As I Lay Dying. Faulkner

As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
1930.

Why read it? Novel. Faulkner uses words to help the reader visualize the character, mood and even the weather in the South after the Civil War. His characters are almost always stoic. The scenes in this novel are both funny and tragic.

Addie Bundren lies dying, and her children prepare to fulfill her desire to be buried in her native Jefferson (Mississippi), far from the crude back-country surroundings of her married life. After her death, the family, led by her husband Anse, begins the trek to Jefferson. The trip is disastrous with Darl trying to burn down a barn in order to cremate his mother's decomposing body. In Jefferson, he is sent to an insane asylum. After fulfilling his wife's wishes, Anse buys a fresh set of false teeth and returns with a new Mrs. Bundren.

To fully appreciate this novel, one would have to have read all of Faulkner's novels. His language depicts the setting vibrantly and in vivid detail. The reader experiences "how the weather was." He conveys the heavy, humid mood of the South. His characters are unique individuals, driven by motivations that seem to the onlooker to be highly individual and obsessive. They are not the kind of everyday acquaintances one meets and talks shoptalk with routinely, people whose personalities have a social mask and that we have become used to and who are predictable. His characters leave the impression that they are both taciturn and laconic, but with storm clouds of thought left unsaid.

You will scratch your head and say about a Faulkner novel, "What the hell is this all about?" but you will never forget it.

As I Lay Dying is crushingly sad in tone. The characters are cursed. The trip is cursed. But the situation, when looked at from a distance and in retrospect, is outrageously funny.