Monday, June 29, 2009

"The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner

I got about 120 pages into this book, then realized that for three days running, I'd chosen to reed Potty Training in Less Than a Day rather than Faulkner because the potty training book was more interesting. So I quit reading Faulkner. Because I have very little time to read right now, and I'm not going to waste it on something I'm not enjoying or learning from.

I'm not a big fan of stream-of-consciousness. Virginia Woolf gives me a headache. This didn't quite go that far, as it's not entirely stream-of-consciousness... but it's also told all out of order, which also annoys me. Sometimes it can work to tell a story in circles -- think Catch-22 by Joseph Heller -- and sometimes it seems to serve no purpose other than to try to show how clever the author is to tell a story in a non-conventional way.

Yes, Faulkner is an Important Writer. Yes, I've read some of his short stories and liked them. Yes, his books are Modern Classics. But I simply didn't like this book.

2 comments:

  1. I found long ago you either love Faulkner or hate him...There doesn't see to be a middle road on his books...

    ReplyDelete
  2. So where do you fall in those camps?

    Kind of like Hemingway, I guess, whose books I dig.

    ReplyDelete

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