Which william faulkner novel to read first

My take on O'conner flannery, I assume : Bunkum. The first time i ever read an author that i thought deeply dislikes the characters the author is writing about.

Feb 02, AM. Probably because I held antipathy to anything that was assigned, I didn't particularly care for it. Later, in college, I was assigned Absalom, Absalom! Blown away by that, I continued with Go Down, Moses because I was excited about the multiple-narrator format.

Only then did I pick up As I Lay Dying -- which makes me wonder if I would have liked it as well if it had been the one I had started with. Eventually I got around to The Hamlet which brought me back to the characters of "Barn Burning" and made me glad I had read it in high school. I almost feel as if it's a needed prequel to the Snopes trilogy, and it is such a powerful story in its own right, as I now realize. Feb 05, AM.

I had trouble getting into Faulkner, but Jonathan Yardley, a super book reviewer for the Washington Post, wrote this great article on it and this goes back to the late 70s , that really got my attention. The nice thing about the Portable Faulkner is that Cowley the editor walks you through Faulkner's imaginary world, its history, etc.

However, if you do want plunge into a novel, I agree with some of the others regarding Light in August being a good starting place. Feb 09, AM. As I Lay Dying is next up for me. William started out as a poet and worked at that for quite some time--and lifted some of his own poetry later to use in his novels. Faulkner had a profound influence on European literature in the first half of the 20th century--much moreso than Hemingway. And in actuality Faulkner's writing style is much closer to Dos Passos who also was very experimental in his time.

Mallarme is an interesting case, because he was one of the first modern poets to separate form from meaning in his poetry. A lot of it is free-associative and a jumble of images. One could see this as an inspiration for using Benjy Compson as a narrator, since, as an "idiot", his use of language and meaning would be radically different from us "normals.

Faulkner was a heavy drinker--if not an alcoholic. He'd retreat to his writing room every night with a quart of whiskey.

He worked in Hollywood for a time too. And by obsessive they are often self destructive. It's something that comes with the territory. Mallarme had some elements of this and so did Proust. Mallarme's son died very young. He never got over it.

A tomb for Anatole. Proust locked himself away in his bedroom for the last several years of his life. So Faulkner's drinking problem can be seen as mild compared to others who may have influenced him. Stephane Mallarme in his own fashion wrote the opening scene to "Forrest Gump": the feather and Gump on a park bench all stem from a belief or at least an idea of Mallarme's that when the Gods choose someone for greatness they drop a feather and whomever it lands on will receive the gift of greatness.

How they handle it is an entirely different thing. Divided into four sections told from four different perspectives, the book is both a notoriously arduous and disturbing read, whose often disorienting narration requires patience and persistence, and whose subject matter confronts painful themes, among which reside incest and suicide. A true tale of endurance and human suffering which will stay with readers for a very long time indeed.

Its protagonist, Joe Christmas, is the victim of both racial and religious intolerance as an orphan with mixed heritage who is raised by an abusive, puritanical farmer.

The fifty-nine chapters that comprise this self-proclaimed tour de force were written, according to the author himself, in four-hour bursts over the course of just six weeks.

Followed much later by The Town and The Mansion, it is the most widely acclaimed of the trio, which charts in an episodic fashion the rise and eventual fall of an eccentric family, of which the most memorable member is undoubtedly Ike Snopes, who professes his love for a cow which he abducts from its owner and takes care of.

The film adaptation of the novel starred Steve McQueen and was nominated for two Oscars. One of the longest sentences in literary history, containing just under 1, words, can be found in chapter six of this book. However this frivolous feature is only a minor part of the achievement that is Absalom, Absalom!. We and our partners use cookies to better understand your needs, improve performance and provide you with personalised content and advertisements.

To allow us to provide a better and more tailored experience please click "OK". Novels like "Absalom, Absalom! Christopher Rieger, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University, offered some tips for processing the complex prose. Think of a Faulkner text as a suspense or mystery story — but with you the reader, instead of a character, as the detective.

Or think of the text as the slow unfolding of a jury trial with yourself as a juror, sitting in court listening to and sifting through the varying and sometimes contradictory testimonies of a parade of witnesses, knowing that finally you'll have to make up your own mind about what actually happened and who is and is not telling the truth.

Be willing to suspend the need for instant gratification: Learn to appreciate and enjoy delayed revelations and a gradual unfolding of plot, characterization and theme. Or, better yet, think of Faulkner's novels as symphonic in structure. And just as a symphony moves from section to section, presenting varying moods and impressions, altering speeds and rhythms, at times introducing leitmotifs — melodic phrases that are associated with an idea, person or situation — and themes that will be developed more fully later on, at other times looping backward to recapitulate earlier themes, but always advancing toward a final resolution, so too does the Faulkner novel employ shifting tones and impressions, hints and foreshadowings, repetitions and recapitulations, time shifts looping backward and forward, all consciously intended to shape the story not so much on the pages of the book but in the reader's mind and imagination.

Since, in many respects, Faulkner's stories are more about impressions than events or facts "I don't care much for facts," he said , the way to read a Faulkner novel, at least the first time, is to immerse yourself in the rich and powerful language. Lose yourself in its sounds and rhythms, delight in the detailed descriptions and the images, enjoy the voices of the characters — and wait, ignoring for the time being what happened before or what's going to happen next.

Like an unfocused image on the screen, the Faulkner text typically appears all a blur for quite some time, but then Faulkner will begin gradually to turn the focus knob, bringing the story and its characters and meaning into sharper and sharper — though never absolute — focus. An interviewer once said to Faulkner, "Some people say they can't understand your writing, even after they've read it two or three times.

What approach would you suggest for them? It is now an accepted axiom that one cannot read high modernist texts from authors like James Joyce, T. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner: We can only re-read them. But why should that be a problem? All great literature deserves multiple readings, and with each new reading we discover things in the text that we had not seen or properly appreciated before.

Lionel Trilling once observed that everyone should read "Huckleberry Finn" at least three times — once when we are young, once when we are middle-aged and once when we are old. Most experienced readers agree with this sentiment in principle, yet many of us still persist in our desire naive though it may be that a literary text reveal itself clearly and completely upon a first reading. Interestingly, and ironically, literature seems to be the only art form that we feel this way about, the only one we are reluctant to revisit, even believing that the need to do so represents some kind of failure of the author.

We don't, of course, adopt this attitude toward painting or architecture or music or dance. We don't, for example, choose to look at a painting or a work of sculpture just once: Rather, we purchase it and exhibit in a convenient place and return to it time and time again, appreciating it all the more with the re-viewings.