Abasalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
1936
Around 385 pages
Faulkner always takes me back to sitting in a hot classroom dissecting A Rose for Emily with a circle of sweaty undergrads. My next experience with dear William was trying to impress a guy with Faulkner tattoos by reading The Sound and The Fury. I don't think he was very impressed, as I haven't spoken to him in five years.
I thought I had seen the last of Quentin Compson, but unfortunately, he hath returned. He's telling his Harvard roommate about the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. As a narrative technique, this feels completely unnecessary to me, though I understand it contributes to Faulkner's bizarre style of unreliable narrations. Anyway Thomas Sutpen is a slaveowner in the 1830s, which is a uniquely unlucky time to be a slaveowner in human history.
Sutpen is a memorable tragic character destined to fail, but I get no joy out of untangling Faulkner's exhausting prose. The center of his work is a very ugly man you can't sympathize with, living in a doomed time. And I hate Quentin.
RATING: **---
Interesting Facts:
Along with The Sound and the Fury, this novel helped Faulkner win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The 1983 Guinness Book of World Records says the "Longest Sentence in Literature" is a sentence from Absalom, Absalom! which contains 1,288 words. The sentence can be found in Chapter 6; it begins with the words "Just exactly like father", and ends with "the eye could not see from any point". The passage is entirely italicized and incomplete. Like give me a fucking break.
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