08 July 2005

35. William Faulkner, AS I LAY DYING

Erskine Caldwell, you should be taking notes. The theme material here is almost exactly the same as TOBACCO ROAD -- poor, multi-child Southern family on quixotic small-scale quest -- yet I savored this book over almost a week of commuting and wished it had been 200 pages longer when it ended. I want to go back to ABSALOM, ABSALOM! and say, Hey, Bill, I finally get it.

Why they didn't make everyone read this in high school -- we only had a semester of American lit, and because I took it in the fall we didn't have time to get to Faulkner -- is completely beyond me.

Ellen vs. the Modern Library: 37-63

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ah, the first book in your posts that I have read.

I think of As I Lay Dying as an exquisitely written book that I did not enjoy reading at all: because, come on, it's disgusting, from the detailed descriptions of the rotting corpse to the characters' actions. I think the only character I could tolerate was Cash, and that's probably because he didn't talk much.