Absalom, Absalom!

By William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, the enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson township in the early 1830s. With a French architect and a band of wild Haitians, he wrung a fabulous plantation out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness.

Sutpen was a man, Faulker said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him." His tragedy left its impress not only on his contemporaries but also on men who came after, men like Quentin Compson, haunted even into the 20th century by Sutpen's legacy of ruthlessness and singleminded disregard for the human community.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780735253766

William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all American novelists and short-story writers.  His other works include the novels The Sound and the Fury, The Reivers, and Sanctuary.  He twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and in 1949 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews for Absalom, Absalom!

[alaskabookworm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Cyclical, complex, dense, controlled; a book you must teach yourself to read, but pure genius.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A southern Gothic novel by William Faulkner, written in 1936. The story is set just before, during and after the Civil War. Thomas Sutpen, born poor, decides he will have what it takes to tell someone to use the back door and he does accomplish his goal 'sort of' only much of his past is still a part of his present person and it ends up destroying him and all he hoped to achieve. The story is told mostly through the Quentin, a grandson of the man who was a friend of Thomas Sutpen. There is also a portion told by Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin's father and grandfather. Quentin and his Canadian college friend, Shrevlin, interpret and reinterpret the story. As they tell and retell the story, you learn more and more of the details of this ill fated family. The title, Absalom, Absalom! is from the Bible and references one of David's sons, a son born of a non Israelite woman, a daughter of a king. Absalom rises up and nearly destroys his father and his father's family. Faulkner's stories are allegories of the South. This book is a companion to the Sound and the Fury which is a bout the Compson Family and Quentin is one of the main characters. I like Faulkner's writing for its richness but it is exhausting work.

[jbreedlove_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Incredibly dense, convoluted, and penetrating. I see now why for the generation in which he wrote, as a southern writer Faulkner had myriad ghosts to choose from to write about. Great descriptions and a strong sense of place there is no way any one could be so direct. His insights were numerous but blacks and ex-slaves were mostly secondary or only part of his stories.

[aketzle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Block out all distractions before attempting to read this book. And don't be tired. And no wine! Just focus!

[spygirl116 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What at first seemed indecipherable is now one of my favorite Southern novels. I had to study this in two different college classes and, after lots of study and rereading, I've (finally) come to recognize Faulkner's genius. His deconstruction of time and other standard elements makes for a heartbreakingly beautiful look at a doomed family's ugly secrets.

[seanlong_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absalom Absalom! is a book that over the years has become less bewildering and I appreciate more with each successive reading. It's outstanding on so many levels, and it might just be the greatest mystery ever written. I'm still not sure what is fact, what is fiction, and what the true story was. No sooner is one question answered (maybe) then another arises, and only in retrospect do certain pieces of information assume significance. It's definitely a book that makes me think like no other, that's for sure.

[ostrom_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A stupendous achievement in narration. I find it to be Faulkner's most difficult book, and I prefer several others to it, including Light In August and The Sound and the Fury, as well as Go Down, Moses, which includes "The Bear."

[nobodhi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

i wouldn't start here, with faulkner, but this is probably as good as it gets, and arguably his great american novel

reading was more like seeing, and once done, it was like i'd experienced it all myself

[mattbowen_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A powerful and stirring story about a southern family during the civil war. The book is narratologically complex, with looping chronology, and revised re-tellings, and questionable narrators. The narrative attempts to explain why the South lost the war and concurrently makes a moving comments on immortality, greed, and racism.

[nhbriguy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Finally, I finish a Faulkner with comprehension

[karlus_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the very best novels I have ever read, maybe even the very best; only "Lolita" and "Ulysses" come close. But Faulkner is undoubtedly the most incredible author I have ever read, bar none. Sheer genius; there is no one like him!

[kgib_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There is a lot I don't understand about this book, but my instincts tell me it's justifiably a classic. I liked the language and structure a lot. Maybe the characters are more symbols than three dimensional, but they're pretty interesting symbols. Faulkner's descriptions of black people are highly racist, but I /think/ he's trying to comment on it rather than perpetuate it... need to find out more about that.

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Every town has their legends; the stories passed down from generation to generation. The Mississippi town of Jefferson has the story of Thomas Sutpen and his "Sutpen One Hundred." All told, Thomas Sutpen was seen as a strange, mysterious and even evil man. When he first arrived in Jefferson no one knew his story. He bought one hundred acres of land and then disappeared, leaving the townspeople to talk, talk, talk. When he returned again he had a crew of slaves, materials, and a plan to build a mansion, a legacy. All the while he continues to be secretive and uncommunicative causing the townspeople speculate as to what he's really up to (as people are bound to do when left to their own devices). The gossip subsides only a little when Sutpen finishes his beautiful home and marries a respectable woman. Quietly he starts a family when his wife gives birth to a son and a daughter. But the chatter can't escape him. New rumors crop up when word gets around of Sutpen encouraging savage fights between his slaves. There's talk he even joins in for sport. And that's just the beginning.Ultimately, Absalom, Absalom! is a story of tragedy after tragedy. Faulkner described it as a story about a man who wanted a son, had too many of them & they ended up destroying him.

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How I love this book! (Oh, yes, I love The Sound and the Fury, too.) That is hard for many people to comprehend. I fully understand that the difficulty of Faulkner's prose and his switching of perspective is enough to discourage even determined readers. I sympathize with the frustration of those who say he isn't worth the trouble, he's over-rated, etc. (I WON'T condone the person who said he must have been paid by the word--that just reveals that reader's ignorance of the most fundamental facts of Faulkner's life). But here's the thing: if you want to read Faulkner, enjoy and understand Faulkner, YOU DON'T BEGIN WITH THIS ONE. Yes, it is one of his masterpieces. It has all the elements he is known for, and they are honed to a fine point here. It is quintessentially Southern, quintessentially Faulkner, and a tough nut to crack. But if you have been introduced to the world of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, perhaps by reading The Unvanquished, or The Hamlet, Sartoris or Intruder in the Dust, you will be much better prepared to plunge into Absalom, Absalom! or The Sound and the Fury. Or pick up a copy of his collected stories, and read "Barn Burning", "Wash", "A Bear Hunt". Grab Knight's Gambit and sample "Tomorrow", or "Smoke". You'll either be hooked, as I have been for 35 years, or you'll know he's not for you. In which case, you can say you gave him a fair trial, and leave him alone with a clear conscience.

[elizabethchapman · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I took a course on Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner in college and have returned to Faulkner’s works many times in the thirty years since I graduated. As my life experience grows, a return to Yoknapatawpha County always holds new insights – Faulkner’s novels are of such depth and complexity that they cannot be exhausted. (Wait, I can hear the joke now – “although the reader may be exhausted before the last page”!)It’s true Absalom, Abaslom! is not an easy read. Faulkner makes you work, no doubt about it. But if you make the effort, you’ll be amply rewarded by an immersion in a fully realized world, and a family history so tortured, dark, and brilliant that you shouldn’t be surprised if Thomas Sutpen rides right into your dreams to build a mighty plantation in your unconscious.Faulkner gives a primer in the ugly history of race in America, and shows how a tiny trace African American blood could destroy generations of a family. It’s absurd to us now, but Faulkner helps us understand that we still (even today with an African American president), live in a world that has been shaped by an almost unimaginably horrific past.To my mind, Absalom, Absalom! is one of Faulkner’s most terrifying and greatest works. The obsessions of the novel’s characters are relentless and their inability (unwillingness?) to escape their fate is a chilling commentary on how humans make meaning of their lives and then cling to that construction even as it destroys them from the inside out. Don’t take Absalom, Absalom to the beach, but do pick it up anytime you want to stare unflinchingly into the human soul.

[snash_44 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I had never read Faulkner before and I was blown away. Stylistically it's thick, difficult, and sparkling. Its plot was revealed at an enticingly and frustratingly slow manner. It's interpretations are so numerous, interwoven, and complex that it'll be reverberating in my head for a long time. Definitely worth the struggle.

[amerynth · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" is definitely one of those books I can appreciate the merits of, without particularly enjoying reading it. All of Faulkner's half-finished sentences, crazy italicizing and general wordiness drove me nuts.The story takes place in the Deep South, where a poor named Thomas Sutpen sets out to establish his legacy. Varying people give pieces of his story, which unfolds slowly layer by layer.The story itself is pretty interesting and Faulkner's slow unveiling is also good.... but it was just a struggle to get through his due to the style it was written in.

[antao-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

(Original Review, 1981-01-12)It is sometimes uncomfortable reading things from other eras - for example I´m a big fan of William Faulkner who was in many ways ahead of the curve on race for his day - if the average KKK member had been more into modernist avant-garde fiction than I imagine they were, he´d probably be having crosses burned outside his house left right and centre - but definitely a bit weird about women at times.Or take for example Dante - who as a medieval Catholic believed in all kinds of things I´m deeply opposed to (though it´s interesting the parts in Inferno when he expresses more sympathy are often precisely the parts a modern reader might also have more difficulty accepting the person´s fate - compare how sympathetically he views the homosexuals or suicides compared to the corrupt priests orthe violent for example - but like everyone at that time he just accepted certain things as fact that nowadays we don´t, namely that God would condemn them all to hell.But in many ways it´s precisely reading thing written by people who believe in values or have experienced a world totally different from our own that makes it worthwhile. It broadens our understanding of the human condition and how people react to it, helps us see what´s constant and what is more fluctuating and impermanent.Values are very much impermanent - they can´t be shown logically, they can´t be proved empirically, and are just shifting products of social circumstances. People can only be judged by the standards of their own time. Who knows what any of us would think or feel had we grown up in a different time with different customs and more limited sources of information? Realising this is in fact the key to genuine tolerance rather than the enforced "I find this offensive so let´s ban it kind" of "tolerance" which is not what the author is in fact arguing for.The fact that some people on the left, and note I say "some", do feel that their own values are permanent and can be applied to all eras, is for me just nostalgia for religion, a form of existential angst. People resist the idea that their values are not particularly solid, it´s part of rejecting our human freedom and our capacity for self-defense and free-thought. In this some of the more rigid PC thinkers show a lot in common with religious conservatives on the right, who also mistake their rather modern literalist interpretations of religion for something eternal and unchanging. In both cases it´s quirk of personality rather than a properly though out philosophical position I feel. It´s fascinating how religiosity, ease of offence, literal mindedness and humourlessness so often go together as a form of syndrome, making me wonder if there is some underlying cognitive variable, such as intolerance towards ambiguity or inability to grasp metaphorical thought....Meanwhile, the rest of us will carry on reading things from other, less "enlightened" times (and how will our own look to "those who will consider this time ancient", as Dante put it?), reading critically when necessary and with some discomfort, but still reading and learning and gaining enjoyment from them.....

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Hoewel ik Faulkner heel erg waardeer, is dit boek me een brug te ver: de constructie van het verhaal vraagt gewoon teveel van de lezer; dit is alleen nog genietbaar voor literatuurwetenschappers. Dat neemt niet weg dat enkele passages zelf van een ongelofelijk hoog niveau zijn.

[jburlinson_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not my favorite Faulkner. The narrative complexity seems inorganic and there is an elongated feel to the entire enterprise. The interplay between the two college chums is unconvincing, at least to me. On the plus side, there's Rosa Coldfied, a very fine invention and superbly characterized.

[chstewart · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love Faulkner. That's out of the way. When I began Absalom, Absalom I was somewhat disheartened. However I persevered and was richly rewarded. The density of Faulkner's language along with the variations in his voice and the absolute convolutions of the story carried me along on a wonderful ride. The texture and style of Faulkner will always light up my mind. It is beautiful stuff.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is incredible. I'm dazed.

Review to come later. I need to lie down.

[zacjohnston · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have read As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August. However, Absalom, Absalom! is by far my favourite Faulkner. Indeed, without hesitation I would put it among the greatest books I have ever read. I feel Absalom is almost neglected behind As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, the former of which I still consider a stunning piece of writing, but neither contain the towering, epic and biblical passages of which Absalom is entirely constructed. All the things I love about Faulkner come together most completely in this book and resonate so deeply and heavily: Mythical characters of the South that embody its underlying filth and decay; the scenery and landscape which you can feel sweltering and shimmering around you; the grand passages of such intense writing that builds up and up so confidently without faltering it shows no sign of collapsing under its own ambition. Most clearly in Absalom is the style Cormac McCarthy is so overtly influenced by, which through his career he worked and moulded into his own. The overall structure to Absalom's story also bears resemblance to One Hundred Years of Solitude (another of my all-time favourites), in that it details the rise and fall of an empire of sorts, told in the style of a legend. Utterly recommended to anyone serious about literature.

[sweetbriarpoet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I suggest reading The Sound and the Fury before reading Absalom, Absalom! so that you are familiar with the main character, Quentin Compson. When you are, you understand his love/hate relationship to the South and to his ancestry. A book about changing ideologies, overcoming (or being engulfed) by the past, and establishing a personal identity, Absalom, Absalom! is definitely a novel you want to spend some time on. Be prepared for tough reading, but completely worth it if you have a guide or a professor to help you realize the importance of recurring themes.

[danielstj · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Yet another Faulkner book that, although it has some good parts, isn't overtly remarkable.

[kathleen586 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is not for the faint of heart. It's probably one of the hardest, more confusing books I've ever read.

[algybama · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Poetic and hypnotizing. Unfortunately my experience was somewhat ruined by reading it on my phone's Kindle app. Now I know ebooks fuck up more than just pagination. Paragraphs do more than structure and pace a narrative - they provide waypoints and shelter for the eyes - and in a book where paragraphs can go on and on for page after page the arrival of indentation is something akin to a desert oasis. So when that same book is divided across 1000s of phone screens, each of which is a huge square block of text, indentation becomes something even more startling. It takes on the significance of a chapter break. And it can't be anticipated, counted on, because I was only able to see a sentence or two ahead at a time. I literally became lost in a sea of words. I was unable to recognize the winding-down of a paragraph as a new one approached – sort of like reading a complex sentence stripped of its punctuation. It was kind of interesting, I guess, but I don’t think I experienced the book the way I was supposed to.

[corinneblackmer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

 What drives the dreadful ambitions of Colonel Sutpen? After hundreds of pages of human agony, frustration, loss, and suffering, we are given the answer. Once, when a young boy, Sutpen was told by a Negro house slave to go to the back door of the house he was attempting to enter. He never recovered from the sense of crippling social humiliation this episode inspired in him. Never have the depredations of racism and class been explored with such devastating gothic force.

[socalnovelist · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is NOT an easy read, on the contrary, it is difficult in that it is structurally archaic, not that I'm complaining: I'm NOT! His prose are so embedded, and his sentences so long, that one must SURELY concentrate, no disturbances, and focus on the plot at every moment. But if you do, you will find a terrifically told story about the old south before, during and after the war; the conventions of the southerners, what they indicated in their behaviors as to what was right and wrong, and how family as well as strangers were dealt with. I LOVED this book, if for nothing else, for the sheer complication and elegance of the language. But the story is beautifully told, not by one narrator, but various narrators/characters in the book. You MUST consider reading it with an open mind, and a concentrated intellect, and then understand Faulkner's writing as purely romantic prose of the south. The plot, being told by a number of different characters makes it a bit difficult to decipher what is going on at times...for me, mainly because I got lost in his lengthy sentences, but I find myself wanting to read it again (and again!) because I imagine him speaking and telling the story in his style of prose...I loved it.

[margaretfield · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's Faulkner