The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text

If you were raised in the South, you may get chills reveling in Faulkner's evocative words "the twilight-colored smell of honeysuckle." You know exactly what this means, how wonderful it is to the senses and the almost-haunting, hazy memories it stirs in you of people long in your past or passed on. This novel was the most difficult I've read, but the most rewarding once I did the work required to know how to read it, and understood its structure and meanings.I never thought I could read it; I tried 30 years ago, 19 years ago, 10 years after that, before I finally finished it a couple of years ago. When I picked it up, I concluded quickly that Faulkner must be a sadist to write anything like the first 10 pages. I read it twice and I was no better off the second time as I was the first go-round. I had absolutely no clue what the heck was going on, the sentences were disjunctive, the thoughts scrambled, the characters were dropping in then disappearing, it seemed to change time frames without any recognizable order so I had no sense of time and, ultimately, I had forgotten why it was, exactly, that I had bought the damned thing in the first place!Oh yeah, I told myself. You want to read Mr. Mint Juleps from that Rowan Oak plantation home up in Oxford. You believe that by doing that you are proving maybe once and for all time that you too can escape the past of this State in which you were raised and of these ghosts that you find despicable, this hate you had no part of, these white sheets, fulgent from the flames above them but burned by the evil beneath, these ignorant men who were passed down hatred as heirlooms to hand down to their sons and their daughters. You think if you can make it through this man's novels it will show that you are more intelligent than what people from afar believe you to be, that you are not like the rednecks you see every day but burst from within to bound over, that you are not like your mother's father who you worshiped, a business man and deacon in the town's largest Southern Baptist church, who you remember using the N word once as you sat beside him at 7 as he was driving from downtown Natchez (the home of my forefathers), a town on the mighty Mississippi River filled with beautiful antebellum plantation homes and scattered with remnants of slavery and a segregated past before you were born, the town in which your mother is now buried 10 feet from her father. And your mother, God bless her, along with your father, raised you not to hate, nor to judge, and for that you believe you have been blessed.After she was buried, you finally got the gumption to make it all the way through this knotty novel by that iconic author from the northern corner of your home state of Mississippi. It took a paperback, an electronic companion guide and an audible version to make it through and understand that you needed to read this book, that it was crucial as one more molting of the skin of your past, one more step away from the sins of the fathers, one further step away from that past for my children and hopefully their children.I did it.

This is among the greatest, most mentally challenging, emotionally arresting novel I have ever read. If you want a novel to shatter your concept of the limits of literature and thus transform the way you read, look no further.This book haunts you. Here's the thing. You know that feeling you get when you hear a song or see a face that sparks some vague memory? The memory may have been a dream, or may have been something you saw in a movie. It might well have been something that never actually happened to you, but was some fantasy you had years ago. Maybe there's even a physical reaction? There is a connection, but you can't quite put your finger on it. Still, it occupies your mind for an afternoon and inspires a train of thought you might not have had otherwise. That's good right? Of course. That's what you get with this book. you're trying to find that connection. The more important themes here have less to do with the post-reconstruction era/turn of the century south, and more to do with a broader examination of time and history as it relates to the human/family experience. This is a book that unfolds like nothing I've ever read. You're sort of lost for the first 70-100 pages. Our understanding of time as a linear process will confound your experience with the first section of the book. Benjy's narrative is difficult to be sure, but when the book is said and done, his is arugably the most memorable (though Quentin's honestly rivals it as a literary tour de force). In all, the book is divided into four sections with four different viewpoints. We see through Benjy the past, present, and future existing on a plane rather than a line; Quentin's inability to accept time's passing at all and his longing for the past (a past he was not necessarily a part of); Jason living only in the present and obsessing over an up to the minute existence; and finally Dilsey who seems the only member of the household with the ability to absorb the past as a part of the here and now, and lives without fear the future. This theme is explored through style. It's like reading a dream. The idea is to pull together all these moments, images, and broken bits of dialogue in order to get to the heart of that feeling I was talking about earlier. "where did this come from? why am I thinking about this? When will I be able to pull it together and figure it out?"And in fact, time's presence becomes so prevalent, that by the end of the book it practically becomes another character: "On the wall above a cupboard, invisible save at night, by lamplight and even then evincing an enigmatic profundity because it had but one hand, a cabinet clock ticked, then with a preliminary sound as if it had cleared its throat, struck five times" (341).So why this theme of time in The Sound and the Fury? Is it that the miseries of its people are so held hostage by it? The book is basically 425 pages of nightmare imagery and suffering with no sign of hope. Would it not be human nature to wonder when it would end? Was Faulkner trying to create an emotional reflection of this tragic Mississippi household through the mind's eye of the reader? I am convinced this to be true. Why else would he devote the first 90 pages to a mentally retarded narrator (Benjamin) who can't even feed himself? Why else would he commit the next 80 pages or so to a reasonably intelligent but obviously insane narrator who is about to kill himself (Quentin). And why would he devote a third section, to the "sanest" member of the family (Jason) and make him almost as incomprehensible as the previous two?Thankfully, we have the final section and an opportunity to see the household through the frankness and honesty of a black servant woman's eyes (Dilsey). Though ironically, Faulkner does not grant her narrator status. Rather, as mentioned earlier, Dilsey's voice is heard through an omniscient narrator. The reasoning behind this is the stuff of research papers and the like, but I find it fascinating nonetheless.It is in Dilsey's section that the story finally comes together. All the battered fragments of the story cohere into a bruised understanding of what has transpired, though I was still lost in many of the details. Here, some of the horrid beauty of Faulkner's language emerges. In one scene, the narrator allows what would be considered an archetypal "window image" of beauty (In Romantic literature, for example) and transforms it into ugliness: "The window was open. A pear tree grew there, close against the house. It was in bloom and the branches scraped against the house and the myriad air, driving in the window, brought into the room the forlorn scent of the blossoms" (352).But perhaps my favorite line, involves the wailing of the idiot son Benjamin, and to me, represents the "Sound and the Fury" of this tragic family: "Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets" (359). This contradictory statement sums up the complexity, and evasiveness of the entire novel. Who better to symbolize the unseen ticking of the clock and the gradual deterioration of a family than the moaning of an idiot, who is simultaneously given the credit and dismissed all in the same sentence? Benjamin's sounds lead to other "furies" as well, but I'll not spoil it all for you.Seriously though, Grove has it right--no Southern author nails the plight of the post-Civil War South with more ferocity than Faulkner. It's as if the very air the characters breath has become tainted by the past.So if you feel like losing yourself in words that will horrify and confuse you, if you consider reading more than just a sally on the beach, then buckle your seatbelts and pick up The Sound and the Fury.

It's a good book; it's interesting. At first the reader will have no idea what is going on: this is apparently normal. Halfway through, the reader will still not know what is going on, but there are many interesting subtle clues about what might be going on that a very alert reader might notice. The third part of the book will reward the reader with some information about what might be going on, and the fourth and final part will spell things out clearly enough that the reader might be able to figure out what has been going on.As soon as I finished this book, I was so intrigued about what had been going on that I wanted to start from the beginning and read it again! That's why I gave it four stars: it's so good that I want to read it again, but it's also so convoluted that I have to read it again to confirm my suspicions about what might have been going on.I recommend this book highly.

The media could not be loaded.  Livro veio em bom estado, embalado direitinho. Muito bonito essa edição, não tenho o que reclamar.

The media could not be loaded.  Está edição é excelente. Contém o Apêndice do autor, tem a capa dura e é bastante confortável ao folhear as páginas.

Everything is fine.

Parfait comme neuf

This book is a testament to Faulkner's immense shrewdness as a writer. And it expects an equal degree of application of patience and alertness from the reader to finish it.The inventive literary style of disjointed time periods, stream of consciousness amd disregard to grammar & punctuation make the first two sections of the book extremely opaque. Mercifully, Faulkner uses italics to signify shifts in time periods as the first section is described from the viewpoint of a mentally disabled man.The smog clears away by the third section and the final section is completely linear, thus bringing relief to the reader who finally gets to understand the gradual, tragic disintegration of a once proud Southern U.S. aristocratic family.I'd highly recommend this book for its memorable characters and a unique literary experiment by Faulkner.