Light in August (The Corrected Text) | William Faulkner | Faulkner's Most Likeable Masterpiece

Light in August (The Corrected Text) | William Faulkner | Another landmark work by Faulkner

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Light in August (T...

	Light in August (The Corrected Text) William Faulkner Vintage International/Random House, 1990 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 77 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Faulkner's Most Likeable Masterpiece

After reading Faulkner's four major masterpieces -- The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; and Light in August -- I've come to the conclusion that Light in August is far and away the easiest to read, has the most dramatic plot, the most intriguing primary characters in Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower and Joanna Burden, and even some of his most intriguing minor characters in Uncle Doc Hines and Mr. McEachern. Overall, it is his most readable and likeable masterpiece. And it leaves you wanting so much more.

The complex and ambiguous character of Joe Christmas alone could have been the source of three or four novels detailing different times in his life. While Christmas is hardly a likeable person, he is fascinating, hypnotic, a train wreck; you can't keep your eyes off him. His actions are morally ambiguous and inconsistent and yet fully understandable within his nature. As a creation he deserves to rank with Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Captain Ahab and Jay Gatsby in the pantheon of American literary characters.

Faulkner has a big mission here. The novel exposes the evils of racism both in the South and among white, northern abolitionists. It traffics in religious symbolism while savaging religious fanatacism. And it leaves one with a great deal of memorable violent and sexual imagery. And that's just for starters. This book is deep, and while it's storytelling is largely non-linear, it is far more palatable than the other three, which tend to be confusing and obscure. Enjoy this one. If you've never read Faulkner, it's a great starter.

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Another landmark work by Faulkner

Laden with symbolism and filled with the sounds of the south where Faulkner grew up, this is the archetypical Faulkner work - savage and yet filled with humanity, darkly poetic and sage in it's observations on both the best and the worst in the human character.

Another Faulkner Classic

Don't be fooled by the title. William Faulkner's Light in August is not a cheerful, lighthearted book like the title might lead you to believe. It might as well be call Dark in September. Despite the misleading title, Faulkner has woven together another dark, stunning, and great novel. Any other author could not have achieved what he has done, which is, told an ordinary story in an extraordinary way. If you have ever read anything by Faulkner, however, this won't surprise you a bit.

The story opens on the dusty roads of Alabama. A young girl, Lena, has just left her home and is searching for the father of her child. She picks up a ride from a fellow who takes her to nearby town where she heard her former lover is living. She asks all around, but alas, she seems to be mistaken. Instead she encounters a man with a very similar name and he ends up taking care of her. His name is Byron Bunch. Ironically, the man she is searching for does happen to live in the same town as a bootlegger, but she won't find that out until later.

The story next shifts focus a Reverend Hightower. He was a former preacher who is haunted by visions of Confederate horseman. He used to have a congregation but they left him because of his adulterous wife. Byron Bunch visits him often and tells him the story of Joe Christmas, a drifter that he used to work with.

Next, and for the core of the novel, the story shifts focus to Joe Christmas. It tells of his abandonment at birth, his abusive, adopted parents, and his troubled teenage years. Eventually, after a tragedy occurs, he becomes a drifter on the road. No one cares about him and he doesn't care too much about anyone else either. Joe ends up making friends with a guy named Brown. Ironically, this guy named brown is the same person Lena is searching for at the beginning of the story. Brown and Christmas live in a cabin isolated from the rest of the town and engage together in the bootlegging business. Also, Christmas has a love affair with a woman who originally inhabited the isolated cabin. He and Brown stay there for a time until the major misfortune and plot twist take place.

The main issue Christmas faces is identity confusion. Supposedly he has black blood in him but looks like a white man. All of his life, this has scarred him deeply. He has never had an identity of his own. Is he white or black? The evils that happen to him revolve around this whole issue of race. I won't reveal how exactly the story unwinds itself at the end. All of the characters lives become connected in some way when the climax hits its peak as we take in the catastrophe that occurs.

Light in August is strewn loosely together in third person. Much of the story takes place in flashbacks. One of the pure brilliant elements of the novel is the matter of fact way Faulkner throws the issues of race, abuse, and loneliness at us. Among Faulkner's many geniuses is letting the reader decide how to react to the issues and situations presented. This novel is another shining example of this. It is as well written, unsentimental, and uncompromising as any of his other works.

Most of this novel is about a hard hearted drifter, but Faulkner also develops his supporting cast. The characters are as rich and deep as any Faulkner novel (perhaps part of the reason is that it is almost 200 pages longer than his average novels.)

Another praise of the novel is Faulkner's description. He paints strikingly original scenes with his words. Sentence fragments, jumbled together words and phrases, complex mixed with simple vocabulary. It has to be read to be believed. Faulkner has created another world of his own in this simple story. It has to be read to know exactly what I am talking about. Some of the passages will leave you breathless. I have never read an author that can create so much uniqueness with his words. This is not his most powerful or creative work, but it is a polished, sparkling gem in its own right. Light in August flows more like a collection of well drawn out scenes that a straight forward story.

Getting back to its title, Light in August, I wondered what it meant. After some research, I learned that Faulkner's wife used to comment that the light in the south seemed a bit different in August than in any other month. Perhaps this is what he had in mind when he named the novel. It is bit different than most reading you will ever do. This is the darkest Faulkner novel I have read, but it still has a certain glow to it, much like August days in the South do, I suppose.

Grade: A

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The only readable Faulkner I've come across

I've tried The Sound and the Fury, and I've tried Absolom, Absolom, but his thick, unweildy prose is just too much for my short, little span of attention. But this book. This book I liked. A very good story, and written in a nice, easy style. I don't know how old he was when he wrote it, but it seems more mature, like he's less eager to impress, and more interested in just telling a good story. Anyway, I liked it.

JS

heavy reading!

This is the first book of Faulkner's that I have ever read. I have to be honest that the structure threw me off. There are so many important characters, and FAulkner doesn't want us to miss any one of their life's story. So he gives a huge biography of each character, which sort of messes up the flow of the main story, and you get lost who's story you're reading about or what it is all about, at least for a moment.
But the issues that he's dealing with is so serious and heavy, and despite his thick and overnarrative writing, the subject itself captivates you and gets a grip of your mind. Thus I couldn't put the book down. I said, "Never mind if he's a scattered brain. Finish the book first and then try to understand why he wrote this one in such a screwed up structure."

Victor Hugo does a lot better job weaving the lives of many characters and putting them together as one work. Hugo is a magician. This book of Faulkner's doesn't have that kind of magic. The lives of his characters aren't woven finely, like here's one huge block of life, there's another huge block of life, and just when you thought you figured it out, you come upon another huge block of life, which makes it really hard to read. But each characters is unforgettable, as some of the reviewers wrote, and the issues that Faulkner is tackling with is monstrous. Considering the weight of the task, I think he did a great job.
Until the end, I didn't understand what Lena Grove's role was. She conceives a child of a scoundrel who has abandoned her, and she leaves her village to find him by trusting strangers. And the strangers she encounters all voluntarily helps her. All the characters in this story are social outcasts one way of another, and Lena is the first one. She trusts, but one begins to wonder what it is that she trusts. The other outcasts, especially Joe Christmas, or Rev. Hightower, or Miss. Burden, act totally different from Lena does. Faulkner deliberately starts the story with Lena, and ends with Lena. In between, he throws in the tragic lives of the other outcasts. Not only that, he lets a totally unimportant stranger, who has never even mentioned previously in the story, tell about Lena to his wife.

Since I'd never read Faulkner before and wasn't familiar with his style, this was probably a rough start, and I still think he could have done a better job in structure and organization. There were a lot of duplicated tellings, wasting pages by repeating the same episodes; he could have eliminated at least 100 pages if he organized it better.

But the story was told in great depth, very satisfying and intense, and you get to know the characters very well. I liked it a lot better than Hemingway's detached way (I can hardly get through Hemingway!). Just read it when your mind is clear and ready for a heavy task.

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