is one of those books that makes a gigantic claim, As if its either genius or its Emperors New Clothes, It wont settle for anything inbetween, On every page I felt Faulkner was straining at the bit to prove to me hes a genius.
The title has always put me off reading this, The Sound and the Fury, Its melodramatic, humourless, a bit pompous, It sounds like one of those American war films of the fifties starring John Wayne,
But what is it with southern writers that they only seem able to write books if they can believe theyre geniuses Look Homeward Angel makes that claim too.
Except Look Homeward Angel is probably the most overwritten novel in the history of literature, Wolfe maybe had some genius but he wasnt in control of it, Faulkner unquestionably is different. Faulkner has genius and is in control of it, But
Essentially to enjoy this youve got to also enjoy codebreaking, I dont. Ive never even done a crossword puzzle in my life, I doubt if Ill ever try Finnegans Wake again after failing to make head or tail of it the first time.
Also, youve probably got to be prepared to read it twice, Its probably every English teachers dream book a book that requires notes formulated by someone with a higher intelligence than your own.
Its not very flattering to realise your own intelligence isnt up to the job, Should a novel require notes Shakespeare might be enhanced by notes but he doesnt need them, I needed to refer to notes to understand what was going on in part one, Okay, Ive got it now but did you really need to be so wilfully obtuse Its not like youre explaining particle physics.
This is essentially a family melodrama, not a treatise on the meaning of life, If you strip away all the literary devices, thats what it is a family melodrama, Sure it has a broader social reach but only bad novels dont have that, It didnt for me have the wide cultural reach of Gatsby, It felt parochial, claustrophobic.
But putting aside the decryption demands of the novel I also think it has some more obvious flaws like the character of Jason His villainy was somewhat coarse.
He wouldn't even get in my topbest villains in literature!
Id like to read another Faulkner but one where he isnt trying quite so hard to prove hes a genius.
Bookfrombooks The Sound And The Fury, William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner.
It employs a number of narrative styles, including stream of consciousness, Published in, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's fourth novel, and was not immediately successful,
The first section of the novel is narrated by Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a source of shame to the family due to his diminished mental capacity the only characters who show genuine care for him are Caddy, his older sister, and Dilsey, a matronly servant.
His narrative voice is characterized predominantly by its nonlinearity: spanning the period, Benjy's narrative is a series of nonchronological events presented in a stream of consciousness.
The presence of italics in Benjy's section indicates significant shifts in the narrative, Originally Faulkner meant to use different colored inks to signify chronological breaks,
Characters: The Compsons, Dilsey Gibson, Quentin Compson III, Jason Compson IV, Caroline Bascomb Compson, Candace "Caddy" Compson, Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, Miss Quentin Compson
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: خشم و هیاهو غوغا و خشم نویسنده: ویلیام فاکنر انتشاراتیها پیروز نگاه نیلوفر فرانکلین ماهابه بوتیمار تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه می سالمیلادی
عنوان: خشم و هیاهو اثر: ویلیام فاکنر مترجم: بهمن شعله ور تهران انتشارات پیروز فرانکلین چاپ چهارمدرص چاپ دیگر تهران نگاهدرص چاپ دوم نگاهشابکچاپ چهارم نگاهچاپ دیگر تهران علمی فرهنگیدرص شابکموضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا سدهم
عنوان: خشم و هیاهو یا غوغا و خشم نویسنده: ویلیام فاکنر مترجم: صالح حسینی تهران نیلوفردرص چاپ سومشابکچاپ پنجمدرص ششمهفتمهشتمنهمشابک
مترجم: مرضیه خسروی تهران ماهابهدرص شابک
مترجم: کریم فرهادی مشهد بوتیماردرص شابک:
ویژگی تکنیکی و برجسته ی رمان خشم و هیاهو سود بردن از چهار نگاه برای روایت فروپاشی خانواده ی کامپسون است از ذهن ناتوان بنجی به ذهن وسواسی کونتین و سپس به ذهن متفاوت و یا بیاندازه وسواسی جیسون و در پایان نیز به سوی دنیای دیلسی حرکتی از ساده لوحی و معصومیت به سوی روشنگری فزاینده عناوینی که فاکنر برای داستانهایش برمیگزیدند بیشتر ذهنی و معنایی برای خود نویسنده داشتند اما خشم و هیاهو عنوان کتاب کلیدی راستین دارد و با همان ابیات شکسپیر در نمایشنامه ی مکبث که میگویند: زندگی قصه ای است که توسط ابلهی روایت میشود سرشار از خشم و هیاهو ولی پوچ کاملا هماهنگی دارد و همچنین با بخش نخستین داستان که شامل روایت بنجی است شباهت و آشنایی دارد بخش کونتین نیز پژواکی از عنوان رمان است او فلسفه ی مأیوس کننده ی پدر را آموخته که انسانها را صرفا به شکل عروسکهایی ببیند که با خاک پر شده اند و.
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تاریخ بهنگام رسانی هجری خورشیدی هجری خورشیدی ا. شربیانی This masterpiece is a classic, a work that I, all the time, wanted to read,
And here I am again in the heart of America!
An intricate monument surrounded at the start! Rough writing, an upset chronology.
Characters with the same first name! A bereaved family, a disabled son, and a son in love with his sister.
A distraught mother and a father who died of alcohol,
There is a family full of secrets, servants of mad humanity,
A shocking reading. Somehow I earned a degree in English Lit w/o ever reading Faulkner, This was the first book Ive read of his and I cant say enough about it, This book haunts you. Heres 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 theres even a physical reaction There is a connection, but damn it if you can 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.
Thats good right Of course, Thats what you get with this book, you're trying to find that connection, Another reviewer said reading the Sound and the Fury was like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle withof the pieces missing.
I understand the point, but I dont know if thats exactly right, I dont think there are any missing pieces, you just have to alter your expectation of what the completed puzzle will look like,
I've come to understand what people mean when they say "Faulkner is not just chronicling the fall of the south.
” I think the more important themes here have less to do with the postreconstruction 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 Ive ever read, You're sort of lost for the firstpages, Our understanding of time as a linear process will confound your experience with the first section of the book.
Benjys narrative is difficult to be sure, but when the book is said and done, his is the most memorable and maybe the most important.
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 Quinton's inability to accept times 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, The book is filled with sentences that have no beginning or end, some teteatete with no indication given as to whos speaking, and all throughout the punctuation isn't exactly wrong, but it certainly isn't correct.
Lots of flashbacks, shifts in perspective, and often pages and pages with few if any paragraph breaks, Each characters perception of time is understood through Faulkners experiment with language, Its 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” you might not get there but its heartening to try.
stars, A, thumbs up, . . all that shit. read this book.
I'm done. My third and final attempt has failed miserably,
No, not miserably, Gladly actually.
So it's official, I'm now as thick as two short planks, an intellectual misfit, I Wouldn't know literary greatness if it shot me in the buttocks from close range.
Well, that's likely what Faulkner would be thinking anyway, Fine. But then I'd most certainly whip his ass at a game of chess, and drink him under the table as long as it's my special cocktails as a way to get even.
The only reason I returned to this novel, was I thought that 'Light in August' was really good and was hoping for more.
Nope.
I didn't get it, and couldn't be bothered to even try, I got so frustrated I started Chain smoking, This coming from someone who is dearly trying so hard to quit! Thanks Bill,
The only thing Faulkner did do for me was make me realise just how much I adore the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, now even more.
They were true geniuses.
What's the likelihood of me reading Faulkner again Only time will tell I guess, But at the moment, there is more chance of Theresa May and JeanClaude Juncker having an affair, Some books are welcoming they start with a gentle slope, give the reader enough space to adjust and get their bearings, contemplate the landscape, and then maybe move things up a notch.
But you never get lost, Not so with The Sound and the Fury, This novel starts like a steep and slippery cliff face, little time to reflect, no idea where this is going, just hang on to what you can.
Things eventually will get better, but tenacity and patience are of the essence,
The Sound and the Furyis a “plantation novel”, a family chronicle, and one of Faulkners early works.
But this is not your everyday family saga, Like sitelinkProust, sitelinkJoyce or sitelinkWoolf before him, one of Faulkners primary storytelling devices is “stream of consciousness”.
But this is not your average interior monologue either, From the start and in close succession, we are thrown inside the inner life and thought process of a series of slightly or even deeply touched characters: the Compson clan.
The structure of the novel feels like utter chaos and confusion, next to which sitelinkMrs, Dalloway or sitelinkThe Waste Land seem almost cohesive and straightforward: the story keeps prancing about, time and space, nonlinear, dislocated and elliptical, from one paragraph to the next, from one chapter to the other.
Three of the four chapters are set during Easter, yet not in chronological order, and a fourth chapter jumps back towithout any apparent reason.
Three chapters are narrated in the first person, yet the fourth is in the third person without justification.
Language keeps being bent and twisted this way and that: a mosaic of Dixie and African American dialects, Greek tragedies and Biblical myths, bits of sitelinkShakespeare, sentence fragments, italics, lack of punctuation, irregular wording, inconsistent spelling, onomatopoeic outbursts.
. . In short, no clear rule, no attempt at any form of aesthetic balance, Everything is smashed and then patched right back up, jumbled together again, layer upon layer into an experimental, complex, jarring and, quite frankly, fearless and virtuoso literary assemblage.
Still, coexisting with that pandemonium of a novel, there is also a sort of logical movement, perhaps like the four movements of a symphony.
A progression not unlike that of sitelinkThe Divine Comedy: while Dantes poem moves from darkness the circles of hell to light the empyrean spheres, Faulkner takes us from the dazzled and disorganised mind of the mentally disabled and scentobsessed Benjy,
by way of the tormented, possibly incestuous and quite certainly suicidal Quentin, through the embittered, unsavoury, racist and rapacious character of Jason, and finally Dilsey, the head of the Black family in the Compsons service, definitely the sounder mind of them all.
The novel ends with an appendix on the familys last three generations, written like a parody of the genealogies in the book of Genesis.
I would recommend reading this section first: its the lube thatll get you/it in using it at the end makes no sense.
This progressive movement from utter mental confusion toward sanity runs counter to the spiralling decline of the Compsons, which, for all I know, heralds the upcoming downfall of the world economy in the earlys.
Meanwhile, the actual anchors of the novel, to which Faulkner comes back, again and again, are the presence of nature birds and vegetation, notably, and the refreshing feminine figures of Caddy and Ms Quentin: the focus point and Ariadnes thread of the whole story.
After all, The Sound and the Fury is a demanding, alienating, maddening but masterful novel that had a formidable impact on the subsequent generations of American writers Southern, New England or Californian traditions alike: sitelinkHarper Lee, sitelinkCormac McCarthy, sitelinkStephen King or even sitelinkDavid Foster Wallace and a few African American and Latin American writers as well.
It is, in the end, a staggering example of how literature and language can be pushed to the limit and yet draw a deep and compelling picture of reality.
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