80 of 82 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
His Most Likeable Masterpiece, April 1, 2006
This review is from: Light in August (The Corrected Text) (Paperback)
After reading Faulkner's four major masterpieces -- The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; and Light in August -- I've come to the conclusion that Light in August is far and away the easiest to read, has the most dramatic plot, the most intriguing primary characters in Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower and Joanna Burden, and even some of his most intriguing minor characters in Uncle Doc Hines and Mr. McEachern. Overall, it is his most readable and likeable masterpiece. And it leaves you wanting so much more.
The complex and ambiguous character of Joe Christmas alone could have been the source of three or four novels detailing different times in his life. While Christmas is hardly a likeable person, he is fascinating, hypnotic, a train wreck; you can't keep your eyes off him. His actions are morally ambiguous and inconsistent and yet fully understandable within his nature. As a creation he deserves to rank with Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Captain Ahab and Jay Gatsby in the pantheon of American literary characters.
Faulkner has a big mission here. The novel exposes the evils of racism both in the South and among white, northern abolitionists. It traffics in religious symbolism while savaging religious fanatacism. And it leaves one with a great deal of memorable violent and sexual imagery. And that's just for starters. This book is deep, and while it's storytelling is largely non-linear, it is far more palatable than the other three, which tend to be confusing and obscure. Enjoy this one. If you've never read Faulkner, it's a great starter.
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61 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Readable and Riveting., June 18, 2005
This review is from: Light in August (The Corrected Text) (Paperback)
I always recommend Light in August to people who say that Faulkner is impenetrable. Here the pages flow effortlessly by and the story line is easy to follow. There's none of the interior monologues that so confuse and derail those picking up the southern master for the first time. This plot is more traditional and will be readily appreciated by the average person.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Faulkner's ambitious Southern epic, with its ambiguous portrait of a monstrous martyr, August 9, 2006
This review is from: Light in August (The Corrected Text) (Paperback)
"Light in August" may well be my favorite Faulkner novel. With its three interwoven plots, its use of flashback, and its family secrets, the book reads like a multi-generational saga--even though the main storyline occurs over a mere nine days. It deals unflinchingly and unsettlingly with such complex themes as isolation and bigotry in small-town life, race relationships (and, particularly, the meaning of race itself), the constrictions of a strict religious upbringing, and the terror of sexual pathology. And, like Faulkner's other work, it paints an often unsettling, occasionally gloomy, and even comic portrait of the American South.
The lives of several initially far-flung characters overlap in the novel's complex plot. First, the naïve Lena Grove arrives in Jefferson, searching for Lucas Burch, the man who abandoned her after getting her pregnant; she meets instead Byron Bunch, a quiet man who believes working on Saturdays will keep him out of trouble. Unrelated to Lena's personal calamity is Bunch's friend Reverend Gail Hightower, who lost his ministry and became a reclusive outcast when his wife openly cheated on him and eventually killed herself.
But the most powerful and memorable character is the mysterious Joe Christmas, a brooding wanderer whose ancestry is unknown and who finds work (and more) from Joanna Burden, a descendant of abolitionists who continues alone her family's historical advocacy for civil rights. Bringing the stories full-circle is Christmas's relationship with the elusive Lucas Burch; the two drifters operate a moonshine business while they live on Burden's property.
In the character of Joe Christmas, Faulkner has invested all his own conflicted feelings and insecurities about race and religion. Raised first in an orphanage and later by an abusive and fanatically religious man and his doting and pious wife, Christmas believes he may be part black, but, since he can "pass" for white, it's never made clear to him whether this is true. After the book was published, Faulkner claimed that "the tragic, central idea of the story [was] that he didn't know who he was, and there was no way for him to find out." Uncontrollable, random, and violent forces form Christmas's personality and cultivate his personal demons, but in the end the reader is undecided whether Christmas is a monster or a martyr.
The book's deliberate ambiguity is what makes it so potent, but there's enough mystery, murder, madness, and mayhem to keep it from being an aimless morality tale (and it is one of the easiest Faulkner books to read). It's the type of book you think about after you finish, and then flip through again to flesh out all the secrets and uncertainties you missed the first time around.
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