Absalom, Absalom!

”Absolom! Absolom!” Is not east to read. Like the Quentin and Beni sections of “The Sound and the Fury”, there are many voices in the novel. And they make appearances randomly! To sort them out takes effort, but, once the readers”gets it” the novel unfolds like an ancient scroll. I read it first in college. I kept closing the book, in frustration. But, with the guidance of the professor of the course (Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Mailer) the lights began to glimmer, clearly. One has to read it once, then again, with a textual explication such as this one, to help. Carefully, like a stubborn mango peel, the authors of this tool kit have broken it apart, line by line, sometimes word by word, to show the reader a way to understand the voices, and, more importantly, to decide what voices to trust. Any Faulkner fan should read this work. Five stars. —“Reading Faulkner Series, Absolom! Absolom!” By Joseph R Urgo & Noel Polk

This book is sort of a commentary on William Faulkner's great novel  Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text . The notes are keyed to page and line numbers (I am not sure which edition; the edition I read was an older edition and the page and line numbers did not match up) and the notes are pretty detailed and informative. Faulkner's novel is complex. It is told in a number of narrative voices, it is non-linear, and Faulkner's style and use of language is often obscure. Urgo and Polk's volume is quite helpful in unravelling the complexity of Faulkner's novel. There are, in my opinion, four reasons to get this book (or at least check it out from the library as I did).First, Urgo and Polk do a great job highlighting the themes of the novel and the symbols Faulkner uses. Absalom, Absalom! is thematically very rich. Faulkner is exploring race relations in the South, the social caste system, the effects of the Civil War, the role of the past in the present, the effects of inheritance on character, the difficulties of childhood, fate, sexuality, epistemology, the role of creative imagination in narrative, and the competing and mutually exclusive perspectives that people often have on the same events. Urgo and Polk do a great job picking out all these themes. They really mine the novel for all it's worth.Second, Faulkner's style is very complex. His sentences are often very long and full of subordinate clauses nested within subordinate clauses. Faulkner's long sentences tend to make his use of pronouns confusing. It is often difficult to figure out when Faulkner says "he" or "she" who he is actually talking about. There were a number of places in the text where I thought Faulkner was talking about Judith or Henry or some other character only to realize, after reading Urgo and Polk, that I had been wrong, and he had really been talking about Ellen or Bon. This was invaluable since the meaning of the passage depends on who Faulkner is talking about.Third, the novel is told in a number of narrative voices: Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson, Quentin Compson, Shreve, and every once in awhile an objective narrator intervenes. Urgo and Polk do a great job explaining who is speaking, when the voice changes, how much the character who is speaking actually knows, how they know it, and how much is pure speculation. They also do a good job pointing out the few places where an objective narrative voice enters, whether that voice confirms or undercuts what the characters are saying, and whether the objective narrator can be trusted. Trying to figure out who is speaking is one of the many challenges of Faulkner's novel and Urgo and Polk's volume makes that task much easier.Finally, there is a really excellent bibliography in the back of the text. I have spent a fair amount of time on amazon researching books on Faulkner but there were still a number of books in Urgo and Polk's bibliography that I had never encountered before. So, the book is a great resource for anyone who is looking to do more research on Faulkner or Absalom, Absalom! For all of those reasons I give this book a very hearty recommendation. Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text