Picked this book up on a whim since I’d read As I Lay Dying last year and liked it. Absalom, Absalom! blew it out of the water. Faulkner wrote an incredible family saga of the greed and hubris of the Sutpen family & plantation, weaving in themes of tragic family dynamics, the slow decay of Southern society following the civil war and the inescapable impacts of slavery and racism that haunted the South long after their loss.
The nature of it being a long family saga was what reminded me most of East of Eden, but upon further reflection it also had a lot of rich Biblical and Greek allegories that actually felt a lot more fleshed out in comparison to Steinbeck’s repeated Cain and Abel analogies.
I will say, the two books really quite differ in many ways as well. Compared to Faulkner, Steinbeck seemed to take a much more optimistic view of fatalism and the repetitive tragedies passed down through generations of fathers and sons.
Another caveat – Absalom, Absalom is incredibly dense and at times, really quite hard to get through. A lot of plot points are fed piecemeal and scattered throughout the story in a very non-chronological manner. Information is also delivered second- or third-hand from a variety of unreliable narrators making it difficult to decipher exactly what’s going on (although to me, it was part of the fun of reading the book and clearly reads as an intentional choice by Faulkner).
If you’ve read it, please tell me what you think of it! I think it was simultaneously one of the most challenging and rewarding books I’ve read this year and gave me a really unique perspective on this period of history.
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