4/25

The Book: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

ISBN: 978-0-679-73218-1

Music: High Violet by The National

Company: None

Pages: 1-55

The Lead In: Spurred by a podcast version of a Civil War Yale lecture series, I picked this book off the shelf and decided to give it a shot. Faulkner is really tagged as "the" quintessential Southern writer.

The 411 on the 55: This book seems to be like most of Faulkner's work: fractured people living fucked up lives in a humbled and bruised American South. The story begins as an older woman telling a young man, soon to be off to Yale, the story of their family and the trouble brought in by a particular patriarch, Thomas Sutpen.

I think the most important aspect of the American South, as emphasized in Faulkner's writing, is the concept of honor. The Yale lecture mentioned this and even in the first 55 of this novel it is clear. Sutpen rides into town without a history, name or much money. He brings with him a group of wild slaves (apparently different from the rest the town has seen) and a basket of gold he uses to buy land, The Sutpen Hundred (square miles). He builds plantation, furnishes it, then marries the daughter of a poor, but well-respected, member of the town. The old woman telling the story is this woman's sister.

Line of the Day: "He wasn't a gentleman. He wasn't even a gentleman." pg. 9

Fact on the Fiction: Faulkner's Acceptance Speech for his Nobel Prize in 1950.