Albert
On 8/21/2012 10:02 PM, andie_nachgeborenen wrote:
> Absalom a lot was my favorite Faulkner back a long time ago, decades, when I read Faulkner constantly. I was just thinking of reading it again fairly soon. Anyway, it's on my short to-read list. Carroll, I wasn't aware about your change in visual status. I'm sorry, Andie
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> Sent from my iPad
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> On Aug 21, 2012, at 11:24 PM, Albert Sonntag<styx55 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 'Absalom' is my favorite Faulkner, Carrol, and I have read it many times and heard it discussed endlessly last year at the Faulkner Conference in Oxford. But in the end, after all the talk, the thing about this book that has most stayed with me over the years is the relentlessly erotic narrative in the relentless heat, and that 'tragic' looking back. It is also Faulkner's most 'Caribbean' book, with the entire racial element that defined that region since Toussaint L'Overture. And there are great issues of incest and of the hatred in the quotidian. The story of Thomas Sutpen, and his frustration and murder, seems to me to be the key to the book, but you only see it through the hatred of Rosa Coldfield and the nostalgia of Quentin Compson.
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>> Albert
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>> On 8/21/2012 8:30 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>>> I've been listening to a recording of Absalom, Absalom. Listening is not the
>>> same as reading prose of this quality; one does need to see it on the page.
>>> But even in this form, the book is bowling me over! I reread As I Lay Dying
>>> and The Sound and the Fury the year before I went blind. They are powerful
>>> texts, but Absalom, Absalom must be one of the most 'densely packed' novels
>>> in English. I've never read any criticism of Faulkner and all my reading of
>>> his books was in the '40s& '50s. I'm having some trouble in getting hold of
>>> this novel. Can anyone on this list give me some help?
>>>
>>> Tentatively, it seems to dramatize the fragmentation of historical
>>> understanding, the way it comes to us in bits& pieces and we struggle to
>>> put it together. With all due respect to a very great novel, War and Peace,
>>> Faulkner understands historical knowledge better than Tolstoi did -- he (or
>>> his narrator) was much too confident that he had grasped "history" as it
>>> "really was." Faulkner sees the flimsiness of that.
>>>
>>> Any other readers of the book here?
>>>
>>> Carrol
>>>
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