The Big Book Project Next Read Is…

A challenging novel. Should you read it with us? Absolutely!

Our next Big Book read is Absalom, Absalom!

I first read William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! twenty five years ago for a non-credit college course on the best novels of the twentieth century. It’s the only novel that I recall from that seminar. I read it a second time a few years after, even more impressed with its emotional pull on me.

What makes Absalom, Absalom! a “big book?” You will notice that it’s not particularly long. But it IS dense and very interior, shifting confusingly among the perspectives of its four narrators who slowly unveil the harrowing, compelling story of one Thomas Sutpen. This man is every bit as driven as Captain Ahab with his whale. The force of Sutpen’s personality bends the wills and fates of everyone he encounters.

In his article for the Norton Critical Edition of Absalom, Absalom!, scholar Johannes Burgers writes that the novel is “an unabashedly difficult text. Its structure is overwrought, its characters are inscrutable, and the prose is nearly impenetrable. There is also no shortage of digressions—parenthetical, italicized, and otherwise—that force even the most focused reader to re-read the same passage several times.”

Burgers goes on to write that Faulkner tried to “capture how the past continuously intrudes upon the present” and used long sentences to do this. When asked why he wrote such long sentences Faulkner claimed that there is no such thing as “was” because everyone brings their past with them.

Indeed, Absalom, Absalom! is a challenging novel. Should you read it with us? Absolutely!

I truly believe that the time that you spend with it will be one of your most satisfying reading experiences, one that will stay with you for many years in a way few other novels, even the great ones, do.