Light in August in Never too Late to Read Classics

Sep 29, 2018 Laurene rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Having a hard time leaving any kind of comment. I am not an English major. There is probably thesis written about this novel that explores all the symbolism in this novel. I am just an avid reader. Who am I to rate a book by William Faulkner? I loved and was so engrossed in As I Lay Dying. I was hoping to have a similar experience. To my disappointment, the novel reminded me of an undergraduate professor I once had who liked to hear himself talk. (I actually got lost in some of his wordy test q ...more

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Jan 21, 2011 Yair Ben-Zvi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

To read this novel is to be lost in a passing storm that you know was even more vicious once, surprises you with its almost (but not quite equal) new ferocity and then subsides and passes finally into the distance as everything falls to the ground. It's heavy, it's bloody, it's Faulkner.

This is now the third novel of William Faulkner's that I've read to completion (the other two being the disconcertingly good and even cataclysmic The Sound and the Fury, and the somewhat more restrained but still To read this novel is to be lost in a passing storm that you know was even more vicious once, surprises you with its almost (but not quite equal) new ferocity and then subsides and passes finally into the distance as everything falls to the ground. It's heavy, it's bloody, it's Faulkner.

This is now the third novel of William Faulkner's that I've read to completion (the other two being the disconcertingly good and even cataclysmic The Sound and the Fury, and the somewhat more restrained but still excellent As I Lay Dying) and now I can say for sure, at least in my own mind, fun-house of mirrors though it may be, that Faulkner is not only a great author, but perhaps one of the greatest who came from the U S and/or A. This may not come as a shock to those reading but for quite a while I wondered and debated about Faulkner's virtues and merits as a writer (his dense, baroque, and incredibly stylized and even at times reader unfriendly prose) versus the much more approachable and even more immediately satisfying writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald or, more to the point and more representative, Ernest Hemingway.

To put it simply, Faulkner is the superior writer. And it's not as if I hate Hemingway (as a writer, forget his less admirable non-writerly traits), quite the contrary, I have nothing but respect and admiration for the iceberg theory specifically and minimalist writing generally; it's a hell of thing to be able to not-tell a story as cuttingly and even profoundly as Hemingway (sometimes) did, to write around the central points and only occasionally guide the reader. But Faulkner and his densely writing brethren (way too many to list here, though I'll point out Mailer, Pynchon, and what I've heard of Burroughs) just 'do it for me'. Between reading a brief and seemingly boring sentence and extracting what I can, I much rather prefer to wade through a dense and allusive page of skewed perspectives, nested allusions, and the paradox of definite ambiguities laced throughout. It's just more satisfying, like the merits of breathing mist versus deep sea diving in search of water, technically both work, but one deluges you much more deeply with what you're looking for, much more completely.

And now for the nuts and bolts. The story is very basic. A pregnant woman, Lena Grove, is searching for the man who impregnated her. That man is Joe Brown (changed from Lucas Burch) a charming sociopath with a cowardly streak who ran from the seemingly naive Lena telling her that he'd send for her as soon as he could. Brown meets Joe Christmas, a superficially cold and distant but internally and ferociously conflicted man disgusted and obsessed with his suspected biracial heritage. The two become partners in a bootlegging whiskey operation as well as roommates on the property of one Joanna Burden, the older daughter of abolitionists that Christmas has, to say the least, a complicated relationship with. At the mill where both Christmas and Brown work is Byron Bunch who meets and falls for Lena and takes it upon himself to reconnect his new love with Joe Brown. And weaved in and out of this is the defrocked minister Gail Hightower.

The progression of the plot is typical Faulkner. Linear progression, stop, linear progression, stop, stream of consciousness (much more sparing and streamlined here than in past works and more simply woven into the story) and then the next section of the plot whose order is usually before or parallel to the previous segment, but not always. But Faulkner shines here. Even in the ridiculous aspects of the plot (and there are many like the conclusion to the Joe Christmas Joanna Burden 'romance') Faulkner lends a gravity and even a density to the stretching of the disbelief of what's occurring that borders on the Biblical. In fact, this whole book reads like an unheard of/unread testament to the fallibility of the rage and will of humanity, its boundless potential for belief and delusion, opposition and assimilation, in short, life and death in the human heart every minute of every day from birth until death.

The introduction to my edition states something to the effect that Joe Christmas is a relatively underdeveloped character, relative to Faulkner's other works I guess. But I have to disagree. Christmas here IS internal conflict. He is a man at war where winning or losing mean nothing as both sides of this inner conflict are just two expressions of the same face, suicidal gestures with an empty gun, in essence, he can't succeed or fail because, quite literally, it's in his blood. I loved him as a character and I felt echoes of not only Raskolnikov(almost his polar opposite, the determination minus the ethos) and even Nietzsche as the ubermensch destined to fail in eternal return again and again. His eventual fate is disturbing, dark, but ultimately appropriate and even beautiful in a haunting and resonant way.

The other characters are good, even great at times. Though in comparison to Christmas they are the flashes of light off the rocks embedded in the cave wall that Joe Christmas is exploring, more, falling through.

It's a tough read, but the rewards it yields are incredible. The impressions, even the most basic sensational images culled from the passages of the book brought to my mind everything from the music of Hans Zimmer (The Thin Red Line), Thomas Newman (The Shawshank Redemption) and even images from Gus Van Sant's Last Days (specifically the death scene). It's wonderful in its own way and that's what makes Faulkner one of the true majestic writers of world literature. He was, and is, at the zenith of the style of writing he mastered, an incredible feat often attempted but seldom accomplished in this or any other time. Read it, give it time, but read it and be taken by it.

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Aug 03, 2011 Linda rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: book-group

"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."

This is such an important book. And Faulkner is such a fine writer, whose work must have been ground breaking in its time. The writing has a very contemporary feel with unusual phrasing, streams of consciousness, time shifts, new words the author created by combining two or three other words, and impeccable use of dialect that is neither condescending or artificial.

It is difficult to und ...more

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Jun 19, 2013 GONZA rated it liked it

I liked this very complicated book, the story is so fascinating even if not clear with all these feedback and forwards and stream of counsciousness. The characters are really impressive, for example Joe Christmas is for me unforgivable, but Lena also, a pure creature that nothing changes.

Mi é piaciuto questo libro molto complicato, la storia é affascinante anche se con tutti questi balzi temporali e stream of counsciousness non é particolarmente chiara. Anche i personaggi sono particolari, per e ...more

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