The Sound and the Fury

I was lucky to have not much else to do when I read this book, which let me stick at it because it was definitely worth the read, although I can imagine losing steam if I was busy with other things. I thought the stream of consciousness thing was pretty cool, and the way all the chapters fit together, and the jumping around timeline as well. The mysteriousness keeps you reading too. Definitely not a fun read though, it makes you feel like shit which is probably the point but not a great feeling.

faulkner is like a horrible person right?

Comfort novel <3

what is there to say? absolutely perfect, as is everything else i've read by him. was reading this at work for a couple of days and two people commented on how bad they thought it was.

good but I would not recommend consuming this as an audiobook

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Not my favorite Faulkner work.

I seriously have no idea what was going on.

My first Faulkner experience turned out to be better than I thought it would be! It was definitely hard to read this book at times, both in terms of the literary techniques used and in terms of themes, but I was most struck by the rawness of the writing, and how everything is presented so uniquely in each chapter - if you didn't know that the same person wrote the entire novel, you'd think four people wrote four different chapters. Overall, I enjoyed it, just wasn't that blown away by it!

The height of things.

More like 2 1/2. When I talk about this you'll understand why. :)

Difficult and devastating, but incredible characterization and storytelling. It would be great to read this in a classroom setting or with somebody who has read it multiple times. There's so many symbols and motifs running throughout with meanings that aren't quite obvious. Going to have to revisit this at some point.

Powerful and weirdly disorienting. Objectively, I get why this is as hyped and beloved as it is (the downfall of the rich! Southern gothica!), but it's not my cup of tea. The looping events and the stream-of-consciousness narratives were especially unforgiving for the reader, and I wanted nothing more than to yeet Jason out of existence. The Sound and the Fury is a demanding book; it demands so much attention to every detail in order to recognize the breaks in scenes and time. Personally, I didn't think the payoff was that great, especially when the most satisfying parts came in the form of an appendix that Faulkner had only inserted after the fact.

I've read lots of scatterbrained, stream-of-consciousness, frustrating, multi-voiced, timeline-fucking books, but never before this one do I recall reading one that did all these things in so short a span of pages with what turned out to be an oddly coherent (if still certainly not altogether unmuddy) effect. There were surely parts of it that I didn't love, and I definitely feel like I ought to reread the thing right now to get more out of it (I did quickly thumb through it again as soon as I finished), but on the whole, it was sort of in my wheelhouse. I didn't love it, but in the end, I very solidly liked it. Standard disclaimers re Faulkner and the grim baggage of the racist South and language around that baggage apply. It's more a 3.5-star book for me, but I suppose the book's chief malcontent Jason Compson -- who by the way I'd love to kick thirty or forty times real hard in the nuts -- has rubbed off on me and I'm scoring it down to a 3 rather than following standard rounding procedure and awarding a 4.