34. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
OPD: 1930
format: 182-page hardcover (no ISBN or publication date, but maybe 1960's?)
acquired: 2006 read: May 25-27 time reading: 6:42, 2.2 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: Classic theme: Faulkner
locations: 1920’s Mississippi
about the author: 1897-1962. American Noble Laureate who was born in New Albany, MS, and lived most of his life in Oxford, MS.

I cannot capture or adequately post on this one. It's bigger than my ability to express. It's just doing a whole lot of stuff, from many different approaches, and it all works. I was absorbed. I was reading at a crawl, slowly wading through words that were demanding to me that I slow down and wade through them, and experience them, think of their sound. Meanwhile they were doing other things. This book isn't exactly a wow, but it has a presence, once you begin, that fills a lot of your mind, that hangs out there as some big thing. And I can't tell you what that big thing even is. But I have something like an awe there. In some non-emotional but deep way I find myself very attached to this.

It's all voices, in 1 to 4 or so page chapters titled by the speaker/thinker. Vardaman tells us, "My Mother is a fish." That's a whole capture. Here's his mother, Addie, speaking about her husband, Anse:

"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; lover or Anse: It didn't matter."

The story is about the death of Addie Bundren on her husband's poor farm isolated in rural Mississippi. She has made her husband promise to take her body to the town she came from, Jefferson, MS, about 40 miles away. They don't have a car, so this would by animal cart. When she dies, the weather breaks and the local river swells and tears down all the old bridges. But Anse is a weird guy, and a promise is a promise. He takes his three sons, his daughter, Dewey Dell, and a friend to help transport her. So, in a sense the book has two parts, the anticipation of Addie's death, where she looks out a window to watch her son make her coffin, the sounds of his sawing and hammering running through the text, and then a journey, their own odyssey.

But, it's the voices. That's everything here. From the opening line. They are just so distinct, that as a reader, my mind melded with their southern rural slang. Somehow, they take on their own reality, and they are the book. It's a kind of stream of conscious, with a repetition that should be irritating, but works, giving us a variety minds, sometimes compromised, sometimes religious, sometimes so coldly or even silently practical. It's almost doesn't matter what they say (or how funny it might be. The humor is superb). They have a rhythm and experience, that, itself, lingers.

This is a non-overrated wonderful classic. Recommended to the Faulkner curious.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/360386#8549381 ( )

Yes, I know this novel has been called one of the greatest novels of twentieth century literature, and here I am giving it just two stars. Yes, I can see it's historical value for the time and place it takes place, and I wouldn't even suggest it's unrealistic in its dysfunctional family relationships. I simply don't see value in reading about it (or watching a movie, as I know this was made into). I don't get the fascination with grim cruel ill tempered people and circumstances. I could object for it's depiction of the treatment of animals alone, let alone the relationships between people---the poor cow that follows people around in an agony to be milked and no one does, the horse that, though adored, gets kicked, the fish that recently caught by a child, gets accidentally dropped and intentionally scuffed into the dirt by same, mules that are sacrificed to cross a dangerous overflowing, bridge smashing river for no better reason than to get to a town to bury a body that's been dead for so many days that many more can't hurt . . .not at all my cup of tea.
The only thing I wouldn't complain about are the multiple narrators. Some of the dialog is inane but it's not the fault of the narrators.
So who would enjoy this story? Lots of people do, emphatically in fact. So my guess would be those who love life and enjoy seeing how the other half lives, those who don't and are attracted on the "misery loves company" level, those who love the drama of all aspects of the human psyche. ( )

"Literature Loving Southern Man, 36, Has Never Read Faulkner". If that's never been a story in The Onion, it should be. Actually I'm deficient in my entire Southern regionalist reading history, aside from Flannery. I've always been attracted to reading stories by foreign authors and that are set in places far away. Not that I dislike the South or anything, I feel of it and I can be as sensitive about defending it as any of y'all, but yeah, foreign places are gosh durn interesting.

But now I've read Faulkner. Some writers brush style on the page lightly, and some slather it on in heavy strokes, so thick and lumpy you might have difficulty making out the picture. Faulkner obviously being one of these latter ones. At points I was left scratching my head, as here:

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 dont know what I am. I dont 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. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

Well, that manner of stylistic whirlymagig isn't particularly my sort of tea. Yet most of the writing doesn't reach those heights of opulance, and after you've settled into it, we have here a compelling novel that I did enjoy. A dysfunctional family on a dysfunctional week long funeral march through rural 1930-ish Mississippi; you got your pathos, your black humor, your surprising revelations, your sympathetic characters and your crazy ones, making for a rollicking ol' ride. ( )

I think Faulkner's writing is really beautiful, but also really hard to follow. I read this in college and when it came time to write papers, I seriously feared that I'd maybe misunderstood the entire book. Years later I tried reading some of his other novels and realized that As I Lay Dying might be his most accessible work. ( )

As I Lay Dying is an astounding book and a deceivingly challenging one at that. It's probably the most popular of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County stories. It's a short, dark, and compelling novel set in what he called “my apocryphal county”, a fictional rendering of Lafayette County in his native Mississippi.

As I Lay Dying, Faulkner's novel of 1930 about a Southern family of poor whites narrated by its members and their neighbors, its events refracted through multiple points of view, is accessible yet somehow dense; poetic yet plain. It seems simple on the surface, As I Lay Dying tells the story of the Bundren family as they attempt to move a coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi. What makes As I Lay Dying challenging and so innovative is its narrative voice. The book is narrated by 15 different characters over 59 chapters. It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her poor, rural family's quest to bury her - but it becomes so much more than this simple journey. It becomes a novel about the inner lives of each character. As they talk they reveal what Addie calls their own "secret and selfish though" -their private responses to Addie's life and their own separate reasons for undertaking the perilous journey to bury her. What first appears to be a simple task– transporting a coffin to a burial ground– quickly transforms into a journey that will change the family forever.

This jigsaw puzzle of perspectives forces the reader to piece together the story bit by bit. Each chapter is labeled with the narrator’s name, though Faulkner writes his characters so distinctly that the reader would likely be able to identify the narrator even without the helpful note at the top of the page. Over the course of the novel, we learn the many secrets this family has been hiding, including knowledge that only certain family members know. Many shocking revelations are revealed throughout. And the ending - is a doozy!

Truly, the brilliance of this sometimes difficult novel lies in Faulkner’s compulsive, bleak unfolding of Addie’s history and her relationship with her beloved son, Jewel, the result of her affair with Rev Whitfield, the local minister. In counterpoint to this, we also meet her family, an extraordinary cast of weird southerners – Cash, Darl, Dewey Dell and Vardaman Bundren. Dewey Dell, the teenage daughter, who is trying to get an abortion, is probably the most sympathetic character throughout the novel. It is interesting that Faulkner chooses to contrast the death of the matriarch with her teenage's daughter pregancy. I'm not sure exactly why this is, but I'm willing to meditate on this for a bit.

This was my second time reading this classic novel. I read it once in my early twenties. Now that I'm in my thirties, I am seeing this novel differently. Families are often built on secrets, on difficult personalities, members often selfish and compulsive. If anything, this novel reminds me that I must love my family well and choose not to be selfish if I can.

I'll be curious to see how I relate to this novel next time I read this novel. ( )