MGN-AFRICA»» pin:2A123D88 The 100 best novels: No 55 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930): The influence of William Faulkners immersive tale of raw Mississippi rural life can be felt to this day This is the first, and probably the most popular, of Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County stories, a short, dark and compelling novel set in what he called my apocryphal county, a fictional rendering of Lafayette County in his native Mississippi. It was his ambition, he said, after the comparative failure of The Sound and the Fury, deliberately to write a tour de force. Apart from Mark Twain (No 23 in this series), no other American writer before Faulkner had ever immersed his readers so completely in the vernacular language and culture of a society that was, and perhaps still is, so deeply foreign to mainstream American experience. The death and burial of a southern matriarch, Addie Bundren, is told from some 15 viewpoints, including that of the dying woman herself. The Bundren familys demanding stream-of-consciousness narrative (Faulkner was a modernist pioneer) is intercut with the voices of the local doctor and preacher, together with neighbours and friends. From the first line, the reader is pitched into the deep south: Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewels frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own. Welcome to a brutal, backwoods community of impoverished cotton farmers in 1920s Mississippi. Continue reading... bit.ly/1kcSHfb pin:2A123D88
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 05:36:19 +0000