Customer Reviews

William Faulkner: Novels 1926-1929: Soldiers' Pay / Mosquitoes / Flags in the Dust / The Sound and the Fury (Library of America)

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Although chronologicallly the four novels in this volume (which includes Faulkner's masterpiece The Sound and the Fury) are Faulkner's first, this is the last volume of his novels to come off the presses of the Library of America. This is a landmark event in the world of Belles Lettres, not just American literature! The first volume (Novels 1930-35) was published in 1985, making the publication of the definitive texts of the novels of William Faulkner a 21-year enterprise. Kudos to Library of America and editors Noel Polk and Joseph Blotner.

For those who haven't heard of them, the Library of America (LOA) is a non-profit venture with the mission of publishing the definitive texts of the best of American literature in uniform clothbound editions designed to last. (Google them to find out more about their mission and for a complete list of titles in print and forthcoming.) But these are not just handsome books or cheesy Franklin Mint style collectables. Establishing the best texts for the works selected for the series is a difficult and tricky enterprise, and the most qualified scholars are sought to take on the series' diverse authors. For Faulkner this editorial task fell to two of the most prominent Faulkner scholars around, Joseph Blotner (also his biographer) and Noel Polk. LOA does not clutter up its pages with footnotes and does not commission literary introductions for its volumes, so the casual reader may be unaware of the extensive amount of scholarship that goes on "behind the scenes." As noted in brief "Notes on the Text" to the Novels 1926-1929, "By preserving Faulkner's spelling, punctuation, and wording, even when inconsistent or irregular, the Polk texts strive to be as faithful to Faulkner's usage as surviving evidence permits. In this volume, the reader has the results of the most detailed scholarly efforts thus far made to establish the texts of Soldier's Pay, Mosquitoes, Flags in the Dust, and The Sound and the Fury" (p. 1175).

Since the publisher's own description of this volume here on Amazon.com doesn't point this out, it should be noted that the version of The Sound and the Fury published by LOA includes the "Appendix (Compson: 1699-1945)" which does not exist in all editions of the novel still in print. Although this Appendix was first published in 1945 as part of The Portable Faulkner (16 years after the novel itself was published), I always found it perverse and annoying that it was excluded from all but the Modern Library edition of the novel. (After all, if readers want the experience of reading the novel in the pristine form of the 1929 first edition, all they have to do is ignore the Appendix.)

I don't know what else, if anything, of Faulkner's output LOA intends to publish going forward (short stories, screenplays, speeches, letters, poetry?), but these five volumes of novels contain (arguably?) the best works of American fiction by any author. Each volume is a handy size (though some contain four novels, they are all the size of one of Faulkner's novels as orinally published), and set in large and readable type. Buy them all and you can own all of Faulkner's best work without giving up three bookshelves to store them!

We all owe the wonderful Library of America a great deal for publishing the volumes of William Faulkner's complete novels. It has taken more than twenty years to bring them out and now concludes with his first four novels. These were published from 1926 until 1929. This volume includes "Soldier's Pay", "Mosquitoes", "Flags in the Dust", and "The Sound and the Fury".

"Soldier's Pay" is a first novel and shows it. While it has some fine moments and shows Faulkner's style of presenting "reality" without context and focusing on emotional interiors and the aspects of life that we tend to hide even from ourselves, it is not a great work. However, it is still worth reading. The central figure is a disfigured and dying pilot brought home from the war by strangers into a complex family dynamic that is made much worse because the pilot was thought dead, but is now alive and horribly disabled.

I personally found "Mosquitoes" to be all but unreadable. It is too self-indulgent with a delight in talking about intimate things as if that were profound. No thanks.

"Flags in the Dust" was published in part as "Sartoris" in the late twenties. In 1973, Random House published the complete text as far as it could be restored. It reads much differently than his first two novels and it is here that the voice starts sounding like a mature and confident Faulkner. It concerns multiple generations that fester into ruin and misery of all kinds that seem to include perverse sexual relations and alcoholism. Yes, there is also racism in the books, but the books are not racist because the attitudes of the characters are consistent with their times and do not include any sympathy from Faulkner that I can find. And his is a worldwith living memories of the tragic Southern experience of the Civil War and the shock and loss of the Great War (WWI)for the living generation.

The volume ends with Faulner's first clear masterpiece, "The Sound and the Fury". While all Faulkner's prose is not easy to read and requires constant attention and often some re-reading, this book also has multiple unannounced perspectives and shifts in narrator. At the end of the book is an appendix that was first written by Faulkner for "The Portable Faulkner" edited by Matthew Cowley in 1946. You might want to read this first if you want to understand the story more clearly the first time through. However, it could be argued that you shouldn't because the confusion and disorientation is part of the reading experience that author wants you to have as you work through his story.

It is clear to me that Faulkner is a great master of prose and that his works are great treasures in the English language. However, his ethos is quite foreign to me. I do not find great value in reading about lives of misery, incest, adultery, perversion, ruin, and loss. Is that really all there is to human life? Not in my more than fifty years of experience. And since Faulkner was a young man when he wrote these works, what did he really know about life and what was just rumor and hearsay?

Still, the use of language is powerful and unique. Attempts have been made to copy aspects of his style, but none can come closer than mannerisms. Faulkner's was a genius that not only included his words, but in the way he conveyed reality. We don't experience our lives with chapter headings or with moments clearly delineated as part of this or that. We construct our filing system for events in retrospect. So, Faulkner presents us his stories in ways that require us to ask ourselves what is happening, what just happened, did anything happen? Where does this go? Who is this? Why the different names for the same people? Why the same names for different people? It is working through these and every other question that occurs to you that you come to an understanding of the work. And your understanding will almost certainly be personal and different from almost everyone else.

This is a fine volume with reliable texts for these important works, a chronology of Faulkner's life, notes on the texts, and a beautiful binding with materials and type that add to the quality of the reading experience.

This Faulkner set comes in a fantastic clothback edition with dust jacket. There's little else in the text - no commentary, no criticism, no class notes. The stories are presented in their entirety. It's well worth the money for a true Faulkner fan.

While browsing through the Amazon Faulkner's offering, I noticed a little tag that urges the candidate reader to suggest the publisher to have this title available on Kindle. This "advertisement" could not be more misplaced! The Library of America in general, and the Faulkner volumes in particular, are the reason why Kindle will not go beyond a niche market. You simply cannot beat the pleasure of owning (or even borrowing, albeit it's not the same!) these volumes, the joy of having an immortal text for your progeny, the pride of having read an incredibly complex yet life-changing book (The Sound and the Fury in this case). And how becoming and appropriate that the title comes from Shakespeare, for this is the best writing after the Bard!
How can the world be a bad place if people like Faulkner lived here? The only problem with these volumes is that the short stories have not been included in a 6th volume. But asking for more than perfection goes overboard! to

Excellent price compared to Amazon's list price. Thank you Amazon for providing this internal competition!

The Sound and the Fury is such a wonder of book, that I give this publication 5 stars just for providing us, finally with this beautiful edition. I haven't read the first three of these books, because they seem to be by an author who hasn't yet found his voice. Just to throw this out there, but I'd love to have his complete short stories (with notes) in this format. Don't you agree, Faulkner lovers?

Faulkner Novels 1926-1929 is The Library of America's exquisite hardcover collection of four of William Faulkner's classic literary works: "Soldier's Pay", "Mosquitoes", "Flags in the Dust", and "The Sound and the Fury". Like all volumes in this publisher's authoritative texts of literary classics, Faulkner Novels 1926-1929 is a compact hardbound volume with a ribbon for easy bookmarking sewn into the spine. A chronology and sections of notes on the text as well as Faulkner's life round out this definitive "must-have" edition, ideal for public and college libraries as well as private reading shelves.