Customer Reviews

The Hamlet

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"The Hamlet" is one of Faulkner's later works, and it belongs to his so-called "Snopes Trilogy." It deals with travails of the Snopes family, first introduced in "The Unvanquished." Various parts of the book can be read as independent stories, and some have even been published as such. The book, like most other Faulkner works, is highly literally and can be challenging to read if you are not used to Faulkner's narrative style. It is also characterized with rich language that verges on poetic. The language and the narrative fall short of the stream-of-consciousness style of many of the Faulkner's best known masterpieces, but not by much.

The book's many characters go through significant personal transformations, and in the process leave a mark on the community that they live in. The psychological insight into various individual psyches and the analysis of their drives and motivations is nothing short of phenomenal. This novel is an impressive work of art, and as such it needs to be appreciated slowly and deliberately. It is certainly not a quick read.

An excellent intro to Faulkner. Beautifully written and one of his most accessible works. See the "Long Hot Summer" with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward which is a filmisation of a novella of the same name in 'The Hamlet'. Great stuff!