William Faulkner

Michael Gorra

Sound and the Fury

--William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism

The Sound and the Fury

even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important… a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willynilly and is recalled without warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen to be floating at the time

you are not lying now either but you are still blind to what is in yourself

The Sound and the Fury, first published in 1929, is perhaps William Faulkner’s greatest book. It was immediately praised for its innovative narrative technique, and comparisons were made with Joyce and Dostoyevsky, but it did not receive popular acclaim until the late forties, shortly before Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner’s mythical Yoknapatawpha County, through the interior monologues of the idiot Benjy and his brothers, Quentin and Jason. Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.

faulkner is like a horrible person right?

lily taggart

_linia_

jack

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.

Cody Degen

good but I would not recommend consuming this as an audiobook

Nihan 

Cat Josephson

Gillian Rose

I seriously have no idea what was going on.

The Sound and the Fury (Vintage Classics)

Claudia Ganea

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 sound and the fury

Christopher McCaffery

Amber Laha

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

Nathan Griffin

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.

Cindy

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.

Daryl Houston

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.

Daria

Jonas Stinziano 

Alyssa C Smith

Gabe Cortez

Una obra maestra de la literatura que relata la degeneración progresiva de la familia Compson, sus secretos y las relaciones de amor y odio que la sostienen y la destruyen. Por primera vez, William Faulkner introduce el monólogo interior y revela los diferentes puntos de vista de sus personajes. El libro se cierra con un apéndice que descubrirá al lector los entresijos de esta saga familiar de Jefferson, Mississippi, conectándola con otros personajes de Yoknapatawpha, territorio creado por Faulkner como marco de muchas de sus novelas. English Description "I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. . . . I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” --from The Sound and the Fury The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Sound and the Fury

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