Customer Reviews

Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horses / Old Man / The Bear

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This was a challenging story, like all works of Faulkner. But also a very rewarding story. When you finish this one you feel like you have been somewhere... truly immersed in a time period... truly immersed in a family.
No author, ever... has had the knack of creating a world of ordinary people so expertly intertwined throughout his novels. Faulkner either by design or accident (I doubt that??) has created a rich tapestry in his books, of characters subtlely connected by time and circumstance.
I have read The Sound and the Fury and most of Light in August; and it is not difficult to see the connections in just these two books plus the short story The Bear. Everything I have chanced to read by this amazing author has had careful, deep, intricate connections to the other works.
I know this is a well known fact... but the way in which Faulkner executes it, leaves me amazed each and every time I encounter it.
The Bear is a coming of age story about Ike McCaslin. It traces his development to a young man through several vingettes. Each time we see him he is involved in a hunt. That is until the last 2 sections in which we see him at age 21 looking back on his family history and discussing his right to the land. Once we see him as a young boy and then onward into his teenage years.
The story revolves around an aged bear who roams the forests and swamps where they hunt. It is interesting to see Ike develop as a hunter and man, as the hunters get closer and closer to the old bear.
There are many rich characters in this story.... far to many for me to touch on in this short review.
A big theme that impressed me in this one was how our personal history is inexticably tied to the land we grow up on. Ike McCaslin was, "who" he was because of where he was from, and he could never escape that fact.
Faulkner was an author unafraid to delve into the scriptures in developing his ideas. I believe his use of scriptural narratives only serves to strengthen his work. What he says, rings with authority when he uses Abraham, Adam and Eve as illustrations. He expertly uses the story of Abrahams travels to the promised land to show how his characters have squandered their "rights" to the land they grew up on... their "promised land".
There is no doubt William Faulkner knew how to put a story together. Any of his works, beg to be read again and again. I will surely be picking this one up again... I recommend it to anyone who loves books! William Faulkner is a giant in the world of literature!

If you expected Faulkner's "The Bear" to be as difficult as "Pat the Bunny" you will be deeply disappointed. High school teachers may assign it in segments to English classes, but it is at heart an adult story, with deep seams of place and poetry. In this coming of age novella, the relationship between the boy Isaac and Old Ben the bear takes place against the backdrop of threatened forest land. Faulkner's passionate writing about the value of the woods rings true for nature conservationists today. The lengthy section on Civil War ghosts and the equivocality of inheritance, often considered an intrusion within the main narrative, also rewards careful reading. As for Faulkner's infamous run-on sentences -- well, here they are on full steam ahead, and even Faulkner's machismo is forgiveable in the context of his marvellous sentences.

Three Famous Short Novels gathers together three long and diverse works by America's greatest writer (that's my opinion, others my contest it, I will only agree to disagree). Spotted Horses is a humorous tale culled from the pages of The Hamlet, the first novel in the famous Snopes Family Trilogy. The Bear is the expanded version of the somber and mythic hunting story about the killing a legendary bear that means so much more than just that. The final story is the exciting adventure yarn Old Man and was one half of the two conjoined novellas that made up The Wild Palms (aka If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem). Although each story has more power than many writers have in their entire output, they acheive even more when woven into the wide fabric of Faulkner's far reaching, generations spanning Jefferson, Mississippi. Required reading.

This is an excellent collection of three short novels. Spotted Horses is a long chapter from The Hamlet and probably doesnt belong here because it is too short but it is entertaining and well concewived on every level and The oldf man one half of the noveL If I Forget Thee Jerusalem is an excellent adventure story with very good characterization of the title character an escaped convict.It is The Bear that makes the collection It is long enough to stand alone and is one of Faulkner's best works .The descriptions of nature are amazing as are all the characterizations and the characters meditations on the great bear they are huntingwho is ravaging livestock because man has invaded his environment. It is an excellent work of literature and Faulkners technique which can be overblown and undermining at times being style for styles sake is at the top of his form here

Faulkner's growth as a writer underpins these three novellas. Spotted Horses is something of a too-oblique storytelling mess, giving the reader more questions than answers to Faulkner's intentions. Old Man is doubtless Cormac McCarthy's inspiration for his later, apocalyptic novels, and here Faulkner seems to have come into his own as an impressionistic writer, his long detailed depiction of the convict's negotiation of the flooded river clearly intended to affect the reader emotionally, not intellectually. In The Bear, Faulkner has grown as a social historian, with his long conversation between Isaac and McCaslin surely intended to paint an everyman picture of the South's demise as a bucolic Eden.

Reading these stories reminds of Miles Davis turning his back to his audiences and playing, if not to his band, then solely to himself. Faulkner's stories wander (many, I know, see the challenge in following such stories as part of Faulkner's genius), his inferences are oblique, often to a fault, his characters strangely superficial, serving only as voices for his social and philosophical perceptions. Faulkner isn't easy, and yet there's plenty of depth to make you soldier on through his baroque prose.

I was first introduced to Faulkner back in Junior High School, we are talking early 60's, the short novel we were to read was "The Bear". I have been an avid reader of all of Faulkner's works since then.

"The Bear" brings out Faulkner's most beloved abilities as a writer. Innocence verses the harsh realities in a heart wretching tale, the reader "grows up" as does the protagonist, but not without some remorse, and questions, left unanswered. Truly a brilliant work, by a brilliant author, a must

Faulkner's writing style is frustrating. I am not a fan of the run on sentences and omission of punctuation. I read one of the three novels and found it pretty boring and difficult to get into.

"The Bear" in all of its versions has a secure place as a boy-coming-of-age story, one interwoven with a microcosm of the southern experience of race, racism and family history. The first half of the novella is the hunting story, and for Faulkner, it's pretty straight forward. The second half however, rehearses all of Faulkner's worst literary mannerisms (portentous vocabulary, over-wrought prose) as the adult Isaac McCaslin encounters the racial history of his family and tries to make reparation. This second section, which is not well connected to the first, is a delight for English professors. All the usual Faulkner themes are here: Biblical import, civilization v. wilderness, miscegenation, family secrets, boy and man culture. The laborious prose is intended to replicate the sense of torturous, sorrow-ridden history, but finally, it's just tedious. And it's difficult to tell if the author even takes it seriously. As if to ridicule the ambitions of Old Ben (the iconic bear of the hunt), Faulkner shrinks his hairy symbol (in the second section) to a scared young bear trapped in a tree, unable to descend because of the thundering daily train. Perhaps we are to see pathos in this "machine-in-the garden" motif, but most readers will just be relieved that the story is drawing to a close. Like many of Faulkner's novels, this one is over-rated.

Excerpted from other, better-known works by William Faulkner, "Three Famous Short Novels" presents the great writer somewhat out of context and not in his best light.

"Spotted Horses" gives us a thrice-told tale, first written as a short story, then as part of a novel called "The Hamlet." It's a comedic but by no means light-hearted story about how shifty Flem Snopes unloaded a herd of dangerous horses on a sleepy town full of fools, told through the eyes of a young boy. Fairly straightforward in its telling, "Spotted Horses" nevertheless feels like a snippet of something larger, and not terribly substantial or compelling on its own. You may be left wondering, as I was, just how horses can be bound together by barbed wire without it hurting something awful.

"Old Man" was originally half of a novel called "If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem," in which it offers a kind of mild comic relief to a much richer and more intense sister story, "Wild Palms." Here, an unnamed convict holds on for dear life when the Mississippi River rises and drowns out the surrounding countryside, leaving him and a pregnant female refugee to fend for themselves. Faulkner may or may not be a sadist here, but he's nearly impenetrable as he describes a never-ending journey interrupted by snakes and gunfire.

"The Bear" starts out as a straightforward and gripping hunting story, like "Spotted Horses" centered around a boy's point of view, in this case Isaac McCaslin, whose name will prove to have Biblical resonances. Halfway in, this rustic Beowulf-type saga transforms without warning into "Absalom, Absalom," a meditation on race and sin. Disdainers of punctuation, proper syntax, or capitalization will be happy to know Faulkner foregoes that nonsense to get at the pre-Beat heart of the matter. As it references other stories that made up the book that was its original home, "Go Down, Moses," it's hard to blame Faulkner entirely for the problem the rest of us will have making sense of the thing. Be forewarned, it really catches you up short if you aren't ready.

I'm left wondering what was the need for this seemingly random collection. Maybe the idea was to present something akin to "Faulkner's Two-Fisted Adventure Tales" as all three of these excerpts center around violent action, whether it be a stampede, a flood, or killing a big old bear. But race issues aside, Faulkner was not Robert E. Howard, and there's a lot of dead space if you read this with excitement in mind.

Maybe it was because when it was first published, in 1958, Faulkner was undergoing a wave of public rediscovery but was not producing his best work. The thing is, about anything original by Faulkner would seem a better bet than something pulled out in parts from separate wholes.

At times, especially reading "The Bear," I found myself pulled along not just by Faulkner's narrative but his intensity, his almost unreasonable will to, as he put it, "write down the heart's truth out of the heart's driving complexity, for all the troubled and complex hearts that will beat after..." He's a great writer. But no writer benefits from being pulled out of context. If not exactly distorted, "Three Famous Short Novels" presents Faulkner in oddly ill-fitting form, both abbreviated and overlong.

I had never read Faulkner so this book gave me a review of his work. I was not impressed. The book did what I bought it for though and you don't know unless you try, so no regrets.