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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
READ THIS GREAT BOOK, October 20, 2006
This review is from: The Hamlet (Paperback)
Faulkner assembled much of THE HAMLET from short stories, where his themes were courtship, lust, love, and obsession or where the average person succumbs to greed or foolishness and is victimized in business.
Take the subject of love. In THE HAMLET, Faulkner examines obsessive and unrequited love through his characters Labove (an achiever obsessed with untouchable beauty) and Ike Snopes (a retarded man in love with a cow); ambivalent love through the experience of Mink Snopes (a vicious murder) and Jack Houston (a guilty widower); and loveless marriage through the lives of Eula Varner and Mrs. Armstid, who are at the top and bottom of social hierarchy. Each of these characters is unique and fully realized. Yet each suffers from cruel variations of a single force.
Not to be a pedant: But Robert Penn Warren described THE HAMLET as: "...a sequence of contrasting or paralleling stories" where Faulkner's "...movement was not linear but spiral, passing over the same point again and again, but at different altitudes." This is exactly right.
At the same time, THE HAMLET is about Faulkner's writing. Here's one quick example, with this great author writing about the weather. "It was a gray day, of the color and texture of iron, one of those windless days of a plastic rigidity too dead to make or release snow even, in which even light did not alter but seemed to appear complete out of nothing at dawn and would expire into darkness without gradation." Great isn't it?
Even so, I was surprised by one aspect of THE HAMLET. It is: terrible things happen to all the characters. This even includes Flem Snopes who is a winner in the male world of business but surely locked in a loveless marriage. Yet despite their cruel fates, Faulkner's amazing characters persevere. As he said when accepting his Nobel: "When the last ding-dong of doom has clanged, ...there will still be one more sound: ...a puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this...." READ THIS GREAT BOOK
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Snopes myth and top-notch Quality Lit., November 7, 1996
By A Customer
This review is from: The Hamlet (Paperback)
Although I have been a Faulkner fan practically since birth,
I put off reading the Snopes trilogy for years because, I
suppose, it seemed inconceivable that Faulkner could write
more than a small number of books as gripping and involved
as "The Sound and the Fury" or "Light in August" or "Absalom,
Absalom"; in other words, I delayed reading the back volumes
of his oeuvre, as it were, in order to stave off
disappointment, to delay the moment at which I would have to
admit that Faulkner, even Faulkner, could not be great all
of the time. After all, who could expect such Biblical
grandeur and keen insight from yet another book covering the
same Mississippi turf? But Faulkner is nothing if not
surprising: his prose here is just as innovative and
finely-tuned as in his better-known work, and the chapters
-- many of them published separately as short stories, such
as the famed "Spotted Horses" -- are individual gems which,
when added up and interconnected, form a satisfyingly
complex and interdependent whole. Faulkner is the very greatest, the
writer who almost single-handedly raised American literature
to the level of myth; who saw most clearly the meaning of
roots and background in the shaping of human lives; who
understood most incisively how such stories could grip and
lash the imagination, and the consciousness, of a receptive
reader. I plan to read the next installments of this trilogy
post-haste, without regard to potential disappointment: I
trust him now to take the story to new heights.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A laughing nightmare with real blood and bone in it., December 17, 1999
This review is from: The Hamlet (Paperback)
Dickens with the DT's. Comic scenes are laced with violence and passion. Drawling horse traders, "dumb like a fox," seek to outdo each other, with farcical results. A shotgun blast cuts short a life we had come to find fascinating, and we're jolted. The images are laid on top of each other like thick paint on a canvas. Somehow, Faulkner makes it possible for us to hear and see and smell it all at once. This is not so much a book as an enchantment, a spell.
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