Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • Family drama and the legacy of slavery haunt this epic tale of an enigmatic stranger in Jefferson, Mississippi—from one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William Faulkner
Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, a man who comes to the South in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”
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Community Reviews
One of the best works of Literature. True emotional depth combined with an interesting and impactful story, poetic prose, and lots and lots of thematic complexity to keep you thinking both while you read and afterwards. Not for the faint of heart, though - the paragraphs are gargantuan and so too are the sentences. There are many many moments when you will have to look for an antecedent or subject within a given sentence by going back a half page or more. One parenthetical stretches for about 23 pages. You're often given information which is repeated and reinforced over and over and then 50 pages later questioned and contradicted - not in the sense of sloppy writing but because the reliability of memory not to mention gossip and family history are all major themes and narrative devices. I read this book alongside a book of footnotes (Reading Faulkner by Joseph Urgo) - it was only really necessary in one or two spots, but it illumined several historical and Faulknerian connections and verbiage. You can totally do without the notes, but I generally don't like re-reading right away (or even usually within like 5 years), so I knew that to get the most out of the book I wanted to make sure I understood every detail as well as I could, going through the notes for each chapter after finishing that chapter.
I think I liked this better than Sound and the Fury. It is harder and thus a bit more rewarding on a sentence to sentence level while also having a slightly easier to follow story.
Definitely made me want to read more Faulkner, although not right away. Highly recommend if you are up for a challenge.
I think I liked this better than Sound and the Fury. It is harder and thus a bit more rewarding on a sentence to sentence level while also having a slightly easier to follow story.
Definitely made me want to read more Faulkner, although not right away. Highly recommend if you are up for a challenge.
This book was really challenging. There were a lot of amazing thoughts threaded throughout, and there was a certain satisfaction in figuring out the storyline as things are revealed out of order, but it was also excruciating.
Have you seen the movie Memento? That's the idea, the entire storyline is out of order, constructed from gossip and different point of views, and sometimes pure speculation. And it's conveyed in sentences that are a paragraph long (though my husband assures me they are not "run-on" because the grammar is correct).
Have you seen the movie Memento? That's the idea, the entire storyline is out of order, constructed from gossip and different point of views, and sometimes pure speculation. And it's conveyed in sentences that are a paragraph long (though my husband assures me they are not "run-on" because the grammar is correct).
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