Customer Reviews

Light in August

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3 star:		(1)
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Faulkner's was a self-indulgent, irresponsible, uneven gift. But at his best, as sometimes in these pages, he is a poet and rhapsodist without equal, and we continue to read him. As a rational thinker he was a nullity; he had no practical insights, no social program, no agendum, no framework that could serve as a starting point toward a solution of the problems he so tellingly describes. This became abundantly clear around the time of his winning the Nobel prize for literature, when he disappointed and exasperated followers who were looking to him for guidance as to a beacon. At least Faulkner had the self-knowledge to know that he did not know, did not in fact even want to know. For knowledge was inimical to his art, not-wanting-to-know a precondition for it. That, and bourbon. The bourbon released his inhibitions and silenced his inner editor (its voice had never been loud), unleashing a torrent of words, much of it bilge but some diamonds too. The result in Light in August is an exasperating novel that contains some thirty scattered pages of the highest poetic value and one potentially great character in the person of Joe Christmas. I say this as a man of 54 who has read the book five times in the course of his life, having been introduced to it in high school. Of course I didn't understand much of it then, but its inimitable style and voluptuous confusion have beckoned me back to it.

One is attracted above all by the descriptions of the simple processes of life in all their earthy particulars, the negro cabins, the town lights, the smells, everything rank and dark and elemental. Except for Joe Christmas and possibly Gail Hightower, the characters are all stereotypes, especially the women. Intellectually, there is little of substance in the novel, its appeal is entirely emotional. There is a clean, bracing no-nonsense description of hypermasculine elements and experiences to which Joe seems to gravitate naturally. For instance, of McEachern's harness strap ("clean, like the shoes, and it smelled like the man smelled: an odor of clean hard virile living leather") and Joe's rapt expression when being beaten by it; of Joe's preference for the clean, hard air of men. Given his latent homosexuality, one feels Joe would have done much better as a votary of the strap. But there was a problem. Biologically he was wired (...), and no mistake. Even as a child in the orphanage with the dietician he showed this susceptibility: "On that first day when he discovered the toothpaste in her room he had gone directly there, who had never heard of toothpaste either, as if he already knew that she would possess something of that nature and he would find it." He was still too young to understand what Charley was enjoying, but when he came of age he learned that it too, like the toothpaste, was not always sweet ("periodic filth between two moons suspended"). Unfortunately, Joe had no use for the rest of the package and never learned to like and appreciate women as people. This was the root of his troubles with women and by cutting him off from a source of life helped to seal his doom.

Several reviewers have stated that Joe had some negro blood. This is an error and is refuted by the evidence given in the book, although it suits Faulkner (if not Joe) to make Joe out as a possible negro and even to foist him off as one. I think Faulkner's device here, of using the negro as the ultimate symbol of the outcast, is a dreadful mistake, so serious as even to call into question his integrity as an artist as well as his understanding of his greatest character. Why? Because it is too easy, too cheap a shot. It's also overkill, since Joe's alienation has already been powerfully delineated by other, artistic means. Raising the N question does great damage by entangling Joe's problem of identity with something completely separate and other. Joe's problem is his alone. Damaged in childhood and partly cut off from the sources of life, he has to renew and rebuild himself to a degree not necessary to his complacent countrymen, who by virtue of their utter mediocrity are granted automatic membership in small, stultifying, inbred towns like the one in which the action unfolds. And it is precisely here in the book that Faulkner begins to stumble, to overreach for a grand synthesis that isn't there. The performance is increasingly over-the-top until eventually artistic control is lost. He doesn't seem to grasp the limitations of his creations, and the book becomes a stew. Faulkner was nothing if not confused, and here alas the confusion damages the work. Where was that inner editor?

After the murder, a building momentum sweeps the reader on to the end. However, there is no true catharsis and no real tragedy, only an overreaching for a grand synthesis that fails. The reader is struck by the feeling that something has gone wrong, and on going back finds he has been the victim of a swindle. The book closes with that sucker Byron Bunch in tow with his damaged goods in the form of Lena Grove and her (...) infant. Faulkner seems to be saying that in spite of some mistakes, life has returned to its immemorial path. But if this is salvation, one must be glad for Joe that he is safely dead and out of harm's way. Not everyone is cowed by the eternal feminine, and Joe himself would have no trouble giving the Lena Groves of the world what they deserve -- the back of his hand.

So after forty years and five attempts at this book, what of value can I take away? Perhaps some thirty pages of beautiful poetry, and the memory of Joe Christmas. He sought to rebuild and renew himself through the transformative power of hard physical labor and I would like to leave him there, contining now and forever on the roads he freely chose for himself (one of the few things in the book that Faulkner does make clear), that run "through yellow wheat fields waving beneath the fierce yellow days of labor and hard sleep in haystacks beneath the cold mad moon of September, and the brittle stars."

Lena came from Alabama. She traveled to Mississippi looking for Lucas Burch. Beside Lena Grove, Gail Hightower, Joe Christmas, and Joe Brown are characters in the story. Hightower's wife had jumped or fallen from a hotel window and had died. He had been the Presbyterian Minister. Even the Ku Klux Klan had not managed to persuade Hightower to leave Jefferson.

Hightower and Byron Burch commence to discuss a fire at Mrs. Burden's house. Christmas and Brown lived in a structure in the back. Mrs. Burden had started praying over Joe Christmas. It was not her fault she had gotten too old.

Joe Christmas went from an orphanage to the home of the McEacherns, a Presbyterian couple. As a teenager he started to see a waitress in town. McEachern watched Joe. He ordered the waitress away. Joe went to Chicago, to Detroit. Finally, age 33, he was on a Mississippi country road in the vicinity of the Burden house. During the first four or five months of his stay in a cabin on her property, Joe and Mrs. Burden would stand and talk like strangers. Later she told him she was pregnant. Now he had a partner in the whiskey business--Brown.

After the fire and Joanna Burden's death, the people searched for Christmas. Brown was placed in jail for safe-keeping. Christmas ran off to Mottstown. He becomes obsessed with getting food. Joe Christmas is killed. He is sent across the square with a deputy and unidentified men take him.

Gavin Stevens is the district attorney, a Harvard graduate. Stevens tells the authorities that Christmas will plead guilty and take a life sentence. His death follows. Lena's baby is born around the time Joe Christmas dies. The mother of the baby had started her journey in Alabama and three months later she is in Tennesee.

Faulkner's was a self-indulgent, irresponsible, uneven gift. But at his best, as sometimes in these pages, he is a poet and
rhapsodist without equal, and we continue to read him. As a rational thinker he was a nullity; he had no practical insights, no social program, no agendum, no framework that could serve as a starting point toward a solution of the problems he so tellingly describes. This became abundantly clear around the time of his winning the Nobel prize for literature, when he disappointed and exasperated followers who were looking to him for guidance as to a beacon.
At least Faulkner had the self-knowledge to know that he did not know, did not in fact even want to know.
For knowledge was inimical to his art, not-wanting-to-know a precondition for it. That, and bourbon. The bourbon released his inhibitions and silenced his inner editor (its voice had never been loud), unleashing a torrent of words, much of it bilge but some diamonds too. The result in Light in August is an exasperating novel that contains some thirty scattered pages of the highest poetic value and one potentially great character in the person of Joe Christmas. I say this
as a man of 54 who has read the book five times in the course of his life, having been introduced to it in high school. Of
course I didn't understand much of it then, but its inimitable style and voluptuous confusion have beckoned me back to it.

One is attracted above all by the descriptions of the simple processes of life in all their earthy particulars,
the negro cabins, the town lights, the smells, everything rank and dark and elemental. Except for Joe Christmas and
possibly Gail Hightower, the characters are all stereotypes, especially the women. Intellectually, there is little of
substance in the novel, its appeal is entirely emotional. There is a clean, bracing no-nonsense description of hypermasculine elements and experiences to which Joe seems to gravitate naturally. For instance, of McEachern's harness strap ("clean, like the shoes, and it smelled like the man smelled: an odor of clean hard virile living leather") and Joe's rapt expression when being beaten by it; of Joe's preference for the clean, hard air of men. Given his latent homosexuality, one feels Joe would have done much better as a votary of the strap. But there was a problem. Biologically he was wired for pussy, and no mistake. Even as a child in the orphanage with the dietician he showed this susceptibility: "On that first day when he discovered the toothpaste in her room he had gone directly there, who had never heard of toothpaste either, as if he already knew that she would possess something of that nature and he would find it." He was still too young to understand what Charley was enjoying, but when he came of age he learned that it too, like the toothpaste, was not always sweet ("periodic filth between two moons suspended"). Unfortunately, Joe had no use for the rest of the package and never learned to like and appreciate women as people. This was the root of his troubles with women and by cutting him off from a source of life helped to seal his doom.

Several reviewers have stated that Joe had some negro blood. This is an error and is refuted by the evidence given in the book, although it suits Faulkner (if not Joe) to make Joe out as a possible negro and even to foist him off as one.
I think Faulkner's device here, of using the negro as the ultimate symbol of the outcast, is a dreadful mistake, so serious as even to call into question his integrity as an artist, or at least his understanding of his greatest character. Why? Because it is too easy, too cheap a shot. It's also overkill, since Joe's alienation has already been powerfully delineated by other, artistic means. Raising the N question does great damage by entangling Joe's problem of identity with something completely separate and other. Joe's problem is his alone. Damaged in childhood and partly cut off from the sources of life, he has to renew and rebuild himself to a degree not necessary to his complacent countrymen, who by virtue of their utter mediocrity are granted automatic membership in small, stultifying, inbred towns like the one in which the action unfolds. And it is precisely here in the book that Faulkner begins to stumble, to overreach for a grand synthesis that isn't there. The performance is increasingly over-the-top until eventually artistic control is lost. He doesn't seem to grasp the limitations of his creations, and the book becomes a stew. Faulkner was nothing if not confused, and here alas the confusion damages the work. Where was that inner editor?

After the murder, a building momentum sweeps the reader on to the end. However, there is no true catharsis and no real tragedy, only an overreaching for a grand synthesis that fails. The reader is struck by the feeling that something has gone wrong, and on going back finds he has been the victim of a swindle. The book closes with that sucker Byron Bunch in tow with his damaged goods in the form of Lena Grove and her bastard infant. Faulkner seems to be saying that in spite of some mistakes, life has returned to its immemorial path. But if this is salvation, one must be glad for Joe that he is safely dead and out of harm's way. Not everyone is cowed by the eternal feminine, and Joe himself would have no trouble giving the Lena Groves of the world what they deserve -- the back of his hand.

So after forty years and five attempts at this book, what of value can I take away? Perhaps some thirty pages of beautiful poetry, and the memory of Joe Christmas. He sought to rebuild and renew himself through the transformative power of hard physical labor and I would like to leave him there, continuing now and forever on the roads he freely chose for himself (one of the few things in the book that Faulkner does make clear), that run "through yellow wheat fields waving beneath the fierce yellow days of labor and hard sleep in haystacks beneath the cold mad moon of September, and the brittle stars."

The Book Light in August is definitely a complex book to read. This is the first novel I have read by William Faulkner. Light in August ranks among the very finest of novels of world literature. The book incorporates great moral themes relating to the ruins of the Deep South in the post-Civil war era. The characters in the book are all unique and complex in there own way. One main character in the book, Joe Christmas, still sticks in my head after I read it. He is a contemptuous man who looks white, but whose father is black. He ends up being the murderer of a woman. People who have a lot of time on their hands and want a good book to read should read this book. The story is filled with great themes, is extaordinarily complex, and is almost always laced with trauma and misery!

Nothing is ever simple in a Faulkner book. However plainly the people talk, however straightforward that the situations seem, there are layers and layers of things to dig through to find the ultimate truth, if indeed there is any. I've already read Sound and the Fury and as glorious as that book was, this novel absolutely captivated me. It's Faulkner's way with words, he's not flashy like some contemporary authors, preferring to slowly wind his way into your consciousness with his gift of writing. It's only as you read, maybe as you peruse a passage for the second time do you see the little details that you missed the first time out, the choice of a word here, the flow of a paragraph. And his characters, all beautifully drawn, with flaws and cracks and everything, but even the farthest gone of his lowlives has some pearl of wisdom to impart, his pillars all have dark secrets. In short they're just like his, if we lived in the South at the turn of the century. Faulkner captures it all, weaving his characters together with the skill of a master, no seams showing, everything seeming to happen naturally. Even when the story detours to tell someone's backstory, it seems to come at the perfect moment. If I sound a bit fawning, that's because this book deserves it, nothing puts together the picture of a time better than this, and as an aspiring writer I am in sincere awe of Faulkner's ability to reflect even the more complex of emotions with a word or a sentence. He has to be read to be believed and it definitely must be experienced. Just immerse yourself in a time and place thought long gone, that still lurks in the corners of people's thoughts and the traditions that never die.

Faulkner is THE most complex author to come out of American Literature. Light in August is a beautifully written book with depths of analysis to which a Proffessor of mine, who speciallizes in Faulkner, cannot even reach. This may be his writing's downfall though, because every word that is read is a treasure trove, so much that it is hard to read a chapter at a time. I nearly drowned. I recommend this book for those who feel like getting down and dirty into a book. I would keep some Sunday comics next to you for breaks.

The book Light In August by William Faulkner was definitely a challenge. This was the first Faulkner novel I had read. I became intrigued with his work after reading the short story, A Rose for Emily. LIA's central focus was the plight of Joe Christmas, a half black/ half white man who is not accepted by either world and a young girl's search for the father of her unborn child. Although slow at times, the different twists and plots within plots make it an interesting read! I'm ready to read more Faulkner!

This isn't your run-of-the-mill pot-boiler. One can't wing through Faulkner's prose; one has to immearse themselves in it with patience. But if your able to connect with his style, you'll not only be transported to a different time and place; at times you'll go inside the minds of some of the characters to feel their emotions and know their thoughts. But be warned: Readers who prefer happy endings should stay away from Faulkner. But realistically, isn't that part of the South's heritage? - tragedy.

Wonderfully written. But then again, saying that about a Faulkner's book is almost redundant. Amazingly entertaining, painfully alive, this portrait reads more as a puzzle. Pieces here, emotions there, everything weaving with the vibrant life in the South. Although it took time for me to construct the final picture, the wait is worthwhile. Being born in another country, this book brings to me valuable information about the history of the US. Definitely, I would recommned it.

This book gives an interesting depiction of the lives of poor Southerners. The importance of racism and religion continue to be stromg themes through the lives of each of the individuals that Faulkner follows. While the story is a little slow at times, Faulkner's unique style keeps the reader interested and hookes.