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Book Description
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Product Description
Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, The Sound and the Fury explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart this is a novel about lovelessness - 'only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?' (20040923)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I wish I had studied this one at high school, its themes are so diverse and details so richly laid down. It isn't a tough book to follow if taken in over a short space of time; don't be put off by reviews that focus on complexity, Faulkner's words are never difficult to follow and the story is wonderfully human. The first chapter seems obscure on first reading and warrants a quick re-read once you're finished with the last, it is only 60 pages in length which means you're not given time to tire of the world the first narrator inhabits. By the third chapter, more becomes apparent and the story starts to make sense- I would look up a list of characters at some point, sparknotes.com or similar, to make things easier!
This edition is nicely printed, with a suitably concise introduction. Well recommended!
This edition is nicely printed, with a suitably concise introduction. Well recommended!
70 of 73 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Not for the beach, this one. But certainly worth ploughing through if you want to stretch your brain and think about life and death and consciousness. Most people will dismiss this book in the first few pages - it is notoriously difficult to get to grips with, and actually requires two readings before it starts to make any sense. But, as a reflection on the incomprehensible nature of life, that's not bad. Most of us make little or no sense of our three score years and ten; in relative terms The Sound & the Fury is a breeze! This is a tragic story, and all the more so for the choked narrative voice of the dead. The repression in these pages is countered by the rebellious and almost unpunctuated text, and the contrast is stunning. It soon dawns on you - as a reader who is impatient at the challenge to traditional literature - that we're all victims of a man-made environment, and by social mores that cripple and destroy our souls. Faulkner's novel is not, by any stretch, the most enjoyable or entertaining that you will ever read. But it is certainly one of the most brave, and I would recommend it highly if you want to confront your own demons.
39 of 42 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Faulkner is often regarded as a "difficult" novelist, and this book is indeed a densely dilineated, complex tome. It is also, however, incredibly straighforward. It is one of those texts that you just have to go with. Too many readers approach this book with trepidation, because they have been told they are not going to understand it. Turn loose of your preconceptions about fiction and about narrative, and you will be amply rewarded.
Faulkner, along with Joyce, was a master of stream-of-consciousness narrative, and this is his masterpiece in that regard. To appreciate such a technique, you must as the Beatles exhorted, "turn off your mind, relax and go downstream." Go with the flow, no matter you noxious that sounds these days. If you let yourself think for a while as Benjie does, the whole patchwork makes perfect sense.
This is a family novel, more than anything else, but it is obviously not about the Waltons. Faulkner made a career out of delineating the disfunction of not only Southern families, but of the South itself in the era following its ignominious Civil War defeat and surrender . The whole social structure broke down from within, and though no apologist, Faulkner was enough of a realist to depict the society in all its infirm decline.
Southern revisionists can come along and deny its accuracy, but for a true picture of ther region in the first half of the 20th century, Faulkner is more accurate than any social historian.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Brilliant - though challenging at the start
The opening of the book is challenging, and I think most readers will have to struggle through it. But persevere, because the book becomes more friendly and easier to follow from... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Mr Witters
Dreadful - this work has got The South a bad name
I must be odd or poorly-educated (or both) for I cannot for the life of me see how William Faulkner could have won on merit a Nobel Prize for literature nor two Pulitzer Prizes. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Geoffrey Woollard
Top 5 easily
One of the best books I've ever read, complicated yet enthralling from start to finish and absolutely mind blowing at the end. Read more
Published 8 months ago by PhilipPhilop
Consanguinity... and some other defective behavior...
...but what is real, and what is imagined? It certainly depends on one's perspective, and there is a spectrum of those reflected in the dissolution of the Compson family. Read more
Published 13 months ago by John P. Jones III
The here and the now
Faulkner is cited by existential philosophers e.g. William Barrett notes the way Faulkner "sees". The value in this painfully disruptive writing style is that Faulkner helps us... Read more
Published 21 months ago by S. Gibbs
Difficult and not particularly rewarding
A great deal has been written about this stream-of-consciousness classic, so I'll limit my own observations to a couple of points. Read more
Published on 9 April 2010 by Phil O'Sofa
"The grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sun."
The Sound and the Fury is an intense and disorienting novel which plunges the reader into the intimacies and fractures of the flagging Compson family in the Deep South, and in an... Read more
Published on 18 Feb 2010 by One as Yet Very Indistinct
Hard work
Had to really persevere with this 'classic"! and felt like going like treacle especially for the first 74 pages -when more than once I felt like giving it up as a bad job - why... Read more
Published on 17 Sep 2009 by aragorn17
Every man is an arbiter of his own virtues.
I'm not that familiar with American literature of this type,but I found it a compelling read.Although the work needs a short explanation via the introduction to set the reader on... Read more
Published on 15 Nov 2008 by nicholas hargreaves
The end of an era
Fragments of thoughts, broken memories, lost and blurred pieces of imagination once lived and desired, are all we have to build a shattered picture of what was the tragic destiny... Read more
Published on 18 April 2008 by Ana Marques
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