About this title: William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING was published in 1930, exactly a year after THE SOUND AND THE FURY. A stream-of-consciousness novel narrated from 15 different points of view, AS I LAY DYING opens as the Bundren matriarch, Addie, is dying at the family home in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. (His later novel ABSALOM, ABSALOM includes a map of the place.) The novel chronicles the struggle of this clan of poor whites--Addie's husband, Anse, and their extended family--to travel to Jefferson, the county seat, to bury Addie, at her request, in the town she came from. Their ...
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780679732259ISBN:067973225X
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Minor shelf and edgewear.. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 288 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. 067973225X Copy has been read but remains in good condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or high-lighting. Spine is tight; a clean read. Shelf wear and tear to the cover and edges of the pages. read more
Edition: Reprint with Corrections
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1990
ISBN-13:9780679732259ISBN:067973225X
Description: Very Good. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. An excellent paperback copy, apparently unread and like new. The spine is solid and square. The cover shows virtually no wear. The text of the novel is clean and unmarked. -----------------------------------This comedy of compounded mishaps is one of Faulkner's funniest novels, though it is certainly dark comedy. Anse Bundren promises his dying wife Addie that he will bury her with her own people in Jefferson, Miss., a day's journay from their home. Floods and ... read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Edition: Edition Unstated
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, Westminister, Maryland, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1990
ISBN-13:9780679732259ISBN:067973225X
Description: Good. As issued No Jacket. Slight spine lean, edgewear to covers, corner bumps, corner creases to the front cover and first few pages, and other light shopwear to covers. Faulkner's black humor novel. For many years the only Faulkner novel I enjoyed(I have since seen the err of my ways). My mother is a fish. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780679732259ISBN:067973225X
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Near Fine with no marks, writing, underlining or names. Cover has only the slightest of edgewear & several tiny marks on back. A lovely book. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 288 p. Audience: General/trade. Editor's Note at back. Faulkner'd harrowing account of the Bundren family's odyssey across the Missisiippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Includes editor's note by Noel Polk on the corrections as well as line and page notes prepared ... read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780679732259ISBN:067973225X
Description: Fine. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 288 p. Audience: General/trade. 12mo. Clean inside and out with no creases to cover or spine. read more
Description: Good. 0140019405 Condition: GOOD. (Book may have one or a combination of the following characteristics: former library book, dust jacket missing, cover wear, name written inside cover, considerable underlining/highlighting, remainder mark, binding loose, binding slants, pages tanning / curling, etc. Overall, the book is in decent shape. This is a blanket description. Please email us if you require a specific, detailed description of the book condition. We will typically respond within one week ... read more
"One of the stranger ones I've read, and the second by Faulkner. Based on the two (Absolam, Absolam!), I can't say I'm a Faulkner fan.
At least I was able to understand this one...most of it that is. And the details I didn't get, I read afterwards in the Cliffs Notes book summary. I must say that the summary made the book sound so much better than it was.
One detail in particular that had me doubting the book to begin with was the fact that each story was told by a different narrator. Fine and dandy, if I had realized this while I was reading the book :) In some chapters it was obvious and others not so much. Even though the narrator's name (I'm assuming this is correct) was the title of each chapter. Apparently, I was too dense to discover this on my own.
It was also pretty far along that I discovered that Cash and Jewel were Addie's sons. That was my fault though because I choose not to read synopses of books.
All in all, it wasn't such a bad book. Perhaps I'll pick it up again sometime and read it again. I'm sure it would be better for me the second time through."
"I think it's very easy to dismiss this book as boring, nonsensical, and difficult to follow at first. I felt frustrated by the dialogue of some of the less articulate characters, such as Anse, who tended to repeat the same sentence over and over until the repitition played like a broken record in your head; "She's a-going, her mind is set on it,". However, the more I read, the more the dialogue began to make sense to me and more like a true reflection of what each character was thinking in an unfiltered way. Since the story is told from the perspective of 15 separate people, the reader gets a very different subjective understanding of how Addie's death affects each character personally. On the surface, none of Addie's family members appear to be grief-stricken by her passing. They seem to be absorbed in the mundane details surrounding her burial and the loss in earnings from the time it takes them to transport her body to Jackson. However, it is clear that her death has taken its toll on each family member in a different way. From Cash's itemized list of how the coffin was constructed to hold a dead body, to Jewel's insistence on forcing the wagon through rough waters, each character attempts to make sense of this new reality. The strength in Faulkner's writing seems to be in the simplicity of it, the scarcity of words spoken by people who are lacking pretense and self reflection.
"We go on, with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and it.""
"This book was very irritating for me to read the first time, since the Stevie Nicks clone with squishy purple boots who dared call herself an English teacher held it as exemplum of dramatic irony.
"It's dramatic because there are many different characters, and ironic because Addie's family doesn't know she's still alive."
It was the first time in my life I threw up in my mouth. That's not to say I was completely ruined by the experience - I re-read/skimmed it years later to verify I still remembered it as being off in some way.
I'm normally a big fan of the Southern Gothic (Crews, O'Connor, O'Toole), which sometimes I've heard Faulkner lumped into. It was just something about this book and its writing that didn't mesh right, like a drunk Don DeLillo. There's alternation between deep and sloppy character exposition throughout. Actually reading it is kind of like sitting at a table full of foreigners telling stories - all of a sudden, people start laughing and it compels you to laugh but you're not sure what the hell is going on, but you laugh anyway, and then everybody gets angry with you, and you feel like an idiot.
Solely because of this novel and its acclaim by others who celebrate the dreadful Nathaniel Hawthorne, Faulkner rests low in my mind as one of the worst authors of the 20th century. I'm willing to re-read it, or perhaps something else by Faulkner, to compassionately reach a conclusion about the man and his work. Or fool me into reading something without telling me it's by Faulkner."
"I must have read this one ten times as an undergraduate, but this time I found myself empathizing with Addie Bundren more than I had previously. Maybe because of her lifestyle (a country school teacher, no less); maybe because, since I was more familiar with the ending, I could cringe a little at the scenes where she recounts Anse's courting her. I found myself liking all the characters more this time. For those unfamiliar, the Bundren family transports Addie, the mother, home to Jefferson to be buried. The comic mixes with the tragic as they borrow shovels to bury her and chase off buzzards that light on the coffin. Each member of the family has his/her own agenda for going to Jefferson. All are dysfunctional. The one carted off to the asylum is probably the most sane. A challenging read, written as it is in the stream of consciousness, but ultimately rewarding."
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