Absalom, Absalom!
Updated: Aug 8
I’m not sure what specific qualities define a book one might describe as “not for the faint of heart,” but I think it’s safe to say that William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is just such a book. It is 316 pages of non-linear, wall-to-wall, stream-of-consciousness storytelling by no less than three narrators whose accounts corroborate, contradict, and/or digress so frequently that it can, until the very end, be difficult to know what to hold on to and what to let go of—and then you’ll never know for certain, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll have a pretty good idea what actually happened.
Sometimes Absalom, Absalom! reads like textbook Faulkner; other times it feels like what Faulkner was working toward all along, the magnum opus in which he out-Faulkners all Faulkner that came before. Each time I sat down, it was with a heady mix of excitement and apprehension: thrilled that I would be thoroughly and completely immersed in another world, at once familiar and foreign, and terrified that I’d need all my faculties, along with the gift of sustained seclusion, to keep up with what can be only described as unrepentantly dense prose.
Many novels reward repeated readings, but, at least of all the ones I’ve ever read, I can’t think of another that would likely bestow greater rewards than this. Only time will tell if I ever make the time, or, more accurately, find the courage to reread this one. In the meantime, I’ve got a few other (hopefully somewhat less impenetrable) Faulkners on my list to get to before I sweat the future too much.
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