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, ...
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Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 1987
ISBN-13:9780394747453ISBN:0394747453
Description: Acceptable. Overall below average used book. May have highlighting, underlining, notes, price sticker on cover, or be an ex-library book. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Acceptable. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Minimal damage to cover and binding. Pages show light use. With pride from Motor City. All books guaranteed. Best Service, Best Prices. read more
"This is my first book of William Faulkner - one of the greatest American novelist. I am not giving him a 5-star rating because this is one of the hardest-to-read novels since I started my reading obsession a year back. Normally, it takes me only up to 20 pages for me to adjust to the rhythm of the novelist for his characters to form life. However, I was already on page 40 and I could not understand what I was reading. I had to Google the book to know that the chapter titles are actually the names of the Bundren children narrating the stories.
Maybe I also had lots of distractions as I read this in my second (and final) week of stay here in Columbus, Ohio. I actually picked this book because I wanted to enjoy the being in the USA (reading an American author while in America). I mostly read this before going to bed and it took me four nights finishing just a 250+ not densely written book.
The story is about burying a mother whose last wish is for her corpse to be laid in her own hometown. The mother had 5 children. Cash, the eldest who is a carpenter and whose broken leg was cemented. Darl, the second who narrated most of the 49 chapters. Jewel, who is the result of the mother's illicit affair with a reverend. Dewey Dell, the only girl and who got pregnant out of wedlock and Vardamain, the youngest who refused to belive that his mother is dead ("My mother is a fish" he says).
The voices who narrated are distinct from each other. I read somewhere that it was a fad during that time in American literature but I found it interested (I had never seen anything like that before this). There were full of grammatical mistakes and vague statements. However, I also read that Faulkner's intention is not to directly inform the reader but to present the thoughts playing in the mind of its characters just like when you are alone in the elevator. Faulkner did this very effectively.
I was able to relate my own late father to that of Anse (the husband of the mother) who refused to work because he if perspire, he will will die. When I was growing up, my father most of the time did not work because he was asthmatic and he tired out easily. Despite that, Anse was a loving father and so was my dad.
This book is among the 1001 Must Read Books Before You Die and William Faulker is a Nobel Prize for Literature awardee just like my favorites John Steinbeck and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. However, I am ranking him lower than those two because I was able to enjoy The Grapes of Wrath and One Hundred Years of Solitude which are those two authors' magnum opuses. I read somewhere also that William Faulker calls this novel (his fifth, as his magnum opus but I am not yet convinced that he is in the same ranking as Steinbeck and G.G. Marquez. He is more of a Hemingway type (with those dream sequences) to me."
"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."
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