Faulkner's As I Lay Dying review

As a Faulknerian scholar, I was pleasantly surprised by this audio rendition of one of Faulkner's complex works. I used this recording to assist a blind peer who was studying the novel, and I read my copy along with the recorded reading to help establish and clarify the characters' points of view, especially with regards to the sections involving stream of consciousness.

Together, we found the use of multiple readers helped distinguish the different narrators of this work. We thoroughly approved of the readers' Southern accents and (being from the South)found very few flaws in that regard. A few artistic interpretations of the stream of consciousness sections were distracting, as the readers chose to add punctuation rather than flow rapidly from one thought to the next without breaks. This did not take away from the story as a whole, but I did need to clarify this for the academic purposes of my peer.

All in all, this was an excellent rendition of Faulkner's novel. I am pleased to have this recording in my permanent library.

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124 people found this helpful

One of the best

Having a lengthy daily commute, I have listened to over a hundred recorded books and this one is absolutely among the best I have heard! Faulkner's writing begs to be read out loud and this recording was beautiful, capturing you in its slow southern spell.

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48 people found this helpful

You Have to "Get" Faulkner

Faulkner is not an easy read. Expect to go back often and really listen to the story. Expect to look up some notes and commentary to grasp what the hell is going on. Expect to struggle with lines like, "My mother is a fish"

Expect to WORK through this book.

And expect the best of literature and performance. Expect to learn. Expect to expand your insight into frustration and futility. Expect to feel pain.

This is a great piece of literature and it's very well delivered.

Worth the effort.

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45 people found this helpful

Listening to a Play

The multiple voices are simply wonderful and, having read this in hard copy many times over the years, I had some trepidations about listening. However the words are as powerful as they are in print and have the added quality of staying as the voices of a "play" in your head. Terrific.

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37 people found this helpful

Clarity

I use this "tour de force" novel in my high school English class, and I've found that the audio helps the students follow the story better. I personally enjoy the narrators who with their use of dialects are able to add life to the characters, even Addie, who is dead for most of the novel.

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29 people found this helpful

Stream of Consciousness

As I Lay Dying is a classic American novel that was written by William Faulkner. This book follows the journey of fifteen different characters as they set out to fulfil the wishes of the recently deceased Addie Bundren who is to be buried in Jefferson. Faulkner shifts between the fifteen narrators throughout book, one of them is even the deceased, who is expressing her thoughts from the coffin. As the book continues you can see the characters develop with each narrator’s perceptions and opinions.

This book is best known for its stream of consciousness writing technique which can be one of the biggest struggles with this book. It’s a dense read and if you don’t pay enough attention and try to delve deep into this book you will struggle to enjoy it. I made the mistake of starting reading book out as like a novel and it took me a while to pull myself up and approach this novel in the right mindset. But eventually I did start enjoying this book for what it is; and that is as a piece of literature that helped pioneer the stream of consciousness narrative and the interior monologue.

Faulkner was never an easy author to read but I hear this is his most accessible novel so I’m worried about reading anything else of his. I did enjoy exploring his literary style and just seeing the techniques he used for this novel but this really isn’t everyone’s idea of a fun read. There are some interesting characters in As I Lay Dying and some very ironic and dark elements to the story. As for the plot and scenery I did find it lacking but that really wasn’t what Faulkner was trying to achieve.

William Faulkner has famously said that he wrote the novel in six weeks and that he did not change a word of it. This in itself is a pretty impressive statement but if you look at the techniques and the novel as an overall piece of high literature, this statement is more impressive that I originally thought; it makes me feel like a failure. As I Lay Dying is not going to be for everyone, it is a dense novel but for lovers of literature it is interesting to dive into something that has been analysed deeply. I’m not going to go into this side of the book because I doubt I could really do it justice. The style of this book is interesting, the prose is worth a deeper look and overall this book is just fascinating.

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24 people found this helpful

Beautiful, grim, and hilarious

The multiple narrators of this audiobook bring the story to life: a grim tale of poverty and death with an unexpected dash of hilariously dark humor. A woman is dying and is finally dead, and her husband and children set out with the coffin on a journey to her home town. The language is colorful and concrete and filled with incantatory repetitions of certain phrases. It's the ultimate jinxed road trip, cursed at times with what appear to be all the plagues of Egypt. Without giving away too much, I'll just say, to paraphrase the Bible: where there's a dead body, the vultures will gather. This saying may have originally been intended as a metaphor, but in Faulkner's beautifully poetic prose, you can hear the flapping of wings.

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20 people found this helpful

Ain't no end to bad luck when once it starts

What makes this book interesting is not the story. The story is pretty banal. What makes this book interesting is the characters, and the insight into how people feel and think, and the dynamics that develop within a family or any other group of people. Faulkner was a brilliant innovator of stream-of-consciousness and other modern narrative devices. I appreciate him more the more I read of him. A lot of writing presupposes that people think in words, but Faulkner tries to express the non-verbal feelings we have drawing from the words we would use if we had the time and the vocabulary to sort them all out. I think this accounts for some of the poetical imagery we get from characters who would not otherwise think some of the thoughts Faulkner ascribes to them.

The travails of the Bundren family are painful to watch. They all have their secrets from each other. They are all flawed individuals. They have barely held together as a family. Watching them all stumble through the trial of dealing with Addie's death makes you wonder how they can possibly all stay together much longer. But there are counterforces at work too.

One thing I cannot understand is how a 270 page book can be narrated in under 7 hours. I guess I will have to go look at a paper copy and try to figure it out.

The use of 4 readers for this book is extremely helpful in sorting out which of the 15 narrators is speaking at any given time. In general I give them high marks for conveying Faulkner's language and coping with the ambiguities of stream-of-consciousness writing. The one exception I have to comment on is the voice chosen for Dewey Dell. The reader chooses to make Dewey Dell into a kind of wispy, ethereal, dreamy teenager. She fails to capture any of the sullen, angry adolescent that Faulkner constantly hints is at the core of Dewey Dell's character.

However, that minor complaint in no way detracts from the overall quality of this audiobook. It's not about Dewey Dell, any more than it is about Anse, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Vardamon or even Addie. It's ultimately about something else. Something I don't know how to express. Faulkner knew how to express it, but it took him a whole book to do it.

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19 people found this helpful

All Hype. Read "Light in August" Instead

What disappointed you about As I Lay Dying?

Faulkner. I've read his other works and this one left me feeling cheated. I went on the journey with him and, when we got there, I was looking around thinking "why did I read this, again?" The characters were uninteresting. The story was lacking.Whatever could have been told was lost in the ramblings of "stream of consciousness." It's like long division ... sure, you can get to the answer that way, but why would you?

What could William Faulkner have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

Written something else ... and given up "stream of consciousness" writing.

Would you listen to another book narrated by the narrators?

Sure. I think they did a fine job. The producers were brilliant in getting multiple narrators. In fact, they could have had more. Faulkner is so inconsiderate to his readers in that he gives his characters no introduction, no context, no "who are these people" which makes it absolutely necessary to have different voices. It was like Faulkner decided, laughing to himself, to write whatever came into his mind, didn't feel like reading back over it to see if it made any sense, then went straight to production with it. The artist has a duty to meet their audience somewhere along the line. He failed here. Will Patton, in Faulkner's "Light in August" is an awesome narrator. One of the best I've heard, along with Stacy Keach in Hemingway.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from As I Lay Dying?

I would sit Faulkner down and ask him, "Will, level with me here. What is the point? Are you trying to prove that you can do the "Stream of Consciousness" thing too? I don't see a story here. I see you, the writer, trying to prove something and maybe you'll get lucky and some "artsy" types will rave about it. William, is that what is going on? I think you should stick to your bread and butter, telling great stories that really change people, and knock off the gimmicky stuff. Seriously. You're from Mississippi. Have you ever heard of any person in that state, or anywhere that communicated that way? If you want to do poetry, fine. Do poetry. If you want to write novels, fine. Write novels. But don't do this. Don't mix and mash it all together along with some ramblings about "is is" and "once was is." What is that? I know what you were getting at but why go about it that way? You owe it to your readers to give them a little bit more."

Any additional comments?

Don't give up on Faulkner for this one. Read "Light in August," the one narrated by Will Patton. It will affect you; it will draw you in. It's a shame that "As I Lay Dying" has received so much attention. I think it does a disservice to the other great works he wrote. People go for this one, get burned on it, then turn their back on Faulkner altogether.

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8 people found this helpful

good narration of a classic

If you're looking at Faulkner then you hopefully know what you're getting into. This, along with Unvanquished are probably good intros with this starting to get into the stream of consciousness and convoluted structures without being too much. this is a great idea to have the rotating narrators by different readers, however they should have gone a step further and used enough to cover all the voices distinctly with no repeats. there are a couple of narrators who read more than one voice/character and some voices are not as individual as they need to be, and a couple times a reader's sections come back to back and the voices run too similar, enough that i lost track of who was speaking a couple times. still a good rendition.

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6 people found this helpful