I started reading William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom". I'm somewhere in the middle of the first chapter and I am starting to realize that the effort outweighs the joy by quite a bit. So I googled "faulkner sucks" to justify my impression (good news: I am far from alone in thinking that!). But one of the links I found a link to this old (6 years!) McSweeny's article, which is much more fun than reading Faulkner refuse to find a point.
Chili’s Menu, by Cormac McCarthy
Southwestern Eggrolls – $9.95
In a tortilla made by the boy’s abuela he watched her, with her armfat and canvas apron, cast frijoles negros upon flecks of cilantro like ash fallen silently on a bed of rice, tiny bones chalkwhite against an avocado ranchero sauce creamy in the light of the coals like the obsidian-flecked desert where God has forsaken all life. Outside a pale starving gallena quickens a lizard to its last writhing gasps. Evening creeps in, a single lobo cries out across the mesa as the sun dips bloodred below the thin black spine of the mountain where death will come again many times in the dusty clockless hours before twilight.
...
Big Mouth Southern Smokehouse Burger – $14.99
The charred black bones of the farmhouse coughed and hissed and exhaled into the early morning fog, ghosts of smoke swirling whitehot against the sun, contrast in defiance of God ordained. The sheriff rested his head on his hand and dug his foot into the soft patter of ash where all that had been lie transformed in heavenly splendor to witness the Holy wrath of all that this house had contained. Generations of violent echoes reverberated in these halls, tearing asunder those wretched institutions, consumed entire in final resolute compliance with the rich matrix which seeks to reckon all forces into balance.
Which of course reminds me of:
Ohhhh I really like that book. Fun to read this though. I took a class in college called Morrison and Faukner where we alternated between each author’s novels. Maybe it was the furious pace that I had to maintain to get through it, but by the end of Absalom it felt worth the difficulty. I recommend reading the “Compson 1699-1945” which Faulkner added to Sound and the Fury a bunch of years later. I think having read that really helped me think of Absalom as the “echoes and hearsay” of these people’s lives. When I read Absalom. I already knew plenty about these characters.
https://silvestreparadox.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/compson-1699-1945.pdf
>the “echoes and hearsay” of these people’s lives
yep. that’s what i was failing to pick up on. the characters go in circles with their parts of the back story and sometimes the details would change. combined with the incredible density of his writing style, i felt like i was constantly missing things no matter how hard i worked at it. i didn’t catch that it was all ‘unreliable narrator’. i just thought i couldn’t understand his prose :)
i did read “As I Lay Dying” a while back, and don’t remember it being so difficult.