As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner | Simple and gritty

books:

As I Lay Dying

	As I Lay Dying William Faulkner Vintage, 1991 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 192 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

My Favorite Book.

This is easily Faulkner's masterpiece. I've read it a thousand times, at least, and I always find something new. The characters are beautifully detailed, and the plot is full of Faulkner's trademark twists and turns. It's not a casual Sunday read, but it's well worth the time. If you're a Faulkner fan, you won't be disappointed.

Simple and gritty

What is so interesting to me about this book is how simple the story is. Anse Bundren is the stubborn-old-goat of a father and husband who has promised his dying, and later deceased wife Addie that he will bury her in her home town of Jefferson when she dies.

"As I Lay Dying" recounts the death and then trip to Jefferson, one tragic mishap after the other, through the view points of the members of Bundren family and others associated with them. These first person accounts from the characters brilliantly reveal the rather gritty and mostly unfortunate existence of the Bundrens, which appears to be the point of the book even more than the story itself.

for more information click here

Tragedy and Comedy

I decided to read "As I Lay Dying" as a follow up to my recent first experience with Faulkner, "The Sound and the Fury." Neither book was an easy read (actually, both were downright difficult), but for reasons I can't quite explain both were also compulsively, almost obsessively readable. "As I Lay Dying" was probably the more accessible of the two, although once again the story is told through the eyes of multiple highly subjective and sometimes unreliable narrators. The choice to present the story in this way makes a relatively straightforward plot more challenging, but it also makes the characters come alive: you see each member of the Bundren family from within and from without; you look on both as a detached neighbor offended by the stink of a rotting corpse and as a passionate son or daughter struggling to cope with the death of a mother and the odious task of transporting her body 40 miles by wagon under the worst possible conditions.

In a way this made it seem like the story was seen and felt and experienced rather than told, and what emerges, piece by piece, is a tragic but darkly comic journey from the countryside of the deep south to a graveyard in Jefferson, Mississippi. To me, the title of the book, although arguably a misnomer, is apt: as Faulkner says, death is a function of the mind more so than a phenomenon of the body, and Addie Bundren, although buzzards are circling her coffin, is not truly dead to her family until they can fulfill their promise to her and lay her to rest in Jefferson. What makes it so much more complex, though, is the fact that this isn't a family motivated to endure terrible hardships only out of devotion to a lost loved one. Instead, each member of the family has his or her own personal concerns seething just below the surface, and each makes the trip to Jefferson for his or her own reasons: some hypocritical, some purely selfish, some sincere.

Basically, I felt like this was a tough read but very worthwhile. As already advised by a helfpul review above, you just have to trust the storyteller and remember that even when something seems unexplained or unintelligible, everything will become clear by the end (or close enough). I certainly didn't understand everything I was reading, especially while I was reading it, but I loved the experience nonetheless. Faulkner is a master of evoking a unique time and place, and it was fun spending some time with these characters.

for more information click here