps he felt, now that the grandchildren had been discharged what with Henry away at the state university at Oxford and Judith gone even further than that- into that transition stage between childhood and womanhood were she was even more inaccessible to the grandfather of whom she had seen but little during her life and probably cared less anyway- that state where, though still visible, young girls appear as though seen through glass and where even the voice cannot reach them; where they exist (this the hoyden who could-and did- outrun and outclimb, and ride and fight both with and beside her brother) in a pearly lambence without shadows and themselves partaking of it; in nebulous suspension held, strange and unpredictable, even their very shapes fluid and delicate and without substance; not in themselves floating and seeking but merely waiting, parasitic and potent and serene, drawing to themselves without effort the post-genitive upon and about which to shape, flow into back, breast; bosom, flank, thigh." (pg 67).

Now THAT is one amazing, freaked out sentence. I cannot recommend Absalom Absalom highly enough.

"Absalom, Absalom!" is my new favorite book. I'll put it up with Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" as best books ever in this history of time. I see a lot of commenters discussing the difficulty of this book- it's not that hard. You just take it like you are hearing the story from a lot of different sources, all of whom have some of the facts. I loved Faulkner's heightened, symbolic language. He is one of the few who can use it legitimately and toward its proper end. His flights into philosophy go somewhere, into the heart of the human condition, and are not vain poetry. His understanding of the pathos of the deep South- the relationships between tradition, family, war, failure and God- has helped the South understand itself. I live in Virginia on the battlefields of the Civil War and these hungry ghosts still haunt our dreams. We may never be right, but at least Faulkner has helped us see where it all went so wrong.

Admittedly a reader fixated on the American Experience from the 1920's through the end of the century, I had considered Steinbeck, Wolfe, and Updike as the best observers/decoders of their respective geographies and time. Until I finally gave in and read Faulkner. And, as a Southerner, I am particularly drawn to 'Southern Gothic' writers, notably O'Connor, McCullers, and more recently Cormac McCarthy...especially his deeply dark Tennessee-based earlier works.
After priming on As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary, I took on Absolom, and what an experience it was and is! I am now convinced (as I am on my second reading of it, aided by numerous essays, doctoral theses, and critical commentary found online) that this is quite probably the greatest American novel since Moby Dick or Huck Finn.
It is surely complex in structure, narrative, and style, but presents not only a respectful challenge to serious readers, but offers the reward of compelling story-telling wrapped inside an autopsy of the Southern experience up and through the Civil War, set inside a fictional world created by Faulkner as a biopsy of the historic South. The mastery of language, variable perspective and narration, and plot revelation are only bettered by the cosmic revelations of the darkness of the human soul, and the insidiousness of the heritage of slavery. A work of pure genius, by any measure. As they say, read it, then re-read it, then read it again. And, as Faulkner himself said, 'Read it a fourth time'.

This is a complex compelling novel by a monumental son of the South who uses all of his considerable talents to bring us to a coherent understanding of the deeper meanings of the South and the thing that America itself is most neurotic about, race. However, he does not slam us in the face with it, but instead quietly slides it into the backs of our heads with a stiletto.

The first clue that something big and scary must be rumbling about in the subtext of this novel is when the entire plot is outlined in the first chapter of the book? The rest of the book essentially is just tying up all of the loose ends and details. The second clue lies in the title, "Absalom, Absalom," which is a reference to the biblical allegory about the third son of David who was murdered by his half brother, for the rape of their sister. And the final clue is in the way Faulkner repeatedly rolls the dice trying to give the main protagonist, Thomas Sutpen, a chance at redemption for his troubled soul, and yet the dice keep coming up "craps."

Thomas Sutpen, by anyone's assessment was "certifiable grade A white trash," who mysteriously appears out of nowhere in the Mississippi Hamlet of Jefferson with several dozen slaves, a hundred square miles of land (bought from the Indians), and a French Architect, but otherwise no visible means of how he might have come into such wealth? The story that unfolds in chapter one (and is only fleshed-out in the rest of the book) is the rapid rise out of nowhere from "white trash" to "white success" and on to "white respectability" of one Thomas Sutpen and his multigenerational dynastic family of misfits.

And while the table had already long been set before the Civil War for this drama/tragedy, it did not get played out nor did the real fun begin until afterwards. Faulkner uses the Civil War together with his considerable craft like a cultural rotor-tiller: to break up, break through, breakdown, and turn over and expose in exquisite and unmistakably honest details, the underbelly of southern culture and the southern way of life. It does not take the reader long to understand that Faulkner speaks fluent "abstract-ese," that is to say he deals only in large abstract ideas, metaphors, allegories, etc., and thus serves up the Sutpen family as just a paradigmatic "stand-in" for the troubling racist and thus inhuman and evil Southern white way of life (If not indeed the whole of America). Lost of the Civil War to Faulkner seems incidental and small in comparison to the cosmic sins committed everyday in the southern way of life.

The riddle of the novel is left as an exercise for the reader, whose job it seems is to take the pieces, the partial views, the fragments and shards uncovered by Faulkner's rotor-tiller, and by the end of the novel, be able to paste them together into a coherent and meaningful whole picture of white southern life? The verdict of this novel is that it cannot be done? Just as was the companion case in the bible, the moral chaos and confusion that reigned in the South required a god to intervene, and god it seemed has intervened on the side of the North (i.e., on the side of normal humanity).

It is a tribute to Faulkner's high level of craftsmanship that his construction is general enough for each mind to come up with its own resulting picture of the whole. One such whole is the simplistic one that once was the Black Muslim Malcolm X's mantra: to the effect that the White man is a devil. Period.

Here Faulkner would not disagree with Malcolm characterization on this point if only it is restricted to the South. For what is common to their parallel constructions is that with racism, there always comes the torrent of distortions: of power, violence, murder, religious and racial hatred and hypocrisy. And always too it comes with forbidden cross-racial sexual taboos, incest, rape, and a general dulling of all of the sensitivities and sensibilities that lean in the direction of elevating humanity.

That is Faulkner's deepest point here. Thus that the Sutpen's tragedy was foreordained. His family's curse in the end has been built into the inhumanity of the southern way of life. And thus was biblical only in the sense that his humanity was trapped inside the false dimension of whiteness, a garment whose meaning is tied up in the knot of false consciousness, hypocrisy, violence, wickedness and racism all of which represent pure evil. 100 stars

It is ironic to consider that Absalom Absalom was published in the same year as Gone With the Wing, two books dealing with the impact of the Civil War. For Margaret Mitchell, the Civil War was the passing of an age of gallantry. For Faulkner, the Civil War was the punishment over the original sin of slavery.

This book takes as its central point of reference a great white house built by an enslaved French architect by Col Thomas Sutpen. Col Sutpen, his imagination fired at the idea of setting up a gentile dynasty, is constantly undermined by reflections of his own bad character. Slaves, who lack a real voice are mistreated or forced to service him in the woods and his fate is to sire a totally depraved collection of children of both races.

That his slave daughter is named Clytemnestra is no mere accident. The fall of the Sutpens is every bit as violent and depraved as Greek tragedy (the Greek revival house is no accident either). Each move that Sutpen takes to make his family a force in the region leads ultimately to its undoing.

This book is an attempt to subvert several well-held myths of the south and its slave owners with pretenses to being aristocracy. I suspect that the difficulty in reading the text might be a reason why this book has not been banned (perhaps that is Faulkner's intent). It is better if this book is read aloud since it is structured the way people tell stories, particularly in a pervious generation. It is difficult, but worth it in the end.

Absalom,Absalom is truely a work of art. Reading it should not be limited to literary savants and college freshmen who are convinced that William Faulkner's raison d'etre was to drive them nuts in return for a passing grade. I fell into that second category in 1972 when faced with reading The Sound and the Fury. As much as I hated the process back then, I realized recently that TS&TF was perhaps responsible for training my mind to understand and actually enjoy stream of consciousness and non-linnear narratives of other contemporary authors.

As have other reviewers, I decided to give Sound another read as an adult...and after having done that,decided to tackle Absalom Absalom. The bad news is that the first half Absalom makes Benji's chapter in TS&TF read like the Cat in the Hat. The good news is that with the following tips, both books can be savored at whatever level your capacity for understanding allows:

1)Do read The Sound and The Fury first..Absalom is sort of its pre-quel.

2) I found both books in downloadable format and was able to toggle between the online(ei:free)Sparks Notes and the text. Actually, I read the Sparks chapter synopsis before reading the chapter it self. Don't worry about spoilers (except for maybe the last chapter)...this is not a dime store detective story. You actually know the general outcome early in the book anyway. I prefer the Sparks. Cliffsnotes gives too much information (unless you need to write a quick term paper).

3)Don't let yourself become obsessed with the density of the sentence structure, vocabulary, and intermittant use of punctuation...with the help of a little advance information from Sparks, have faith that somehow, the story will indeed come shining through the excessive verbiage.

4)Ditto the complexity of the chronology; I think (as in Sound&Fury) Faulkner wants you to be confused. Don't further confuse yourself by worrying about who knew what about who when. It all becomes clear toward the end.

5)As you are reading the book, paruse the the store reader reviews and other internet commentary...very helpful.

...in China, which causes the proverbial tornado in Kansas (a topical subject in itself). Admittedly it is a simplistic formulation, but it is the classic metaphor for the Chaos Theory which states that dynamic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Human life itself is an essential "dynamic system," and it seems that Faulkner was a proponent of the Chaos Theory, in his writings, even before the theory was formulized. In Intruder in the Dust, the "initial condition" was a young, cold white boy being offered warmth, and a plate of collard greens. Faulkner depicts this scene at the beginning of "Intruder." In "Absalom, Absalom," one must read more than half the book before realizing the "initial condition" that set all else in motion, in the form of a Greek tragedy: being asked to go around to the back door.

This is a great novel; a quintessential American masterpiece. The "great" themes of life are there: striving, hubris, the choices made in the mating rituals, hierarchical social relations, the means by which the few maintain control over the many, war and peace, aging, family relations, and on and on. Themes that transcend the American condition, and apply to all societies. But few novels speak so directly to that uniquely American issue: its "original sin," slavery and race relations. This issue permeates the book. It has rarely been stated as starkly: "So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear. Henry doesn't answer." Maybe, just maybe, this question was answered in the last election. Imagine, if you will, the sheer strength of "black blood." Just a bit, one-eight or even much less, makes a person "black." Faulkner explores this idea with more than one of his characters.

As a narrative, well, there are actually several narratives, it starts in 1909, with Miss Rosa Coldfield sitting in "a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers...latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes..." Wisteria makes its appearance on the first page also, but one must wait for the fireflies, an essential element of Southern summers, to make their appearance later in the book. Miss Coldfield is intent on telling the story of the Sutpen's, and her interactions, as well as her family's, with them. The receptive vehicle, soon bound for Harvard, and those cold northern winters, is Quentin Compson, grandson of the person who first befriended Thomas Sutpen when he arrived on "the frontier," which was Northern Mississippi in the 1830's. Faulkner is demanding of the reader: long convoluted sentences rarely duplicated, just a hint of a particular relationship or incident, and then he moves on, returning and backfilling, explaining. The author dazzles with his style, which rests on a solid basis of content concerning the human condition. I savored it like a fine after dinner drink: small doses of 20, 30, at most 50 pages at a time. In doing so, I was richly rewarded. I even learned what an "octoroon" is, a term that should slide into the dustbin of history. And who would have ever thought of them as "sparrows," living in New Orleans?

Another "topical" subject is Haiti, still poor, forevermore? White men going there, and becoming rich. Need to learn French? "...because Grandfather asked him why he didn't get himself a girl to live with and learn it the easy way..." Are Caribbean planters a model for Southern society? Sutpen obtained, earned, or stole his "grub stake," take your pick, and built a mansion in the middle of his hundred square miles of land. The reader struggles to keep up with the dates; at least I did, knowing the "doom" is coming in 1861. War, a losing war, which will haunt the proud survivors. Faulkner keeps the war mainly in the background, but is still insightful: there is the year of marching backward, towards Richmond, trying to slow down Sherman as he marches up from devastated Georgia. On Southern military leadership Faulkner says: "...because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say `Go there' conferred upon them by an absolute caste system;" Faulkner had the wisdom, obtained from his personal experience in World War I, to identify one strain in the forces which cause wars: "...that wars were sometimes created for the sole aim of settling youth's private difficulties and discontents."

Why is Miss Coldfield so angry? What was the insult she experienced at Sutpen's One Hundred after the war? I do not doubt that a good 20 PhD's have been awarded based on the theme of women in Faulkner's writings. Absalom is a rich mine of material, not only for Rosa Coldfield's anger, but the circumstances of Ellen Coldfield's marriage, the unfailing loyalty of Clytemnestra Sutpen to her dubious family role, the bucolic innocence of Judith Sutpen perched on her pedestal.

Based on some of the negative reviews, I can only say that it is indeed a pleasure to read this book for the pleasure, and not as a school assignment or a PhD thesis. With all due deference to the store, I purchase my copy from the excellent bookstore "on the square" in Oxford in April of this year. It was the weekend; we didn't have reservations and there was "no room at the inn," (any of them) as the town filled for a spring college football game. The bookstore proudly displayed another "native son," Richard Ford, but you have to go upstairs, past the coffee bar, to the very front of the store to find the Faulkner selection. No doubt some of the football fans could have explained why: Sure, they are proud of him, in an ambivalent sort of way, but he did tell far too much about them.

An essential read, and even an essential re-read, in five years time, given the allocation. Absolutely 6-stars.

I really enjoyed this book. As many other reviewers have pointed out, it can be very hard to read at times, but I found it worth it. Particularly in the first half of the book, there are sections that are near incomprehensible. However, I found the trick was to just read straight through these sections, without getting bogged down in trying to discern the meaning of every phrase. By doing this, I was able to absorb the meaning if the section without getting endlessly caught up and frustrated.

The push-through reading philosophy also applies to the book as a whole. There is no denying it, the story is confusing as it careens back and forth through time with no regard to the overall comprehensibility of the story. Eventually everything falls into place, and I found it extremely satisfying to find out how all the different elements of the story fit together.

Overall, while I struggled through the book at times, I'm glad I did. Despite the confusing bits, the writing is amazing and the story is rivals a Greek epic. The more I read the better the story became, and in the end I couldn't but the book down. The style kind of reminded me of James Joyce in a way, and if you've enjoyed his works then you'll likely enjoy this as well.

This is my favorite Faulkner novel. It is amazing. Yes, reading it is a committment of sorts. But the difficult passages - some of which I have felt as though I am hearing, in effect, Lear speaking on the heath into the wind - can be made less difficult IF YOU SIMPLY READ THEM OUT LOUD. There is a spoken flow to them. The punctuation may well have vanished but that only increases the intensity and force of what is being said/written. Even without punctuation there are natural pauses for breath when read aloud. My first time to read Absalom, Absalom, I closed the book and felt "all writers everywhere need no longer write another word: Faulkner has said everything that is worth saying !" Of course this is absurd, but Faulkner has definitely spoken definitively about racism and slavery in U.S. history and its impact on the U.S. culture.

For someone new to Faulkner, I would not start with Absalom Absalom, Another work, like Light in August, would be a more appropriate choice. But this is his Faulkner's best novel - his most challenging technically, his most epic in vision and with some of his most memorable characters.

Plus his most intricate and involved plot. If you want to know what they mean by "Southern Gothic," take this work out for a ride. In telling the story of how Thomas Sutpen tried to create a family dynasty in the South, Faulkner throws everything he can into this story: insanity, miscegenation, family betrayals, murder, incest. And in the middle of everything, the American Civil War breaks out. There's always something.

Along the way, with its rich Biblical and mythological symbolism, Faulkner uses the fate of the Sutpen family to mirror the fate of the American South during these tumultuous decades.

To do this, Faulkner uses a lot of modern techniques - shifting time frames and points of view, stream of consciousness and interior monologues, and sentences almost baroque in structure. It takes a little getting use to, but stick with it. After a chapter or so you get use to the voice and realize that Faulkner is developing unique characters while giving you bits and pieces of a very intricate family mystery and letting the reader put all the pieces together. The result is a challenging masterpiece with many fascinating secrets just waiting for the reader to uncover.

For someone new to Faulkner, I would not start with Absalom Absalom, Another work, like Light in August, would be a more appropriate choice. But this is his Faulkner's best novel - his most challenging technically, his most epic in vision and with some of his most memorable characters.

Plus his most intricate and involved plot. If you want to know what they mean by "Southern Gothic," take this work out for a ride. In telling the story of how Thomas Sutpen tried to create a family dynasty in the South, Faulkner throws everything he can into this story: insanity, miscegenation, family betrayals, murder, incest. And in the middle of everything, the American Civil War breaks out. There's always something.

Along the way, with its rich Biblical and mythological symbolism, Faulkner uses the fate of the Sutpen family to mirror the fate of the American South during these tumultuous decades.

To do this, Faulkner uses a lot of modern techniques - shifting time frames and points of view, stream of consciousness and interior monologues, and sentences almost baroque in structure. It takes a little getting use to, but stick with it. After a chapter or so you get use to the voice and realize that Faulkner is developing unique characters while giving you bits and pieces of a very intricate family mystery and letting the reader put all the pieces together. The result is a challenging masterpiece with many fascinating secrets just waiting for the reader to uncover.

Absalom, Absalom is a classic southern literature novel by William Faulkner. Faulkner tells the story of the rise and fall of General Sutpen. Sutpen wanted to become powerful through obtaining land and starting a dynasty. The story is told from multiple perspectives, some believe that Sutpen is evil others have more respect for the man. This novel has southern themes in it such as racism, ownership of land, and southern history. The book uses zoomorphism when describing black people often calling them wild or comparing them to animals. The book also emphasizes land ownership and it is reasonable to say that it is Sutpen’s driving force. Absalom, Absalom is also centered during the civil war which brings out the southern history in the novel. I did not personally like this book. There are quick narration changes often without much warning or breaks and Faulkner reveals things piece by piece making it confusing to read.

This novel is said to contain the longest sentence in literature: 1,288 words. And the sentence is incomplete on top of that. This was perhaps Faulkner showing off. Despite all this, however, I love this novel, which is the story of Thomas Sutpen, a poor white in the pre Civil War South. Sutpen aspires to become part of the Slaveocracy that ruled the South. In his climb to building a 100-acre plantation that he calls Sutpen's Hundred, he commits many crimes against humanity, including denying his own children (Charles and Clytie) because they are of "mixed race." The story of how Sutpen does this and the obstacles he encounters, and how he and his mansion meet their ends, is gripping.

Brilliantly composed, beautifully written, filled with pathos and wisdom, as engaging as a mystery novel and as unrelenting as a Greek tragedy, nothing compares to Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner's complex investigation of hubris and the struggle with history. The single most impressive work of fiction written in America in the 20th century—maybe in any century.

Thomas Sutpen is a man with one single, unfailing goal: to forge a dynasty in 1830s Jefferson, Mississippi. A century later, young Quentin Compson, obsessed with Sutpen, slowly uncovers the interweaving, ever-expanding story of Sutpen's ruthless ambition, the intervention of the Civil War, and his ultimate failure and destruction through his children. A gothic novel of the highest degree, this book is rich with complicated family histories, race issues, and above all complex character motivations that create a slowly evolving story of increasing depth and darkness. The writing style is lengthy and dense, becoming at times frustratingly difficult, but in the end the pieces of the story unify into a whole truth: a vivid analysis not only of one man's life, but of the lives of those he touched and of Southern identity itself.

The major fault of this novel is the lengthy, wordy, sometimes difficult writing style; the major strength is the complex layers of plot which confuse, reveal, confuse again, and reveal more, building an ever more complex and meaningful complete story. In many ways, this weakness and strength feed in to each other: it would not be the same book if it were written any other way, but the novel may be difficult or off-putting to some readers as a result. Faulkner's writing style is often dense and presented as a stream of consciousness, where topics shift, articles go unspecified, and phrases or words are repeated for emphasis. In Absalom, Absalom! the style is even more exaggerated, with incredibly long sentences and paragraphs. Worse, despite the fact that the narrator changes a number of times through the book, the narrative voice is almost always identical, making it difficult to separate speakers and determine character relations. The difficult, dense narrative may make it hard for the reader to begin this book--it takes a few chapters to get into the rhythm of the writing, and the reader has to accept a certain degree of confusion and trust that the story will explain itself in time.

However, granted some hard work and some faith in Faulkner's storytelling, the novel expands into a story of increasing complexity and great depth. Like the writing style, which often begins with confusing references and repetition before resolving into comprehensible storytelling, the plot is alternately confusing and revealing. Once one relation, motivation, or event is revealed, it again becomes confusing, and then again reveals new information--information which often revises previous events or complicates an earlier character. As such, the story may come back to the same event three times, but each time exposes more about the event, the people involved, and their motivations, creating an ever more meaningful story as the truth is revealed. Such complexity would be impossible without the dense writing style, and both style and story aid the other into new settings, rich language, new events, greater motivation.

As the book comes to its conclusions and the final revelations unfold, there is a classically tragic sense to Sutpen's story: stuck between the reality and the appearance of his own success, he watches and enacts the repeated downfall of his personal dynasty and finally himself, all by way of his offspring. Quentin, the reader's companion as he researches and knits together Sutpen's story, must interpret this underlying failure, the crisis of Southern identity: what it means to be a part of, what it means to be great in, the South--and ultimately, of course, this is an identity crisis that reaches from the South to all humanity. The end of the book is heavy with motivation and character, and ultimately fulfilling, even as it raises doubt and a sense of personal dis-ease. So while the writing style can be difficult at times, while the constant confusion and re-confusion of the plot may become frustrating, this is ultimately a satisfying read: satisfying to the very heart of the reader, a brilliant piece of storytelling and a wonderful analysis of humankind. I greatly enjoyed it and very highly recommend it--to all readers, even those that have to force themselves through the first few chapters.

This is the biggie. Faulkner's masterpiece - epic, impenetrable, unforgettable, overpowering. You just have to stick at it and the power of the story in all its bewildering dimensions will drag you through. The most difficult part for me was all the brother / sister angst in the middle when the boys went off to war. It seemed endless, but push on and suddenly it is all there and it is all over.

How to describe this huge book? The Greek tragedians would recognise it and acclaim it, justly so. Gothic horror, ensnarement, nemesis, betrayal, obsession, folly, sacrifice, foredoom, vengeance - all this and more, revealed tantalisingly, teasingly (when the two undergraduates play with our knowledge and emotions as they hypothesise in a telling of their own), until finally it is all done. Will you ever take your leave of the great ogre Sutpen once you understand a little more of his hardscrabble origins, the tormented Charles Etienne, the sacrificing Judith and the ever true Clytie? Reading this book at whatever age is a rite of passage all of its own and well worth the struggle.

Here is my review/ Analysis on Faulkner's triumph that is Absalom, Absalom!

First off, the thing I love most about the novel is Faulkner's stubborn resistance of classic story-telling methods. He does not give us a distinct protagonist, Henry is a murderer, Charles commits incest, Miss Rosa is crazy and tormented by the past, Judith doesn't do anything wrong really but she doesn't do anything right and she is shallow and obsessed with money, Quentin is a good man but he really isn't a huge part of the plot. The protagonist that Faulkner gives us is Thomas Sutpen. Almost all of the characters look down on him because he seems somewhat selfish and causes a long line of family problems but in reality he is sort of a good man, it is very telling that Faulkner describes Sutpen as amoral and not immoral. The natural tendency when reading the book is to think of Sutpen as evil because of the way he is described but that is not entirely the case. He doesn't have the greatest track record but Sutpen is determined, he is a man driven by pure ambition with that desire to conquer the world.

Albeit a strong assertion, this book is among the most brilliant works in English... ever. I have read it for pleasure as well as for a graduate-level course, could read it another dozen times before I die. It's not appropriate for anyone's first Faulkner, ahem, most likely, as it is a prequel of sorts to the likewise fantastic _The_Sound_And_The_Fury_ (a complex and absorbing saga as well). It is a challenging read and best consumed when the palate is somewhat attuned to the conventions of Faulkner's other work: Y-- County [I still don't even try to spell it.], the cultural and psychological topography of the American South, family history and Civil War and Reconstruction--eccentric characters and epic, labyrinthine skeletal closets. Even if you've never read Faulkner in particular, it will certainly offer plenty, though it might take some time to understand how everything you see as a breathtakingly rendered detail likely refers to something huge that has happened or will happen. But get it and read it no matter--start with another one if it doesn't work for you, then come back to it.
As an engaging novel, this book delivers. The language is rich with a seldom-rivaled vocabulary and a knack for tangible descriptions. The characters and plot are complex and the stuff of novels. As with other novels, there's more than you can digest, so you get lost in whatever you follow easily, turning back to earlier chapters when you get interested in something you weren't paying attention to before. Characters whose imposing shadows loomed over SF are here, and those whose tragedies consumed your attention in SF are supporting players in a sense. The result of reading both of these is an appreciation for every supporting character's story. No matter where you are in your appreciation of Faulkner, you will appreciate the fabric of the book, rich in texture and detail.
Those reviews that deal with the plot are guaranteed to leave something out. The words and writing are critically acclaimed since your parents were in school. The examples of how a war can raze an entire culture's edifice of identity are compelling, each person's doom and curse being common among her kin and her countrymen: ghosts and sex and violence and cruelty, gut wrenching drama to challenge any soap opera or miniseries or movie. There are themes and studies aplenty within the nightmare realm of Faulkner's masterpiece.

A peerless masterpiece, the greatest novel ever written. Not merely Faulkner's greatest novel, nor even just the greatest novel of the twentieth century, simply put the best of all time. I was nearly stammering when I finished it. It is a text so thick, so full of beauty that to describe it at all is daunting. The parallels to the cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane are numerous, and this novel was in fact a major creative influence upon that work.

First of all, Faulkner is always doing things like this:

". . . and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust. Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish."

or things like this:

"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales, we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable..."

This narrative is relentless, it is a constantly roiling spiral, one that keeps picking up and dropping off details and elements as it grows wider. There is a submission to the narrative that must occur, similar, but much more difficult, to the submission required to get through the opening 50-60 pages of As I Lay Dying, except that this one takes about 200 pages to settle in fully, and instead of confusion, every moment of the reading is stunning and engaging up until that point, then after crossing into the rhythm and cadence and gaining fuller comprehension you are suddenly frightfully stuck with Quentin in the devastating heart of the South and Sutpen and Quentin and Caddy and the war and so many other pieces of this mosaic, this vast terrible mosaic Faulkner is finally able to fully articulate.

Sutpen is the disease, he holds himself up as a mirror to his contemporaries without conscience, they in turn are disgusted by him, his nudity, his windowless mansion, yet they are fascinated by him, Sutpen is kept close, nearly from the start in one capacity or another to his southern gentlemen counterparts.

Yet, this is a love story, as Salinger wrote in Franny and Zooey "pure and complicated" And in a sense I think that is the most important part, that these multi-page sentences, the spiraling plot, the description and re-description and re-description again of the very air surrounding the events of the story are the closest I have ever seen to being wholly purely, truly, complicated. It's as if his layering and re-layering and re-re-layering and his endlessly unfolding and stacking metaphors are the ONLY way for Quentin, and for us, the readers, to understand the South, and to understand Quentin's desperate self-loathing and destructiveness, and Caddy, and Henry and Bon and Judith and etc.

As bleakly austere as the plot itself is, however, Faulkner's revolutionary narration provides the perfect atmosphere for its gloom. Most of the story is not observed first-hand, but rather related by characters who were in turn told the events by others. The main narrator is Quentin Compson (see The Sound and the Fury), who was originally told the story by his grandfather and others who knew Thomas Sutpen, now some decades dead, personally. Quentin is now recounting the tale for his college roommate, while adding his own conjectures as well. And this is the brilliance of Faulkner's narrative structure: by changing viewpoints and retelling the same scene from several angles, the subtle nuances of the various characters, both storytellers and subjects, are allowed to develop. Faulkner's adroit criticism of humanity is revealed just as fully in his characters' reaction to his story as in the story itself. The dense, sometimes stream-of-consciousness narration can sometimes make comprehension difficult, but the masterful prose deserves the extra attention.

The challenging, haunting combination of story and storytelling yield an artistry unsurpassed. Faulkner truly understood humanity, and the tragedy it so often comes to. Here, in this memorable tale, he reflects our tragedies, histories, laments, regrets, sorrows, memories, lost and forgotten, a window into the dark pathos of the human soul.

This novel is a historical reconstruction by the fictional Quentin Compson (from "The Sound and the Fury") of the long ago rise of Thomas Sutpen out of a bog of obscurity to become a wealthy landowner in Mississippi, only to have it all destroyed again. It features all of the bugaboos one expects of Southern or Gothic literature--rumors of miscegenation, incest, murder, love, and betrayal. In the telling of the story, Faulkner also uses Sutpen's history as an allegory of the South itself.
Anyone can tell a story, especially a story that is essentially as old as the hills as this one. What makes this book, of course, is the style in which Faulkner narrates it. In terms of language, this is the most excessive, Baroque, verbose, garrulous and thick verbiage Faulkner has ever laid down at this length. It's like Section 4 of "The Bear" for 300 pages, and features at least one notorious 1.5 page long sentence. I strongly recommend you take a peek at the first page available here, and then imagine that going on ceaselessly until the end of the book. True, it can be very tiresome--Faulkner is a demanding author--but it also has a way of getting into your blood, if you let it, so that the text becomes unbearably effective and powerful.
The structure of the novel is equally elaborate. Faulkner spent his entire career as a writer discovering ways to project narrative into a character's voice, rather than directly narrating himself. As such, you get things like Bob and James talking about how Jane related the story of Rex witnessing Sue and Melanie talking about Larry murdering who he suspected his wife was sleeping with. [This example is illustrative, and bears no relation to the book.) In the final analysis, this means knowing exactly what happens becomes difficult to follow in general, and perhaps unknowable. Of course, part of Faulkner's point is precisely that only we, here and now, can reproduce or guess at the history of our pasts, and it is those reconstructed histories that we live by, rather than the actual historical reality (whatever it was).
This is a difficult book by one of the United States most difficult authors. It is also one of the best books by one of our best authors. The relationship between Sutpen's children and the half-brothers is one of the most effective he ever penned; not since "The Sound and the Fury" had a family been drawn so well. Also very memorable is the psychological portrait of Sutpen as a boy and young man.
Faulkner's narratives, unlike most modernists', do not require you to understand their allusions and so forth to make sense. They deepen the meaning of the novel if you know them, of course, but you can get the sense of the novel without them. In this case, the title is a reference to one of the Biblical David's sons, who launched an armed rebellion against David. In the course of this attempt, the son is killed, and it is at that point that King David cries out his son's name, "Absalom, Absalom!"

Faulkner is notoriously cruel to his readers for making them scrape and dig for details in his almost incomprehensibly dense chronicles of the fictional families of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, but not for nothing is he one of the greatest of American writers. A story is not a collection of cold hard facts but of ideas and images designed to make us exercise the remotest faculties of our minds, and Faulkner's fiction presses the buttons and turns the dials that set our mental mechanisms in motion.
"Absalom, Absalom!" is a particularly intricate machine that links the Old South with the New and features a family tree whose branches are gnarled beyond all reasonable efforts at traceability. The trunk is a man named Thomas Sutpen, who, after an adventurous youth in Virginia and the West Indies, arrives in YoCo in the 1830's with a large supply of money and black slaves, builds a plantation, marries a local girl, Ellen Coldfield, and fathers two children, Henry and Judith, envisioning a fruitful dynasty.
In Faulkner's characteristically confusing style, the story is narrated through a few different viewpoints. The closest to the Sutpen family is Ellen's sister Rosa Coldfield, who happens to be younger than Henry and Judith. She has suffered some unhappy experiences as a result of being associated with Sutpen, but she retains a certain pride as she recounts her history to Quentin Compson, the morose young man who, we know from "The Sound and the Fury," is later to drown himself in the Charles River. Quentin also gets information from his father, whose own father was a close friend of Sutpen's, and in turn discusses the Sutpen saga with his Harvard roommate Shreve, to whom Quentin insists, as the novel ends, that he doesn't hate the South.
As in "Light in August," race consciousness is a major subject in "A, A!" Thomas Sutpen is revealed to have fathered a boy named Charles Bon by a Haitian woman he thought was "pure" white, but he abandons her and the baby when he learns of her mixed ancestry. Later, he has a daughter named Clytemnestra (oh, the implications) by one of his slave women, proving himself to be a rather lecherous sort of hypocrite. Trouble begins when Henry meets his half-brother Charles at the University of Mississippi and brings him home, where he and Judith fall in love; Quentin's ultimate lesson about the Sutpens is that irony is a merciless punisher of irresponsibility.
"A, A!" returns to the impressionistic style of narration used in "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying." There are frequent shifts in focus and voice and extremely long parenthetical digressions which make this a difficult novel, but this is the kind of difficulty that gives Faulkner's fiction its substance. With an almost Shakespearean sensibility, Faulkner creates majestic characters of dazzling complexity and brooding intensity out of the basic cloth of ordinary folks, which is why figures like Thomas Sutpen, Quentin Compson, and Rosa Coldfield survive in our memories long after we finish reading the novel.

Thomas Sutpen when he is fourteen years old knocks on the front door of a mansion and is told to go to the back door. He and his family are poor and just down from egalitarian mountains, the many class distinctions of southern plantation dynastic society stun him. Born of poor white stock in what later became West Virginia, as an adolescent he moved with his family to the Tidewater region of Virginia and for the first time saw wealthy planters. This formative experience at the age of fourteen led him to realize the social caste system of the antebellum South, and this experience led him to conceive his "design" to create a dynasty of wealth and power.
"Out of quiet thunderclap," Faulkner writes of Sutpen's haunting presence in Miss Rosa's voice, "he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color, faint sulphur-reek still in hair clothes and beard" Sutpen with slaves and an architect "overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen's Hundred, the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime Be Light". Sutpen appears upon the "soundless Nothing" of earth like some gnostic demiurge. Distorting the invocation "Be Light" from the book of Genesis, the description of Sutpen's construction on the land 12 miles outside Jefferson shows him calling his own empire into existence with the phrase "Be Sutpen's Hundred" like a demoted godling trying to rob the creator of franchise.
During the war Sutpen's daughters Judith and Clytie along with Aunt Rosa form a cabal at Sutpen's Hundred like three nuns awaiting not Christ's return but Sutpen's. Judith repudiates, but fulfills the spirit of, Sutpen's design by taking in Bon's mulatto son who has yellow fever and dies nursing him. Faulkner has spun an intricate tapestry of polymathic prose. He experiments with characters becoming part of telling the story. The story is told from three views, Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson whos father knew Sutpen, and Quentin and Shreve who are college roomates and who tell and imagine parts of the story in their cold, cold room deep into one winter night, "the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere, who, shadows, were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died but shadows in turn of what were (to one of them at least, to Shreve) shades too, quiet as the visible murmur of their vaporizing breath". Reading Absalom, Absalom! is like being lost in a maze turning corners and finding where you have been before but a little different, something added, growing dimensional jigsaw until you hit the exit panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark, saying I could go again like you have been on some phantasmagoric carnival ride.

I first read Absalom, Absalom! in a class on women's writing and feminist interpretation. The instructor assured us that this book was "all about" Faulkner's fear of and jealousy of women or more specifically of our reproductive power. Even though I was very much a feminist at the time (hence the class in the first place) I admit, this interpretation ruined the book for me.
In fact, I never finished this book while at college and only read enough to get an "A" on the term paper and exam. It wasn't until very recently that a good friend of mine finally succeeded in convincing me to give Faulkner another chance. I did and this review is a kind of thank you to that friend.
For Absalom, Absalom! is an incredible work. For those of you who want to know "what it's all about," the plot is fairly simple: a poor boy goes to the West Indies to make his fortune, meets a woman there, marries her, finds out she is part Black, repudiates her and his child, gets another (White) wife and family. Eventually his son by his first wife meets his second son, the two come home and his first son falls in love with his half-sister. And the younger brother kills the older brother before the latter can marry their sister.
That's it. That's the "what happened" plot but the real "plot" is in the "why happened" not the "what happened". This book takes us on a breathless journey to the depths of the human heart (a heart corrupted by an immutable caste system) and lifts us up again on a rollercoaster ride that is a bit hard to take sometimes. It is about the way people think and react; about the way (and the why) they love and whether they acknowledge that love (or not) and what happens as a result.
It is about the choices we make once but that happen over and over as though those choices are not and can never be made only once. And no doubt Faulkner's fear of women is in here too.
It's just that this time I didn't see it as much; or perhaps it wasn't the only thing I saw.

Absalom, Absalom! is indisputably one of the two or three greatest American novels, and while, perhaps not as easy to read as that stuff by Nicholas Sparks, it's perfectly straightforward as long as your attention span hasn't been destroyed and you can still parse a sentence. But to talk about the difficulties of Faulkner's text, it seems to me, is to miss the point of the book itself. While the subject of the novel is Thomas Sutpen and his desire for an heir, the theme is the nature of time itself, as well as the arbitrary and perverse texture of memory, and the difficulty of arriving at some version of events that we can dignify by calling them "truth." What Faulkner achieves in this novel is a peculiarly brilliant synthesis of form and content; to read the book is to engage in the very process the book describes--to take the shreds of history, to differentiate what is probably true from what is fantasy or myth, and to reweave the shreds. The novel has both the majesty and the inexorability of Greek tragedy, and as it reaches its final pages, the hair will stand up on the back of your neck. I first read this as a college student in the 60's, and neither the book nor my reading it has ever left me. It remains one of the great experiences of my life.

There exists among humanity a small number of men who feel themselves born into the wrong circumstances. Smaller still are the number who ever articulate what the circumstances they wish to live in would be. The people who attempt to live out Rilke's dicta: "You must change you life," are utterly frightening in their ability to do anything that they please or feel necessary in the pursuit of their goal. Thomas Sutpen is one of these men. If there really are only two types of people on earth, masters and slaves, than he is so completely a master that all of us who do not consider ourselves the same should tremble at the fact that men and women like Thomas Sutpen still walk in the streets and on the farms and in the foot hills of America.
But Thomas Sutpen is only one aspect of what Faulkner is trying to tackle in "Absalom, Absalom!" Through the very frustrating, but ultimately rewarding, technique of having different characters in the story retell and retell and the story of Thomas Sutpen and the implosion of his family at the close of the Civil War, Faulkner is able to paint a picture of the south that is on par with the great classical tragedies and the old testament chronicles that gave this book its title.
For Thomas Sutpen and his family the great tragedy of his life are those all to American self-imposed problem of slavery and also of race. Especially race. The genius of Faulkner is that he is able to show just how warped the actions of his characters become when race is made a factor in their relationships--some are able to accept incest more readily than black men having sexual relations with white women. There is an overwhelmingly psychosis about race that underlies nearly every action taken by all the characters in this book; ultimately it annhilates all of them from the world and leaves them only in the realms of history, folklore and legend.
I have written only in the most vague generalities about this book and I do not apologize. The best part of the experience of reading this book comes with slowly piecing together one coherent story out of the several narratives. After reading the same things with only the slightest, but incredibly significant, variations over and over again I had more "eureka!" moments than I had reading a dozen mystery novels. Faulkner is able to give his readers a view of a fragmented world that is much more like our own than the more coherent story telling that is the usual province of fiction. What is gained by being forced to wrap your mind around vernacular, non-linear, and very often ungrammatical story telling, is beyond my powers of description. This is a story that is meant to be mulled over and thought about, so do not fear having to reread it.

The rich tapestry Faulkner has weaved in "Absalom" is a delight in reading experience. Personally, not being an American ( let alone Southerner ), and living in an European "racially pure" ( more or less ) state, I nevertheless find this novel astonishingly universal, touching and powerful.
The story on miscegenation, fratricide, struggle for recognition and "respectability", divided loyalties and above and behind everything, fatality cannot fail to impress anyone susceptible to "eternal verities" of the heart.
Apart from being a master of the craft ( the torrent of words hypnotizes & swamps even a cautious reader ), Faulkner clearly possessed a rare quality of temper, mind, disposition- whatever. It is a sense of fatality, destiny- something that places him a bit apart from the 19/20th cent. writers & puts him in company of ancient Egyptian, Hebrew, and, most likely, Hellenic authors. The intonation of "Absalom, Absalom!" is curiously similar to that of the Hebrew Bible ( the title is not the only signifier ) & Aeschylus or Euripides. Heimarmene/destiny that squashes the Sutpen family, hubris of old Tom, incestual hamartia/sin...all this reveals mythic mindset.
While Joyce and Thomas Mann deliberately tried to construct elaborate mythically inspired narrative structures, Faulkner's archetypal story, redressed in antebellum South ( horse carriages, parasols & all that jazz ), directly leapt from mythic times of ancient Greece and Middle East to commune with ethical core of our beings those timeless verities of heart in conflict with itself.

To characterize this novel as a stream-of-consciouness tirade of wayward thought is not entirely fair. True, Faulkner pencils together one idea after another in an endless series of commas, hyphens, and other grammatical devices save the elusive period (which affords the reader a brief rest). But to me "stream of consciousness" means thoughts spilling from the mind of the narrator-ideas that drift about much like own's own mind does-a pattern of thought better kept locked inside one's own skull than spewn forth on the printed page. But Faulkner's endless narrative is not just ambling thoughts-rather it is a detective story-albeit a much more difficult detective story than Faulkner's "Sanctuary"-where subtle clues and obvious facts are planted deep inside this jumble of sentences. So it's not just musings but is a tightly woven narrative albeit short on periods, white space, and paragraphs. For that reason the reader better read carefully and not miss a word.
"Absalom, Absalom" reminds me of the recent movie "Memento". It is a tale told backwards. We have the ending given first and then we are given various pieces of the plot from different character's points of view. We know what happens at the end of the novel before we get there. But we are not sure why the novel ends as it does until we get to the end. More accurately, we are given greater clarity to the events that have happened as various narrators and events make other events more clear. In that regard it's much like "The Sound and the Fury". In that novel the story is made clear only when the final narrator has her say. As other reviewers have already pointed out, Quentin Compson was also a character in that other difficult Faulkner novel.
Lile other reviews have said read "Light in August" before you read "Absalom, Absalom". It's style is a good primer for "Absalom, Absalom" which is, of course, a much more difficult read. Also I would recommend a proper book of literary criticism such as Alfred Kazin's work on Faulkner. That will help you understand the plot and be able to distill the important themes therein.

Faulkner is not for everyone, and this book is exhibit number one. I read half of it a year ago before going back and starting over, determined to finish it. I am certainly glad I did, and I will say without doubt I will read it several more times in my life, for this book is at the same time one of the most difficult I've ever read, and one of the most rewarding.
First, the cons: vocabulary that continually drives you to a dictionary; long, run-on sentences, with digression piled on top of digression, parenthesis within parenthesis within parenthesis; multiple telling of the same story. The reading is not easy, in other words.
But the pros: Faulkner is a master of "showing, not telling." He writes poetry without line breaks. For example:
** "a creature cloistered now by deliberate choice and still in the throes of enforced apprenticeship to, rather than voluntary or even acquiescent participation in, breathing"
** "battles lost not alone because of superior numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say 'Go there' conferred upon them by an absolute caste system."
** "and maybe they never had time to talk about wounds and besides to talk about wounds in the Confederate army in 1865 would be like coal miners talking about soot."
From these three examples alone, one can see that it's unfair to say that Faulkner's book is one run-on sentence without any differentiation in style or voice. Instead, they show a mastery of language, which Faulkner admittedly gets a little carried away with from time to time, but generally uses much like we use our lungs - without seeming to think about it.
What is most striking about the book is the similarity it has to the human experience. Walter Allen said this is the book in which Faulkner "most profoundly and completely says what he has to say about . . . the human condition." And what is that? That humans are weak and prone to lying, and more dangerously, prone to believing lies that are more comfortable than the truth. When we finish the book, we're still not sure about the details of the story. We don't know who twisted what in his/her narrative, and because the story is told from several points of view, we get conflicting interpretations from the characters about the meaning and cause of certain events. But as in real life, there's no omnipotent interpreter to sort everything out. Almost . . .
"AA" is particularly engrossing in the final half. Just when you think you pretty much know Sutpen's story, Faulkner reveals yet another detail -- coincidence turns out to be anything but, ignornance is shown to be willful, and many other facets which can only be called "plot twists" fall into place in the final 100 pages, and though the prose is anything but easy, it's difficult to put the book down then.
If you're not into "academic" books, stay away. If you're interested just in "a good yarn," steer clear. If you want to see an impressive effort at capturing in writing the frustrating experience of being a fallible, limited human, give it a read.

I like Faulkner and I like difficult books (partly because I can't resist the challenge, it certainly can't be to impress people because then in that case it would be a miserable failure) so in that sense this was definitely right up my alley. My previous exposure to Faulkner's novels (Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I Lay Dying) left me with enough of a sense of his style that I figured I could tackle just about anything he wrote. This novel seriously tested that idea, although I enjoyed the novel immensely. As usual, it's about the South, telling the story of Thomas Sutpen, a fellow who comes out of nowhere to build a great big mansion on a large plot of land that he basically steals and then proceeds to attempt to build some sort of legacy for himself, which in true tragic fashion he ends up sabotaging and destroying not only himself but the futures of his descendants as well. Sounds straightforward? Ha! The story is seen through the eyes of Quentin Compton (last seen in the Sound and the Fury, I think) whose grandfather was present for most of Sutpen's antics. Essentially the story is a series of monologues, really really really long monologues as various people recount Sutpen's history at various moments, some of which they were witness to and some they're just recounting. Faulkner uses dialogue to brilliant effect, retelling events from a bunch of different perspectives but leaving the reader to figure out the motivations, although it does tend to ramble a lot, which helps it develop a rhythmic effect but also can be annoying when the same character basically restates the same bushel of sentences several times in the course of a few pages. Everything is told out of order, but Faulkner obviously had a plan to what fit where since it builds to a sort of dramatic conclusion. This is a novel where the reader has to do a lot of the work though, not only are the dots only laid out and not connected but because the story is told through other people, there's always the question of narrative reliability and how good peoples' memories are. The writing tends to veer towards sharply toward the realm of sublety when recounting important events, a post-modernism trademark which means that unless you're one of the those truly rare careful readers or just an incredibly perceptive person you are going to miss stuff in this book almost guarenteed, while reading it you can almost hear a voice in your head cackling "Ha, you aren't going to get this on the first try, buddy!" . . . try reading the scene where Sutpen dies and tell me what you picked up on all of that on the first shot. However the scene is marvelous and spine chilling in its pacing and description and I went back and read it a few times just to let it sink in. There's also a timeline in the back for those who want to cheat, it definitely puts everything into perspective, but in the case of this book it's the execution that's important. And yes, the ending is as gut wrenching as you've heard, one of the most memorable endings of any American novel ever. I can't claim this as Faulkner's masterpiece, it's probably his best work from a technical standpoint (Sound and the Fury wasn't as integrated as this, although As I Lay Dying comes close) and its difficulty dilutes some of the initial emotional impact moreso than his other novels but if you have any interest in his work, this is one of his key novels.

This was my first approach to Faulkner, and a very satisfying one, though experts advise on NOT starting with this one, as it is one of the most complex and obscure of his novels. However hard to read, it is very rewarding, since Faulkner's prose is so intense, dark and realistic. Clue after clue, the reader puts together the pieces of a nightmarish puzzle, a story of ambition, sin, revenge, envy, hard work, disappointment and tragedy. Indeed, it reminds of a Greek tragedy, one that takes place during several decades, in the torrid scenery of the Yoknapatawpha county in the American Deep South.
The story is totally phantasmagoric; it is the account and the reflection of the diverse -and improbable- narrators, who imprint their own passions and longings as they build the story. The Sutpen saga is a journey of madness and perversion, close in its own way to Russian classical stories. Just as in Greek tragedy, the main character is Fate. The most disturbing aspect of this novel is the ambiguity which characterizes the narrators.
Thomas Sutpen is a man of humble origins in the Appalachians, a man who has suffered rejection and discrimination. But he is terribly strong-willed and so he travels to the South looking for fortune. He dreams of building an empire and a dynasty that will prevail and avenge him for his misfortunes. He arrives at Yoknapatawpha and buys some land, which he, by virtue of hard work, turns into an emporium. But he is also a dark and violent man, who rejects his first wife and son for having black blood in their veins, an action that will come back to haunt him.
The main narrator is Quentin Compson, the son of a neighboring family, who years later recounts the story to a roommate in Harvard, so building a parallel story of drama and death.
Even if it is a challenging read, it is much worth it, since Faulkner develops a very powerful narrative with a strong prose and a great gift to create moods and sceneries. It leaves you with the sensation that you have read an epic of grand proportions, a "War and Peace" with much war and little peace, without balls nor nobility.

this is the ultimate in american literature. faulkner's other tales of previous days and people in mississippi are stunning, but 'absalom, absalom' is so transcendent in all it attempts to do, that it clearly identifies itself as THE essential american novel.
in case you are somehow unaware, this is another piece in the puzzle of the fictional county in mississippi faulkner created to illustrate the american south in the early twentieth century. more specifically, it is the tale of henry sutpen and his grand design to rule whatever he could. it really is a tragedy of sorts -- sutpen will go to any length to be in control, when he really has no control at all. the story is much to cavernous to describe here.
this opus is just another indicator that faulkner was the master of stream of consciousness writing. from miss coldfield's telling of her version of sutpen to quentin compson [yes, quentin from 'the sound and the fury], to shreve mccannon spewing conjecture at quentin in a dorm room in harvard, to the shocking, disturbing end, faulkner's prose keeps the pages ablaze.
i once had a teacher who said that reading and understanding this book was much like climbing a mountain. i cannot agree more. digesting faulkner's masterwork is amongst the most rewarding experiences possible via literature. words of warning: don't expect to be blown away the first time through. this book reveals its beauty when it unfolds in subsequent readings.
if you are new to faulkner, try 'the sound and the fury' or 'as i lay dying' first, as each serves as perhaps a better introduction to the universe of southern mississippi.

ABSALOM, ABSOLOM! tells two intertwined stories. The first is the story of Thomas Sutpen, born a poor white in West Virginia, who creates a great estate through sheer determination and eventually becomes an elite in the Antebellum South. Through Sutpen, Faulkner once again explores the quest for money and respectability in the rich imaginary world of Yoknapatawpha County.

The second braid of this story is slavery and its historical repercussions. In this case, Sutpen, a slave owner and plantation master, fathers two mixed race children. Ultimately, it is Sutpen's unwillingness to treat a son with "black blood" as a man and equal that destroys what he has achieved. This son is the Absalom of the title.

To tell this story and explore these themes, Faulkner creates a series of unreliable narrators who have exaggerated views of Sutpen. One is Miss Rosa, who is outraged by his sexual unscrupulousness, as well as his ability to pull an empire from the wilderness. (Her own devout Methodist father was a failed businessman.)

Then, there are the highly rhetorical Mr. Compson and Shreve. Both of these narrators approach Sutpen with amazed and fascinated speculation. A modern parallel to their voices might be celebrity interviewers who wait outside the theater at the Oscars, savoring every detail about the stars. But if you don't share their obsession? Then, their hyper focus and passionate conjecture simply seem weird, and not a little pathetic.

For me, the amazed and obsessive speculation of these voices seemed out of proportion to the faults and actions of Thomas Sutpen. I think, in part, this shows that Faulkner's theme--race, miscegenation, and its historical consequences--are no longer viewed as cataclysmic threats to American society. This is a great and positive change from the Jim Crow climate in Oxford Mississippi in the 1930s, when Faulkner wrote and where defeated Confederate soldiers and freed slaves still lived.

This is not to say that we've become a race-blind society. But the concerns that animate Mr. Compson and Shreve--Interracial sex! We'll all have black ancestors in a thousand years!--no longer brew that muddled hysteria that energizes their narrative voices, especially that of Shreve.

In my opinion, this challenging book is Faulkner-for-professors. I still prefer THE HAMLET.

Although I've read several of Faulkner's books, this was the first to leap out at me as indicative of his genius. The work that must have gone into it is staggering. Absalom, Absalom! is Southern tragedy at its very best, replete with dark meditations on the South's Civil War legacy and a story so fascinating, so magnificently plotted that it leaps out at the reader despite Faulkner's often mind-bending prose and endless parade of parentheses. Thomas Sutpen is the type of tragic character Shakespeare would have written had he been alive and living in Mississippi at the time--a self-made man whose ruthless, myopic vision of forming a family dynasty is destroyed through chance and his own grave mistakes. Faulkner unravels this dark tale with perfect timing, leaving the most tantalizing, informative details to the very end. The whole novel possesses a kind of brooding atmosphere which lasts to the closing words. I would not suggest this as the first Faulkner book to read--better to spend some time on the less important works in order to get a feel for his style, otherwise you will miss too much. And even then, it helps to keep a finger on the family tree at the back of the book to get the characters straight. But it's well worth it--this is one of the finest, most introspective and fascinating American novels I have read in a long time.

Absalom, Absalom! is the story of a legend and the people who tell it over and over again. In September 1909, 20-year-old Quentin Compson goes to visit Rosa Coldfield, an older woman in his hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi. Miss Rosa has summoned him to listen to her version of the legend of Thomas Sutpen. That same night, Quentin goes over the story again with his father, Mr. Compson, who tells the story from a different perspective. Five months later, when he goes to Harvard, he reinvents the story with his roommate, Shreve.
In 1833, Thomas Sutpen came to Jefferson and built, without any help but his own wild, superhuman will, an enormous mansion on 100 acres that he swindled from an Indian tribe. With a band of foreign slaves and a French architect, he raises the house and cultivates a plantation. Within a few years he is one of the richest single planters in the county, and he marries the daughter of a local merchant (Rosa's older sister) and has a son and daughter, Henry and Judith. The two children grow up with privilege yet the knowledge that the town resents and despises their father. Henry goes to the University of Mississippi in 1859, and becomes friends with a worldly older student named Charles Bon. He brings Bon home for Christmas and holidays, and soon it is assumed that Bon will marry Judith. But Sutpen recognizes Bon as his own son--the son he abandoned when he discovered that his first wife had black blood. He follows Bon to New Orleans to be sure of this fact, then tells Henry that they cannot be married because Bon is actually Judith's half-brother. Henry refuses to believe his father and will not abandon his friend. They quarrel; Henry repudiates his birthright and leaves. For four years, while the Civil War rages, Henry tries to convince himself that Charles Bon and Judith can be married even if it means incest. He has almost justified it to himself when Sutpen (a colonel for the Confederate Army) calls his son to his tent and tells him that Charles Bon must not marry Judith. Not only is he Judith and Henry's half-brother, but Charles Bon also has black blood.
This information repulses Henry in a way that even incest does not. When Charles Bon insists on marrying Judith anyway, goading Henry to do something about it, Henry shoots Charles Bon as they walk up to the gates of Sutpen's Hundred. Then he disappears. Sutpen returns home after the war to a ruined dynasty and a devastated plantation. Determined to start over again, he first tries to marry Rosa Coldfield, then takes up with Milly, the 15-year-old granddaughter of a poor white squatter on his property. Increasingly impoverished and alcoholic, Sutpen insults Milly after she bears his child. Furious, her grandfather kills Sutpen that very day in 1869.
After she tells Quentin her version of the story, Rosa asks him to accompany her to Sutpen's Hundred, where Clytie (Sutpen's daughter with a slave woman; she is now in her late 60s) still lives. Clytie has been hiding Henry Sutpen there for four years while he waits to die. Quentin and Rosa discover this when they go to the estate after midnight. Rosa returns to the house three months later with an ambulance for Henry, and Clytie sets fire to the house, killing herself and Henry. No one remains of Sutpen's dynasty but Jim Bond, a mentally-impaired man of mixed blood.

Faulkner is an artist. I use present tense for, like the best artists, his work lives forever and in the work lives the man.
"Absalom, Absalom!" stands, perhaps, as Faulkner's crowning achievement. Headache-inducing at times, yes, but only because it requires the reader to use his mind at an unprecedented level. In this day of Stephen King and John Grisham, it is extraordinary and eye-opening to come across a writer of such talent and imagination, a twentieth century authors long-forgotten to many of today's readers, but, perhaps, on par with very few. Only Proust springs to mind as a companion on the hilltop.
What makes this book so frustrating is the very thing that makes it so succesful. His use of flashback without announcing it as flashback, his use of foreshadowing that appears to be simply the black mark a tree has made on the ground, thrown there by the sun through no fault of the tree, unless, of course, you consider the tree guilty for simply being there.
I consider "Absalom, Absalom!" to be not only Faulkner's greatest work (challenged, perhaps, given my mood fluctuations, by "The Sound and the Fury"), but one of the great works of this century. This book is not for everyone, though. Be prepared to read and re-read in able to come to grips with the full brilliance of this novel. It is not something to be skimmed through, but rather a fine wine to be tasted slowly and savored.

I probably would never have touched any book by Faulkner - the sentiment that seems to be unconsciously passed down from generation to generation is that Faulkner is dense to the point of impenetrability (is that a word?) - if I hadn't had to read "Absalom, Absalom" for a class on American literature. I'm glad I took the class; this book was a wonderful surprise. It brought me back to the pure joys of reading, the delight I feel any time I tackle something truly meaty. Admittedly, "Absalom, Absalom" is confusing, even schizophrenic, in its multiple narrators and its page-long sentences. You can't read it half-heartedly; I had to turn off the stereo and retreat to the quiet of my room to give it my full attention. And I was blown away. There is so much here for a literature lover to delve into. I won't even bother offering a synopsis - it wouldn't make much sense, and you should just read it anyway. I've heard people say that one shouldn't read "Absalom, Absalom" for their first Faulkner experience, and I can see why: this book is hard work. Still, it has inspired me to explore the rest of Faulkner's bibliography. And to read other books I was hesitant to read before. And it reminded me why I love to read. Not bad for a book I was dreading.

He came from the far mountains of Appalachia, trudging down range after range till he reached the rich, fertile lands of coastal Virginia to grow up poor, in a shack, with less dignity than even a house slave of that distant, fecund time when imagination ruled more than facts, when he (a boy) could dream of fame and fortune in the legendary West Indies and, daring, hoping, actually set sail for such fabled isles to wrest, by courage and by native cleverness, the position he saw before him, dancing unreachable before his potent desire that later, in Mississippi, on a hundred square miles of swamp with only his own brute strength and a band of rough slaves, would carve out a plantation in the old, genteel Southern style, a style that he embraced as an outsider, who was never accepted, never allowed in to the circle of locals-even pelted with vegetables and threatened with arrest when he dared to marry a local girl-because he had formerly trudged down those far blue mountains, bore some resemblance to white trash, but worst of all had not been born among them (the folk of Yoknapatawpha County, renowned in American literature these many decades) and so having dared, having fought over the years to ensure his progeny a place at the top, was brought down, utterly destroyed, by early deeds, and by racial separatism, which in that faroff day, was considered more important than incest.
Well, folks, if you can stand many more sentences more daunting than my above miserable effort, if you like Jackson Pollock in art, you will love ABSALOM, ABSALOM !, one of the great novels of American literature. It is a thick dreaming; figures looming up through the dark, redolant masses of verbiage, marked, even scarred by inevitability, but veiled in mystery, awful conclusions to be revealed just around the corner---on the next page perhaps. Jackson Pollock's best paintings pull the viewer in, the depth is astounding, the effect stunning. Faulkner's novels, at their best, are the same. That intense, magic splatter of words turning into a flood. The tales of doomed aspirations, "currents of retribution and fatality", the corruption, violence, and murky destiny of crocodilian proportions lying in wait for the craftiest, most potent striver. Faulkner's plots seem to be predictable-and they are in terms of unhappy endings-but the twists remain fascinating, the ways in which you learn them, always impressive. There is nobody like Faulkner, who can weave tales of family disasters, hubris, incest, and racism that appall and amaze at the same time. He is truly one of the great novelists of world literature and in my humble opinion, the best ever produced by the USA.
P.S. The racial images and language of this novel are unpleasant. Faulkner wrote before the days of political correctness and his words can be ugly. I took this in the same vein as "Merchant of Venice" or other historic literature that uses stereotypical images. Faulkner knew that racism was the curse of the South, and perhaps he extended it to the whole country, but he portrayed the South as it was, not as we would like it to have been.

The number of lists of "classic" literature on the store is rather silly. It is pretty clear to must people with a High School education that Steinbeck and Hemingway are pretty standard. Absalom, Absalom is not standard. That is because it is a searing, shocking and truly unsurpassed work of art.
At the heart of this novel is a struggle for identity. How do we understand our history. In these days of "evil-doers" and the axis of "evil", we are often deluged with a biased media's quest to simplify historical conflicts of identity. Likewise, Quentin Compson is intrigued and repulsed by the history of the South. Is the South "America"? Are the slaves actually free in their own minds?
Faulkner is also amazing in his grasp of the philosophical underpinnings of gender issues. Judith, Sutpen's daugther is a new Antigone who must bury one of her two brothers when they feud. Faulkner's Southern agrarian lifestyle, and gentle humility in the face of nature(and correspondingly, our natures) is somewhat lacking in the flippant Beat generation through the electronic generation. If Faulkner were alive today, we would be reading deconstructions of internet porn and corporate Caesars, not silly vain and impotent gestures such as "Sex in the City." Morality is not dead.

Absalom Absalom has all the markings of a great classic, and it is considered by many to be one of Faulkner's greatest works. It is worth reading, but if you are going to read only one of Faulkner's books, I think Go Down Moses is far better. Both novels are written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness manner, but the prose in Go Down Moses seems tighter. In Go Down Moses every word counts, while in Absalom there is a great deal that I would have trimmed if I were the author. Another thing that bothers me about Absalom is that everyone speaks (and thinks) in almost exactly the same style of prose--there is almost no variation between the way characters think, which is in long run-on sentences, and the way they speak to others, which is likewise in long run-on sentences full of similies and metaphors (some of which do not seem to make sense, and some of which are very good). I also found it annoying that I could sometimes read for pages before figuring out who was talking (or thinking). The stream of consciousness writing style is good when handled with skill, and in my opinion it is handled with more skill in Go Down Moses.

Review Summary: Absalom, Absalom! is a book that you can easily underestimate. Your persistence will be rewarded with pleasure if you are patient, and assume that something magnificent will appear that is different from what you expect. The story is a cross between a Greek tragedy, King Lear, and the oral tradition of story-telling. As such, it strikes the deepest chords of human connection and ambition. The primary settings are Mississippi and the West Indies from the Antebellum period through Reconstruction and into the early 20th century. The themes touch deeply on Southern tradition, slavery, and social class. This is a challenging book to read, and will appeal primarily to those who like difficult books that are full of allusions. For most, having read other Faulkner novels will make this one easier to access and understand. As I Lay Dying is a good precursor for this novel.
Reader Caution: A six-letter word beginning with "n" to describe people of Afro-American descent is used frequently in this book in ways that will offend many people. The use of the word is consistent with the beliefs and the historical moment of the characters who utter it, and does not reflect racist beliefs by the author.
Review: Absalom, Absalom! is certainly one of America's greatest tragic novels. Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson, Mississippi in middle age with a burning desire to establish a magnificent plantation and a dynasty with a leading role in society. To accomplish this, all he has available is his passion, a French architect, some slaves from Haiti, and a huge tract of land that he has somehow swindled out of the Native Americans. From the mud, his dream rises. But his very determination to accomplish his dream causes counterforces to rise that drag his dream into the mud again.
The story is told in a most unusual fashion. Almost every major character's perspective is captured through the device of recounting prior conversations with other major characters. Most of the characters are missing major elements of the "why" of the story, so you need to keep adding the stories together to begin to understand what was happening beneath the surface. The book eventually relies on a conversation with a nonparticipant in the events to explore why they might have occurred, where no direct evidence is available. In this last regard, the book takes on a little of the mystery-solving tradition involving logic that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. This conversation-reporting story-telling device makes the book both remarkably recursive and potentially maddening. If you are like me, you will wonder at times what else could possibly be covered in the book. And then, Faulkner pulls new dimensions to his story out of the hat.
Faulkner's point is that we can almost always know "what" has happened in terms of major events, but without great investigation and thought we unlikely to ever understand the "why." You come to appreciate this point by seeing your understanding of Sutpen's life change as you learn more about him and the events that preceded his arrival in Jefferson. I ultimately came away intrigued and inspired by the book's structure. You could easily have the opposite reaction.
The book is a rich source of concepts and observations about the contradictions inherent in slavery and Southern notions of gentle behavior during the 18th and 19th centuries. You only find these contradictions as well laid out in Thomas Jefferson's writings and biographies.
After you read this book, you should be in a good position to ask yourself some basic questions about what you are trying to accomplish with your personal life and your work. Are your goals any more worthy than Sutpen's? What dangers are you exposed to as a result of having this focus? In what ways are you an innocent in your pursuits?
In seeking respect and esteem, remember to give it to others even more generously!