4.5/5 scars (permanent)
After an aborted audio attempt on The Sound and The Fury, As I Lay Dying came into the household as a gift. I had not recommitted to finishing a Faulkner, but as a good a reason as any had arrived. Values spill forth from the largely ill-fated, badly-used Bundrens and their impotent observers in the form of self-reflective first-person retrospectives.
Personalities bear themselves and burn themselves (and a barn) in this half-tome. Motives tear and yearn. Desire overcomes fear. Inertia is overwhelmed and again settled into. William Faulkner paints a desolate picture of rural Mississippi life, complete with the futility of neighborly help, the desperate cost of poverty, and the tight-lipped, accelerated suffering of nobility.
As I Lay Dying drives far from home the notion that Faulkner could ever be ingested aurally. This consciousness stream, unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, needs to tease and burble the eyes, driving stakes down in front of the spine to the weaker and weaker heart. This book beats not for blood flow, but to inscribe a eulogy in bruises across the center of the reader’s mass: here lay innocence, before it was shattered and evaporated. Loving, like a mother.
Obits aside, there is a tinkle of triumph, as least for the universally despised. Don’t hold too tight to your pearls, they will shatter in the teeth of river fords, vulture-inducing smells, stationary-aloft vultures, and hard words.
Leave time to get through this book in three sittings. And take weeks to examine your wounds that may never afterwards seal.
Roman Ryan 