Soldiers' Pay [Paperback]

William Faulkner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 17, 1996

Faulkner's first novel, published in 1926, is one of the most memorable works to emerge from the First World War.

The story of a wounded veterans homecoming, it is partly autobiographical, filled with hope, dark laughter, and despair.

Editorial Reviews

From Scientific American

A rich compound of imagination, observation, and experience. In an isolated world of Faulkner's own making, shadows having the reality of men grope through a maze complex enough to be at once pitiful and comic, passionate, tormenting, and strange.

Review

Soldier's Pay is the first novel by American Nobel-Prize winner William Faulkner. It was during the summer of 1925, when he was working in New Orleans, that Faulkner met Sherwood Anderson and was encouraged by him to write a novel. Unlike his later books this post-war story of a wounded, helpless and dying officer returning home to his father and his fickle sweetheart is set in Georgia, but some of Faulkner's feeling for the South and many of his character-types are already foreshadowed. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Liveright; Reissue edition (December 17, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871401665
• ISBN-13: 978-0871401663
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,227,736 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Overshaddowed, but still extraordinary May 20, 2002

By "kj2250"

Format:Paperback

Many people who review this book give it a bad rating because they have read Faulkner before and expect his writing to be of a certain style and intellectual caliber. Perhaps this book is not quite up to the level that people are expecting, but when you compare it with much of the other literature available dramatizing this time period (just after World War I) in a fictional manner, this book stands out as being a simply extraordinary peice of literature. While it lacks much of Faulkner's later literary intuitiveness, this book still demonstrates true Faulknerian style with its soap-opera-ish manner of storytelling and robust character development. Even this, one of Faulkner's least talked about and least admired novels, is better than the work of 99.9% of the authors writing today. What people consider "bad" as a Faulkner book is still leaps and bounds ahead of what other writers are able to produce. I found this book to be an excellent stepping-stone into Faulkner's style and literary skill from less "deep" books. I would definitely recommend reading this book first before reading other Faulkner novels. Once you finish this one, THEN try another book directly after this one - his style will be much easier to follow and understand.

Overall, a wonderful book for discussion and reflection!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Soldier's Pay the Price December 30, 2009

By Carla Gabriel Beckman

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is one of Faulkner's best stories, but perhaps the least read. If you are a Faulkner fan, you have read it. If you are not a reader of Faulkner, this is a good one with which to start. It is the story of a World War I soldier coming home with debilitating terminal injuries which have essentially ended his life as he knows it. He is treated with human kindness by some, but others are horrified and uncomfortable, and even deny his humanity. As Hemingway wrote about "The Lost Generation," Faulkner also brings the human cost of war into stark reality. It seems the most artistic among us are the most prescient.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Faulkner's SOLDIERS' PAY foreshadows his evolving style. April 3, 1999

By [e-mail]

Format:Paperback

In his first novel, SOLDIERS' PAY, Faulkner deals with the aftermath of World War I to illustrate the disillusionment that war inexorably brings to combtants and non-combatants alike. Whether is is the war to end all wars, the war to save humanity, the forgotten war, or the immoral war, no one who survives escapes unscathed. The narrative is more straightforward, with fewer digressions, than that of most of Faulker's later novels; but it is still difficult to follow at times. Using the shattered life of a wounded and dying war veteran as the vehicle, Faulkner weaves the lives of his characers into a revealing tapestry. In the arras he depicts fear, despair and denial; sexuality, frustration, and fulfillment; pettiness and compassion; love and hate--a range of emotions to which all mankind is subject. While many of his descriptions seem strained and burdensome, others present a blinding insight into the foibles and failings of our neighbors and of ourselves. Likewise, to the modern reader, some of the moral values and motivations of his characters may be arcane; yet, as a whole, the universal standards of human behavior still apply. All in all, I would say that if you are a fan of Faulkner, give this book a try. It hasn't the power of THE SOUND AND THE FURY or ABSALOM, ABSALOM! nor the delightful comedy of THE REIVERS, but it does give the reader a glimpse into the evolution of Faulkner's inimitable style.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars faulkner doing anderson who does everyone else March 21, 2013

By T. Ellis

Format:Kindle Edition

I certainly didn't expect this.

Who knew that Faulkner could screw up so completely? that the brilliant author of Absalom, Absalom! and As I Lay Dying could start his career off with such a gosh danged mess of scrambled ideas and no clear vision? Being his first novel, and a novel nearly forgotten by time at that, with even the back-page summary warning the potential buyer it's no good, should be avoided by all but the Faulkner scholar, I didn't of course go in expecting a masterpiece, but I was hoping for it to be at least decent, at least a slight bit readable, you know, not this pile of dookie danged dookie. I enjoyed the kick-off, the beginning train ride (wreck?) that promised a funny and quirky slapstick war disillusionment story with some slick and prophetic commentary that would be right at home in any contemporary fiction knocking consumerism and suburbiatic post-WWII living, but this ended up being so absurdly out of place--and really, positively unnecessary: you could skip it and lose nothing at all from the experience, much as you could erase the inclusion of 3 or 4 characters and still miss nothing--for once we hit page 50 it's a soap opera to the end, and a clumsy one at that.

Faulkner seemed to have no idea what sort of novel he was writing--comedy? melodrama?--and if he even cared, I don't know; Sherwood Anderson told him one day in 1925, Hey, write a book and I'll get it published, and that's exactly what he did. Anderson refused to proofread or sample even a line of Soldiers' Pay for Faulkner before he turned it over to his publishers with the highest of recommendations once the finished manuscript reached his hands (and I assume it was the same way with Faulkner's second `lost' novel, Mosquitoes).... When the book was published in 1926, hardly a soul had anything good to say about it, just another derivative post-war novel, they claimed, and it quickly vanished from print (or so I like to imagine). I'll give it to Faulkner that, like all his novels, at least as far as I know, the most basic story outline for Soldiers' Pay sounds terrific: Donald Mahon is declared dead, shot down from the sky in WWI, and as his family deals with the tragedy back home, he stumbles off the local train to surprise his parents and former fiancée, not dead--and yet not exactly alive, neither. More of a shell than anything: his face a grotesque mess of stitches and old gore, brains not altogether there--literally.

(Faulkner himself pretended throughout his life to have been shot down (twice) in the war `observing' for the RAF, although in actuality he joined the RAF at the war's end because America's Signal Corps said he was just too dumb to fly for them, and he didn't get his Toronto wings until after World War I was already over and done with, at which time he went home to New Orleans and refused to take off his uniform for the next six months, showing it off around town and letting all the returning soldiers know he was one of them, with them on the field or in the air over Europe, even when that was simply what he wished he could have been.)

Before he was a novelist, Faulkner was a crummy poet, and it shows. Most of the book, particularly any scenes featuring Donald Mahon's fiancée Cecily are painfully purple--but not all of it. As with the story, Faulkner didn't seem to know how the hell to approach writing of whatever the hell he was writing, with the quality and style inconsistently going back and forth, all over the place, the most painful of which is the overly poetic garbage that takes up the page(s) whenever Cecily is around, and we're questioning What's she gonna do? She gonna suffer her altruistic calling and marry this broken and more than likely dying war hero or not?--and that question, unfortunately, is the major focus of Soldiers' Pay. Sometimes, not often but two or three times, we get a hint of the inimitable style Faulkner would skillfully employ in his future novels and stories, and that's always a pleasure, a seriously wonderful diversion of the purple melodrama between Cecily and Cecily's feelings regarding the zombie hero. In total, there are between 10 and 15 pages' worth of quality in Faulkner's 221-page debut, but no more.

Donald dies, to spoil it for you, and Cecily marries her second lover, crying out to everyone she's no longer the good person she once was. You should never, ever read this book, even if your childhood dream was to become a scholar of all things Faulkner: this sucks. Stay far away. I'm hoping that by writing this review, I can block Soldiers' Pay from memory entirely and never again get the curious itch to pick it up for a re-read, that I can refer just to this and be satisfied, reminded of the utter awfulness of Faulkner's first foray into prose fiction.

Mosquitoes--sigh--here I come....

30%

-----
"Carry on, Joe."
-----

[Written November 2009 for LibraryThing.] Read more ›