Review: The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

My version didn't have the white text present on this cover, but I haven't for the life of me been able to find my cover anywhere.

Rating:

🏃🏼‍♀️🏃🏼‍♀️🏃🏼‍♀️🏃🏼‍♀️🏃🏼‍♀️

First Response:

I actually like this one. This is my second Faulkner, and while I wasn’t wild about the first one, this one was pretty good.

One Sentence Summary:

The Compson family remembers and rebels over Easter weekend in 1928.

Tell Me More:

I’ve only read one other Faulkner novel (As I Lay Dying), and I didn’t really care for it. I had to read it for grad school, and while I appreciated the brevity of the book, I was too busy trying to figure out what the hell was going on to actually enjoy it.

This book was slightly more comprehensible, and far more enjoyable.

I decided to read this book for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to dive back into some good Southern literature after the disappointment of Junie a couple weeks ago. Second, a podcast I listen to did an episode on this book back in April, but I ‘ve been neglecting my podcast listening in favor of books, so I didn’t actually get around to listening to it until this week. The episode made the book sound interesting, and I already had it on my shelf (for some reason? I’m not sure when I bought it, but I guess it’s nice to get one of those longtime TBR books off the shelf), so I figured I’d give it a shot. I needed something to break up the monotony of my current long read, The Stand by Stephen King.

This book is a masterpiece. Unfortunately, I can’t quite tell you what it’s about. The basic plot is the events of Easter weekend in 1928, with a short foray back to 1910. The main characters are the three sons of the Compson family and their housekeeper (I think? She mainly cooks, but also seems to manage the other household servants), who relay events with varying degrees of clarity.

Benjy, who appears to have a mental disability, narrates a fever dream that slides through time according to his whims. His section was the strongest in the book IMO, and while the podcast hosts that turned me on to this book mentioned that Faulkner’s style in this section was often the most confusing for readers, I found it an easy read one I learned how to read it. Faulkner uses italics to indicate changes in time, and will ‘intercut’ scenes in a flash-forward/ flash-back sequence that I’m sure was revolutionary in the early 20th century. But in the early 21st, where audiences are used to parsing film sequences that fragment time like this on a regular basis, it felt almost old hat. Effective, but not revolutionary.

The plot of this book is almost mundane, but the experience of reading it is extraordinary. To say I loved it is almost a failure of expression. It’s true, but not right.

A couple of notes I want to pass on to other readers:

1. Faulkner writes stream of consciousness. We live inside the flow of his characters’ thoughts. As a consequence of this, there is very little imagery in this novel, and an overabundance of run on sentences. It’s not unusual for an entire dialogue sequence to take place in a single, unpunctuated text block. If you’re able to roll with it, it’s mostly comprehensible, but if you’re a reader who struggles with stylistic eccentricity, this book might not be for you.

2. There are 2 characters named Quentin in this book. The text can sometimes make it confusing who is who, especially in Benjy’s section, where time is just a suggestion. The 2 Quentins live in different times, and have different genders. Knowing this helped me stay oriented in the narrative, and it’s something I knew going into the book because I had listened to the podcast. I found it helpful, so I thought I’d pass it along.

When I finished this book, I went on Amazon to immediately start looking for more Faulkner, which is the opposite reaction I had to As I Lay Dying. This book was an incredible read. I can’t wait to read another Faulkner novel, and the only problem I’m gonna have is figuring out which one I should read next— the man was incredibly prolific!

The Sound and the Fury gets 5 🏃🏼‍♀️ (because there’s a runaway teenager in the book) out of 5.