But I decided to give the audio book a try. The writing, while beautiful, is just so dense, and takes so much concentration to understand, that I plain ran out of steam each time. I love Faulkner, and had tried to get through reading this book three times, all without success. I may also need to come back to this novel. It captures, without over-doing it, issues of race, class, the American Dream, the South, family, memory, etc., all packed inside a nearly perfect novel that slowly unwinds and unwraps through multiple, unreliable narrators. In many ways this novel, for me, belongs next to Moby-Dick or, The Whale, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Great Gatsby, and a handful of other as some of the greatest written art America has ever produced. However, as novels, I prefer Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!. “That is the substance of remembering-sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.” ― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury are probably more important, and perhaps more influential overall.
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