What are you reading now?

[richardfinegold]

The Sound and the Fury is coming up shortly for me, first-time read, perhaps right after Go Down, Moses.

I was surprised by how unproblematic Light in August is. Moving, too.I would recommend it heartily to everyone.

Yes, unfortunately, Light In August is an outlier in Faulkner in terms of accessibility. The Sound and the Fury has 4 separate narrators, all giving their spin on an event. The first narrator is mentally challenged, and therefore the biggest challenge for the reader to navigate

[PatrickMurtha]

I remember when Oprah’s Book Club, probably spurred by her friend Toni Morrison, did a Faulkner series - The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August. I have a feeling that most of her readers didn’t get very far with it. The boxed paperback set is ubiquitous in the used book market.

I don’t mean to be too much of a snoot about it, however: Although I am certainly all for people reading and appreciating the classics, what has primacy is that they have the TOOLS to do this (vocabulary, historical literacy, etc). And in almost all cases, these are obtained through a first-rate education before adulthood – a type of education that is becoming increasingly rare now.

Can these tools be developed through autodidacticism in adulthood? Yes, but that is a difficult and gargantuan task, requiring an investment of time and a level of self-discipline beyond the reach of most. Youth is the best time to do it, just as with learning languages, partly because your mind is pliable and still forming.

[Mandryka]

Yes, unfortunately, Light In August is an outlier in Faulkner in terms of accessibility.

Have you read any of the Snopes trilogy? I certainly enjoyed The Hamlet - but couldn’t get through The Mansion.

[PatrickMurtha]

Have you read any of the Snopes trilogy? I certainly enjoyed The Hamlet - but couldn’t get through The Mansion.

This question was not posed to me, however I’ll chime in and mention that I am reading the first volume, The Forge, of T.S. Stribling’s Vaiden Trilogy, which it is well known that Faulkner bought and read as it appeared, and which was certainly an influence on the Snopes Trilogy. Stribling is good, and poses no stylistic difficulties. As a critic once said of Ellen Glasgow, Stribling can function as an “introduction to the South” because he makes explicit much of the knowledge that Faulkner assumes in us.

[Mandryka]

That’s interesting PatrickMurtha


I’m kind of learning a bit of American history on the hoof. Only this evening I was reading about the One Drop Rule - essential (possibly) for understanding (one aspect of) Absalom Absalom, but not explained in the text as far as I can see.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

[PatrickMurtha]

Faulkner was very much not explanatory.

[PatrickMurtha]

Entering the final chapters of Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool (1936), I can’t help thinking that it isn’t a good sign for a writer’s first novel to be quite so louche and dissipated, and in fact this was also Connolly’s LAST novel. An account of wastrels in a resort town in the south of France, and markedly lesbian in content for a novel by a straight male writer, The Rock Pool captures the lassitude of an impecunious protagonist who can barely force himself to get up in the morning (this is described multiple times).

Reading a bit about Connolly’s disappointed life, which is chock full of literary names and dodges about money and pointless to-ing and fro-ing, one immediately detects that unlike an F. Scott Fitzgerald who could live the heavy social drinking lifestyle and somehow write about it with insight and sparkle, it just messed Cyril up, to the point where he had much difficulty focusing (he left fragments of several other novels). He didn’t even have the alcoholic spurts of energy of a Malcolm Lowry, although he did manage to write a rather famous apologia, Enemies of Promise, about why he couldn’t achieve what he wanted to.

Beyond the booze, my partial take is that jadedness before age 40 is not only unattractive, but de-energizing: Connolly was been there, done that, almost from the beginning, and you need enthusiasm and drive to get the big projects done, which he appears not to have possessed.

Despite all that, The Rock Pool is a quite interesting read, and Connolly was later a fairly productive journalist and critic. He just wasn’t a big-guns, sustained-effort kind of writer; even Enemies of Promise and his other well-known book, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus, look very SECTIONAL, and The Rock Pool itself is a shortish novel.

[richardfinegold]

Have you read any of the Snopes trilogy? I certainly enjoyed The Hamlet - but couldn’t get through The Mansion.

Tried, about 30 years ago

[richardfinegold]

The Immoralist, by Andre Gide. Supposedly an important book in La Belle Epoque, the main protagonist supposedly being a Nietzchean figure who can only realize inner peace by renouncing conventional morality. It’s a sad little tale and the protagonist is not any happier as far as I can see after screwing up his own life and causing the demise of his loyal spouse

[PatrickMurtha]

The Immoralist is a Gide that I need to get to! The Counterfeiters is one of the great 20th Century novels. I have also read his short novel Strait Is the Gate.

[vinteuil]

The Immoralist is a Gide that I need to get to! The Counterfeiters is one of the great 20th Century novels. I have also read his short novel Strait Is the Gate.

... Strait is the Gate is the obvious negative (?) twin to The Immoralist. They're both fairly autobiographical. We 'did' la Porte Etroite as part of our French 'O' level, and were encouraged by our French master also to read its companion l' Immoraliste - while being warned that it was essentially gay porn. I think most of us preferred it to our set text...

[PatrickMurtha]

Gide would be beyond my French reading level now, although perhaps I could have managed as a senior in high school (when we did read Camus’ L’Étranger).

[Sir Velo]

Gide would be beyond my French reading level now, although perhaps I could have managed as a senior in high school (when we did read Camus’ L’Étranger).

I was always miffed that my "A" level class missed "L'etranger" by a year, while we ended up with "Le ble en Herbe".

If memory serves, we also got La Peste, Germinal and Pere Goriot.

[french frank]

... Strait is the Gate is the obvious negative (?) twin to The Immoralist. They're both fairly autobiographical.

La Porte Etroite is a bit insipid. I have to thank L'Immoraliste/Gide for introducing me to Agrigento, so having visited Paestum (which has a railway station) I set off for Sicily and the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento (which, if I remember, he deliberately avoided because he was "supposed to" visit it). Memorable visit (mine).

[PatrickMurtha]

I was always miffed that my "A" level class missed "L'etranger" by a year, while we ended up with "Le ble en Herbe".

If memory serves, we also got La Peste, Germinal and Pere Goriot.

That is more advanced than my French classes in high school. I did not continue French at university, but took up Russian unsuccessfully. Nor did I continue Latin, which I had enjoyed in middle and high school.

I am not a good linguist on the speaking / listening side. My Spanish is still indifferent after 13 years in Mexico. I have always been much better at reading languages, and if I really applied myself, I could get to literary level reading in both Spanish and French. I never seem to find the time, though…