The Hamlet (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes -- wily, energetic, a man of shady origins -- quickly comes to dominate the town and its people with his cunning and guile.

From the Inside Flap

The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes -- wily, energetic, a man of shady origins -- quickly comes to dominate the town and its people with his cunning and guile.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage International edition (October 29, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679736530
• ISBN-13: 978-0679736530
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #279,749 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars READ THIS GREAT BOOK, October 20, 2006

By	Ethan Cooper (Big Apple) - See all my reviews

Faulkner assembled much of THE HAMLET from short stories, where his themes were courtship, lust, love, and obsession or where the average person succumbs to greed or foolishness and is victimized in business.

Take the subject of love. In THE HAMLET, Faulkner examines obsessive and unrequited love through his characters Labove (an achiever obsessed with untouchable beauty) and Ike Snopes (a retarded man in love with a cow); ambivalent love through the experience of Mink Snopes (a vicious murder) and Jack Houston (a guilty widower); and loveless marriage through the lives of Eula Varner and Mrs. Armstid, who are at the top and bottom of social hierarchy. Each of these characters is unique and fully realized. Yet each suffers from cruel variations of a single force.

Not to be a pedant: But Robert Penn Warren described THE HAMLET as: "...a sequence of contrasting or paralleling stories" where Faulkner's "...movement was not linear but spiral, passing over the same point again and again, but at different altitudes." This is exactly right.

At the same time, THE HAMLET is about Faulkner's writing. Here's one quick example, with this great author writing about the weather. "It was a gray day, of the color and texture of iron, one of those windless days of a plastic rigidity too dead to make or release snow even, in which even light did not alter but seemed to appear complete out of nothing at dawn and would expire into darkness without gradation." Great isn't it?

Even so, I was surprised by one aspect of THE HAMLET. It is: terrible things happen to all the characters. This even includes Flem Snopes who is a winner in the male world of business but surely locked in a loveless marriage. Yet despite their cruel fates, Faulkner's amazing characters persevere. As he said when accepting his Nobel: "When the last ding-dong of doom has clanged, ...there will still be one more sound: ...a puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this...." READ THIS GREAT BOOK

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Snopes myth and top-notch Quality Lit., November 7, 1996

By A Customer

Although I have been a Faulkner fan practically since birth, I put off reading the Snopes trilogy for years because, I suppose, it seemed inconceivable that Faulkner could write more than a small number of books as gripping and involved as "The Sound and the Fury" or "Light in August" or "Absalom, Absalom"; in other words, I delayed reading the back volumes of his oeuvre, as it were, in order to stave off disappointment, to delay the moment at which I would have to admit that Faulkner, even Faulkner, could not be great all of the time. After all, who could expect such Biblical grandeur and keen insight from yet another book covering the same Mississippi turf? But Faulkner is nothing if not surprising: his prose here is just as innovative and finely-tuned as in his better-known work, and the chapters -- many of them published separately as short stories, such as the famed "Spotted Horses" -- are individual gems which, when added up and interconnected, form a satisfyingly complex and interdependent whole. Faulkner is the very greatest, the writer who almost single-handedly raised American literature to the level of myth; who saw most clearly the meaning of roots and background in the shaping of human lives; who understood most incisively how such stories could grip and lash the imagination, and the consciousness, of a receptive reader. I plan to read the next installments of this trilogy post-haste, without regard to potential disappointment: I trust him now to take the story to new heights.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A laughing nightmare with real blood and bone in it., December 17, 1999

By	Jonathan Leach (Coppell, TX USA) - See all my reviews

Dickens with the DT's. Comic scenes are laced with violence and passion. Drawling horse traders, "dumb like a fox," seek to outdo each other, with farcical results. A shotgun blast cuts short a life we had come to find fascinating, and we're jolted. The images are laid on top of each other like thick paint on a canvas. Somehow, Faulkner makes it possible for us to hear and see and smell it all at once. This is not so much a book as an enchantment, a spell.