23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Faulkner's true southern odyssey, December 8, 1997
This review is from: Snopes: A Trilogy (Modern Library) (Hardcover)
The three novels that comprise the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, were published over a thirty year span of Faulkner's career. For this reason these books, now published in a single Modern Library volume, provide an incedible insight to Faulkner's evoloution as a writer. At heart, these works are concerned with the rise to power and influence of the Snopes family in Faulkner's mythical town of Jefferson. The Snopes are complete embodiments of evil, and their unique brand of deviousness and complete lack of scruples allows them to overwhelm the inhabitants of the town. The reaction of these people against the tide of corruption, their resistance to this Snopish threat is central to this work. And at the base of all three is a changing attitude toward the Snopish absurdities and evils of the human condition, an attitude that evolves from fierce repudiation to cooperative antagonism. Perhaps these are not the greatest of all the great work that Faulkner produced in his career, but the depth of human understanding and characterizations that are the superlatives applied to Faulkner's work are here in force.
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36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Did Oprah...goof? Should she have chosen 'Snopes'?, June 7, 2005
This review is from: Snopes: A Trilogy (Modern Library) (Hardcover)
Oprah's Book Club chose three novels by William Faulkner for the summer months: "As I Lay Dying," "The Sound and the Fury" and "Light in August."
When Oprah speaks, America listens, so the three-volume set of the novels Oprah picked -- 1,152 pages of Faulkner, a bargain on Amazon at $17.97 --- has leapt to #2 on the Amazon bestseller list. Home across the country which only have "The Da Vinci Code" and "Tuesdays with Morrie" on their bookshelves will now greet books by a novelist who would have been lionized by the symbolist writers of 19th century France. That's thrilling.
But..."As I Lay Dying" has multiple narrators who favor the stream-of-conscious style. The first section of "The Sound and the Fury" is narrated by an idiot who slips in and out of the present with only italics to guide you. "Light in August" is a comparatively straightforward "traditional" novel, but it's 528 pages.
I'll be stunned if 10% of Oprah's devotees reach page 100 of any of these novels.
The tragedy in Oprah's summer reading list? There are three books by Faulkner much better suited to her purposes. She just picked the wrong Faulkner.
The right Faulkner? Three novels that Faulkner conceived as a trilogy: "The Hamlet," "The Town" and "The Mansion." Compared to other Faulkner novels, these 1,088 pages ($17.61 at Amazon) read like pulp fiction --- the plot is lurid, the motivations of the characters couldn't be more contemporary, and the style breaks no new ground. They're not Grisham, but they're close.
"The Hamlet" is the story of Flem Snopes, all grown up and just about as unethical as his father, and of Flem's effect on the small, unsuspecting village of Frenchman's Bend. Flem's impotent --- but only below the belt. So when he discovers that Will Varner's daughter Eula is pregnant without a husband, he steps forward and offers to help Will out. That makes Flem the son-in-law of one of the town's leading landowners --- and neatly positioned to start taking over the hamlet. (This book was adapted into a film called "The Long Hot Summer," starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles, Lee Remick and Angela Lansbury.)
Eula is a sensual woman, with a body that turns any man's thoughts to just one thing. In "The Town," Flem seems not to notice. He's too busy getting promoted --- first to chief of the power plant, then to vice president of the bank. Can the presidency of the bank be denied him? And, along the way, can he get his revenge on the man who's been having an eighteen-year affair with Eula?
In the final volume, justice finally comes Flem's way. But not before Frenchman's Bend has been transformed --- eaten alive, really --- by the kind of man never before seen in these parts. That is because Flem represents the unethical, unrestrained capitalism that only could flourish in the South after the Civil War had stripped it of its codes of honor. Flem has only one goal and one emotion --- power, and the love of it. In our time, we know this kind of man well. And, as often as not, we live in "communities" where people used to be like family to their neighbors and now barely recognize them to wave.
Rapacious capitalism. The loss of our sense of "home." Men who use women to advance their master plans. These are themes that Oprah's fans could really get into. Maybe after they've struck out with the brainbusters, they'll give these books a chance.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Snopes, the way it was meant to be read, October 5, 2000
This review is from: Snopes: A Trilogy (Modern Library) (Hardcover)
If you love reading Faulkner, then I recommend the Modern Library edition of _Snopes_. Snopes, probably some of the most unjustly underrated Faulkner, is also a fine introduction to his fiction since it contains some of the stories published separately, such as "Spotted Horses." In Snopes Faulkner works the revolving point of view to great effect with primarily four narrators; V.K. Ratliff, the sanguine sewing machine salesman, Gavin Stevens, the sensitive, meddlesome county attorney, Charles mallison, the young boy who grows up with the 2nd and 3rd books, and finally the community of Jefferson itself as a kind of collective 3rd person. Snopes is an inviting, lyrical novel, one that accomodates the reader as a citizen of Jefferson and privileges that new citizen with as much gossip as any other. It's a rich and telling family chronicle as well as a novelistic treatise on time and change in rural Yoknapatawpha County and the town of Jefferson, with real relevance for our own time since as Cleanth Brooks says, Flem Snopes is himself a harbinger of Corporate expansion and agressiveness. Snopes is also a treatment on money, developing more at times a sense of the value of money from the point of view of those with precious little of it than just those with a good deal more of it. These books do get at the human condition, Faulkner wrests even from the innocuous daily affairs a tangible improvement in the catalog of human understading. He approaches his characters, especially the memorable Mink Snopes, with the passion and understanding that they are human and therefore complex and their reasons complex, even if they are simple and criminally minded. It is a pleasing volume that does not disappoint in the end, the satisfying resolution that the reader comes to believe may not happen but does.
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