As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text

This is a great book. It is not a fun or easy read. It will make you think. I ordered to copies for my book club, one had a torn cover, but I took that one for myself, so that's OK.

I really enjoyed reading this short book. I would highly recommend it to others.

That is saying something, as Faulkner never deals with functional families. Anse Bundren is both put upon and the instrument of his own self imposed bad luck, due primarily to his condition of not being able to sweat lest it make him ill, which is unfortunate for a farmer in the deep south before air conditioning. Addie apparently hates her family, except for Jewel, the progeny of an affair. The novel opens brilliantly showing Jewel's straightforward determined character in simply how he walks. His stubborn work ethic setting him apart from Anse. Dewey Dell has her own problem she's trying to solve and Darl is the only one who really catches on but he's also crazy. Cash is just Cash; a carpenter holding up the coffin in progress for his mother to see out the window. Addie insists on being buried in Jefferson on the other side of the county and circumstances coalesce to make this the odyssey from hell. But Anse has his own plans and a kind of pride, as does Dewey Dell. I've read this novel three times and will read again. The humor (hilarity) is there as is tragedy and bad breaks (one literally) and the Faulkner trick of planting images and tableaus in your head while reading also. The Bundrens are cleverly contrasted with just about everyone else along the way who seem to have their acts together. I understand how Faulkner can be difficult at times, but this is worth reading and re-reading. I've read all of the Yoknapatawpha County novels except The Mansion and I'm half way through The Town, and this is still my favorite. The James Franco film of this is brilliant and worth watching as well. They did an amazing job of bringing this book to the screen with some creative techniques and the acting is superb.

I found it interesting how the story sort of blossoms out of the words ethereal like. More like the idea of a story than a narrative.

I loved this book! It’s definitely not for the faint of heart, written in stream of consciousness between several different characters. I’m truly captivated by this piece and will be delving more into the works of Faulkner!

The language of this book is beautiful. Sometimes it was so poetic I had to read a sentence over again just for how the words felt. Sometimes it described a universal feeling I had never seen put into words so perfectly before. Sometimes it was so strongly a dialect that it made my grammar-brain twitch, but even then I enjoyed how it was not the mere semblance of dialect which is so frequently used. The book is told in many different voices, too many to count (though I’m sure someone has). Yet each voice is unique, not only in language but in tone and understanding as well. I was very impressed by this. That said, the story is somewhat disappointing. The wife/mother of the Budren family has died and she wanted to be buried in her hometown, so the family sets out in a mule-drawn wagon carrying her coffin. It has been and is raining heavily, all the bridges are out, and the story follows the family as they find ways around the difficulties they encounter on the road. However, the voices, and when the switches between them are placed, are used to obscure the reality of the action. Most of the reader’s time is spent figuring out what is going on and who each character really is. None of the characters develop in the course of the story; what they are and have always been is merely slowly revealed to the reader. Things happen to them, but the purpose of each event is not to change them but to show who they have always been. This static state frustrated me. I enjoyed the language of the story and the voices very much, but that is as deep as the book went. I rate this book 5/10.

Updated review: I was quickly sent a replacement with a perfect cover. I'll still be able to give this book as a Christmas present after all! Original review: First of all, five stars for the story itself, one of my favorite classic books. This one, however, arrived with a torn front cover. It was meant to be a gift, and if I had wanted to give someone what looked like a used book, I would have saved myself the money and shopped at a used book store.

An easy way to approach this book is to imagine that it is the narration to a movie, but that for some reason we can't see the screen. Remember that Faulkner was a successful screen writer, with Humphrey Bogart's The Big Sleep to his credit. A book usually tells a story, but a movie shows us people. This book might not spend much time on a story, but it does tell us a lot about the people in it. We find Faulkner's novels difficult because of their style. This classic tale of a morose family burying their matriarch is a stream-of-consciousness novel, meaning Faulkner wrote something that mimics our "internal monologue", i.e. the verbal thoughts that go through our head whenever we daydream, or take a walk, or do something that requires little concentration. The difficulty, and the pleasure, in this technique comes from having to piece together ourselves what really happens. Faulkner has the main characters talking to themselves and since they already know themselves and the people around them, they don't need to describe what we want to know, leaving us always confused. However, they do drop hints. For example, when we meet Darl early on, we know this is a younger character because he refers to "pa" and "ma". A couple of short chapters later, Cora says that all he needs to become right is to find a wife, so we know he's a young man of age to marry. By the end of the novel, all that we know of the Bundren family was revealed to us this way. Once we turn the last page, we realize that we know everything important about this family: who has courage, who is generous, who is self-righteous, who is short tempered, who has suffered and when and why. And all this without a plot.

Una de las obras maestras de Faulkner. La historia te atrapa desde su inicio y combina tragedia y humor de forma magistral.

Very slow book with lots of detail. Had to give up halfway through May visit it when I have more free time. Not to be read for past-time This book is the perfect example of the "stream of consciousness" which was used by Modernist writers

Excelente

COURS

El papel es de buena calidad, también me gustó la textura. El tamaño de la letra es adecuado. Tiene muchos modismos por lo que es recomendable tener un conocimiento avanzado de inglés