As I progress down this literary road, I have already come across several bumps. This is one of them. Never having studied literature per se (apart from basic middle school English) I have found that I lack an appreciation for the more, shall we say, imaginative styles of prose. In short, I don’t understand them.
Absalom is one such novel. I really struggled with it and I have had to resort to study guides to get beyond a most basic understanding of, frankly, what the heck was going on. Add to the difficulty I found in actually piecing together the story from the disparate strands of the prose, the fact that the sentence structure is interminable. This being the case for me, I found the wonderful language employed to be bordering on the pretentious.
I think I erred in not reading the three previous novels (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying and A Light in August) so I at lease knew who the narrators were. It was not even clear to me from the text who was writing. There are interesting themes here for sure, and the irony for me is that I read a lot about the South, the Civil War, racism and white privilege and so on and Faulkner has a lot to say on this subjects but I found it impossible to get much out of this due to the impenetrable style of writing. This is a shame and a missed opportunity as the story itself of dynasty building, war, racism, family feuds etc. is in itself, very interesting.
Hopefully as I read more such novels (and I will try some of his others) I will get more out of it and this style, but this joins Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5 as novels that I just found hard going and that passed me by somewhat.