This was the last book that I finished reading in 2019, which, by some people’s measure, would mean the last book that I read this century. This was also the first book I have ever read by the Nobel Prize Winner, William Faulkner.
The story is lost in time and nearly lost in place by virtue of the structure of the book which flows in a whirl of multiple consciousnesses interacting with each other, all telling the story of the death and eventual burial of Addie Bundren. Like life itself, the action of the story is often hidden beneath the surface with winks and nods from one character to another, but it’s all there: violence, betrayal, love, lust, honor, shame, pain, loneliness, hopelessness, bitterness, confusion, madness, prejudice, innocence, and grief. A veritable Smörgåsbord of human feeling.
Quotes I enjoyed:
“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not.”
p. 80
“Because a fellow can see every now and then that children have more sense than him. But he don’t like to admit it to them until they have beards. After they have a beard, they are too busy because they don’t know if they’ll ever quite make it back to where they were in sense before they was haired, so you don’t mind admitting then to folks that are worrying about the same thing that aint worth the worry that you are yourself.”
pp. 139-140
“Sometimes I ain’t so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.”
p. 233
“He sat on the ground and us watching him, laughing and laughing. It was bad. It was bad so. I be durn if I could see anything to laugh at. Because there just aint nothing justifies the deliberate destruction of what a man has built with his own sweat and stored the fruit of his sweat into.
But I aint so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.”
p. 238
“I don’t know if a little music aint about the nicest thing a fellow can have. Seems like when he comes in tired of a night, it aint nothing could rest him like having a little music played and him resting.”
p. 259