As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner | Now I can get them teeth...

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As I Lay Dying

	As I Lay Dying William Faulkner Vintage, 1991 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 190 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren family's bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Faulkner lets each family member--including Addie--and others along the way tell their private responses to Addie's life.

Homegoing

One of the most important writers of the twentieth century in any country, William Faulkner could tell a rousing tale. Check your collective memory. You're sitting around the campfire and the the storyteller begins.

When it is Faulkner, expect the unexpected. As I Lay Dying. As Dead I Am Carried to My Homeplace. The first sentence: "Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file." When they get to the cottonhouse, Darl, the narrator takes the path around, Jewel goes straight--through one window and out the other. Cash, the oldest son, is making a wood coffin. (This is a very impoverished family in an impoverished South.) Their mother Addie is dying in bed and watching the building of the coffin through an open window. "It will give her confidence and comfort," Darl tells us through his first person thoughts.

If you want a study in dysfunctional families, go no further. Anse, the father, is a n'er-do-well, who is basically indifferent to the needs of those around him. Cash, the oldest, is a mighty fine carpenter, but a little slow on the uptake, while Darl, the only one who understands this family's pathos, is mentally ill. Dewey Dell, the only girl, is not conversant with the facts of life and makes this homegoing pilgrimage with hopes of doing away with the life she is carrying. Poor Vardaman, the youngest, will suffer the most in his total lack of understanding. His mother dies. She is in a coffin. He can hear her talk inside the coffin through the drill holes to give her air (she is decomposing in the hot Mississippi heat). And Jewel, the second youngest, is his name to Addie, the special son for a special reason.

When Faulkner wrote, he discarded all notions of what a writer is expected to do: tell a straightforward narrative. Sit where you are and go back in time to any episode. Plan a summer vacation in your mind. That's the premise Faulkner worked with. The mind is not a straightforward narrator. He depicts that backward and forward movement in his stories. He challenges the reader by never indicating where on the time line he is in telling the story.

In "As I Lay Dying," he goes a step further. He never tells who narrates the story until the reader figures out that the title of the chapter is also the narrator. The first chapter is entitled "Darl." He begins the story in his prescient, omniscient knowing.

Make no mistake. The story of the Bundrens taking Addie back to her homeplace for burial is a comic-tragic one. The person who most deserves punishment for his bad deeds is the one who is most rewarded. Faulkner was no optimist. But he was a chronicler of his times and of a defeated South and of resulting decaying values years after the fact.

If you are new to Faulkner, read this novel first, now that you know the secret to its puzzle in narration. Then imagine sitting around that collective campfire and hearing this story just as Faulkner wrote it. Puzzling on paper, clear in the telling. So Faulknerian!

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Now I can get them teeth...

In *As I Lay Dying* the Bundren family is on a death-watch as Addie--wife and mother--dies. Within view of her deathbed, through the window, she can see one of her sons, Cash, building her coffin. With that macabre beginning, Faulkner tells a story as compact and grotesque as it is powerful and unforgettable.

It's giving away nothing to say that Addie soon heaves her last because the real story begins after she dies. Anse, the toothless, luckless family patriarch, has promised his wife he'd bury her among her own people in the cemetery across the river. Unfortunately, it's been raining real hard lately and the bridges are washed out. But a promise is a promise and Anse is going to see it through come hell and high water. So the Bundren's set out on funeral procession through said hell and high water, passing from one mishap to the next, eventually followed by a flock of buzzards as mom's corpse begins to immodestly decompose.

The novel is narrated in short chapters, each told through a different character's point of view, mostly the Bundren family, and all in a sort of heavy backwoods patois that will surely pose a challenge to some readers--and delight the rest with its flexibility, originality, and hypnotic power.

Faulkner is the acknowledged grandmaster of the southern gothic and *As I Lay Dying* doesn't disappoint. It's part tragic allegory, part black comedy, and, for high literature, surprisingly hard to put down once you get into it. Don't try to understand everything immediately. Let the story come to you; let the language infiltrate your way of thinking, and soon all the pieces of this ghoulish hillbilly road-show will fall into place like a bloody chainsaw puzzle.

A lot of novels by Nobel Prize winners are a real obligation to read. This one's a dark and bittersweet treat.

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A Grim, Morbid, and Compelling Tale

Wow! This novel is quite morbid, and grim. Probably most analogous with some of Cormac McCarthy's more dark epics. You read on to see how low this family can sink into a depraved, stingy, and heartless abyss. Faulkner was certainly a genius.

As I Lay Dying

Faulkner at his best & easiest to read. Ordered it for a book club review & gained new readers for Faulkner. (And customers for Amazon; not available locally)

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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