Customer Reviews

Sanctuary

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

SANCTUARY is, by all standards, an odd book. A minor work by a major talent, it blends elements of Greek tragedy and tawdry potboiler to create an unusual amalgam. Faulkner himself was quite up front about it being his great attempt to write a bestseller, lathing the book with a bevy of cheap effects, yet still to imbuing page after page with one striking phrase after another.

Although not major Faulkner, it is still Faulkner, and is definitely worth reading. It is set in Yoknapatawpha county, and features many characters who either appear in other books or whose relatives appear in other books. Furthermore, the key female character in the book, Temple Drake, reappears as the major character in REQUIEM FOR A NUN, written twenty years after this one. While I do not rate this anywhere nearly as highly as many of his other books, being something of an oddity, it is nonetheless absolutely not a waste of time. While there are many sensationalist elements, there are still many magnificent sentences that read more like poetry than prose, and many of the characters are memorable.

If one is wanting to read only one or two books by Faulkner, I would not recommend this one. I would recommend instead AS I LAY DYING or, if one is feeling more ambitious, ABSALOM, ABSALOM. But if one is planning on reading all of the major works of Faulkner, then this is a book one should not skip. Minor Faulkner is better than the major works of many other writers.

Imagine it's 1929 and you're reading a book about bootlegging, couples living in sin, rape, whorehouses, with near-explicit sex scenes. Faulkner's SANCTUARY must have been mind-blowing to the genteel masses. They were reading material that they still don't show on network television today, in an age where such things are so commonly discussed in the media that we hardly look sideways at it. This book must have arrived like an explosion, shaking the sensibilities of readers everywhere, daring booksellers to put it on their shelves.

SANCTUARY is not an easy book. You'll find yourself, if you're like me, rereading passages to understand exactly what's going on. The characters, though precisely described, can be difficult to picture in your mind, especially as we move further away from the Jazz Age, with its unusual expressions, costume, and mores. Imagine Tennessee and Mississippi when cars were relatively new to the roads, when the various social strata -- some wearing suits, some overalls -- began mixing together more easily. Imagine being a teenage girl acting as a woman trapped in a moonshiner's shack, far away from the protection of her home, encountering men like creatures in a horrific play who drink liquor and watch her lie under the covers, her only protector passed out beside her.

Faulkner's reintroduced introduction is a godsend that will help you decipher the book somewhat. The editor's notes at the end of the book will help you understand much of the jargon and the motivation of the characters.

A good read in any age.

Even when Faulkner is writing to sell books, as he admits he is doing with "Sanctuary," the master of impressionistic Southern fiction can be quite sublime. The novel's racy subject matter and lightning-strike narrative have the feel of pulp fiction, but the rich descriptions and illustrious prose reveal that Faulkner never strays far from the top of his form. As expected, its base locale is Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha County, that endless wellspring of Faulkner's imagination.

It's prohibition, and business is good for moonshiners like Lee Goodwin, living in a large but decrepit antebellum house with his "wife" Ruby and baby son, who is kept in a box hidden behind the stove to protect him from rats. Goodwin, while not a bad man himself, associates with a number of hoodlums, including a sympathetic young man named Tommy and a cruel cretin called Popeye who harbors a nasty secret about his past and his libido.

One night, a drunk named Gowan Stevens and his girlfriend Temple Drake, the privileged daughter of a judge in Jackson and a college girl with a wild side, get into a car accident and end up spending the night at Goodwin's house, where Gowan had been planning to buy some whiskey. Temple, warned by Ruby that the house is no place for a girl like her, and abandoned by Gowan the next day, finds herself in a nightmarish predicament when Popeye brutally robs her of whatever innocence she had, drives her to Memphis, and puts her up at a cathouse fronting as a respectable hotel, run by a careworn but charitable madam named Miss Reba.

But Popeye and Temple have to answer for the murder of Tommy, who was shot around the time they left. Goodwin gets arrested, and a friendly lawyer named Horace Benbow, himself on vacation from his nagging wife, decides to defend him at the trial. This leads to some detective work to find Temple, who is being held prisoner by Popeye in that Memphis hotel and would provide valuable witness testimony. The manner in which Benbow manages to do this proves Faulkner's skill in characterization, as he employs two members of the infamous Snopes family to comic as well as narrative effect.

"Sanctuary" has two very memorable morbid, but poetic, images: the first involving Flaubert's doomed Madame Bovary, of all people; and the second describing a funeral for a small-time hoodlum that is transformed into a bacchanalian celebration by the fatalistic sensibilities of the Memphis underworld. This is a scene which could be conjured only by a William Faulkner (or a Nathanael West).

This novel is an odd brew. It feels messy yet still exhibits an unquestionable professionalism; its characters are grotesque but all the more interesting because of it. Faulkner's writing is never explicit; you must be attentive to clues and details because you'll be expected to piece together the puzzle later. This is the main challenge confronting his readers, but understanding Faulkner means being willing to accept this challenge.

I read this book because I had never read any Faulkner before. I guess I thought I was missing something in my library or maybe it was time to lay off the nonfiction I mostly read.

I found Faulkner's style and word choices difficult at first. He assumes the reader is not lazy and will keep up with him and his stream of consciousness approach. I must admit I read half the book, became disinterested and put it down for several weeks. I then made up my mind to give it a second chance and really enjoyed it.

The story is dark and slightly twisted. There are very few admirable characters but I found myself sympathizing with most of the characters. Everyone except maybe Temple Drake has reasons for their misdeeds. I felt Faulkner was trying to convey the injustice of the time and just plain bad luck as reasons for the poor behavior or lack of optimism of the characters.

I highly recommend this book. It is gripping and real. The story got to me.

Sanctuary is another brilliant tale that reveals exactly how amazing Faulkner is as an author. This story, by far, is one of the most "twisted" tales; the unexpected occurs throughout. All through the book, I was in complete awe and in disbelief. By the end of this book, I was in complete shock. What occurred in the last 50 or 100 pages left me in surprise and in utter astonishment. I had never suspected any of what had occurred. How Faulkner was able to conjure up such an original story is beyond me!

In short, the story is about the kidnapping of a rich girl of 18 and the trial of a man accused of murder. However, the plots are not nearly this simplistic. Faulkner ventures into life and its evils, revealing that it does not matter how a person is raised, the choice of evil is his own; sometimes those of low class are more true and kind than those of high society. This is a book that, I believe, breaks the shell between class stereotypes.

This book is a definite must read. Not only is it unbelievably entertaining, but it also leaves you thinking. It's a fairly easy read despite the various numbers of characters involved (if you are anything like me, you might want to take notes on who's who). In addition, I would also recommend reading this book closely; don't just give it a skim. You might miss something important!

This was my second shot at trying to appreciate William Faulkner. I read Light in August a few years back and gave it 3 stars. I'm a big fan of Steinbeck, a contemporary of Faulkner's, who is often compared to Faulkner. Some reviews have said if you like Steinbeck you will like Faulkner. I disagree. Steinbeck writes clear and concise stories that are carried by his creativity and a reflection of the life he led. To describe Faulkner's style in Sanctuary, I will borrow from another review that said it was "oblique and distracting". I finished the story with a half-hearted understanding of what I had just read. By reading all of the other reviews on this site I now understand so much more about the book. That's a problem, I don't connect with Faulkner....

I found this a bleak, disturbing novel - Faulkner seemed to me to want to immerse the reader in the most unattractive sides of the human psyche. If you're not in the mood, I suppose that this could be a deeply depressing work - the treatment of Temple Drake, and her resultant decline as a human being would ensure that.

As it is, I don't mind being taken on such journeys into the dark side, not least because I think it acts as a warning or reminder. Added to which, I found the writing interesting - I've only read a few Faulkner works, but he intrigues me in that I find that his style, whilst oblique (the best word I could summon up at the moment), is nonetheless highly effective in relating atmosphere and mood.

This novel is essentially claustrophobic - the tension is palpable. All the female characters are treated badly by the men, albeit in different ways. This perhaps says much about the social roles of the time and latent brutality therein. But what I thought was more interesting, and might be worthy of deeper thought was why otherwise honest, peaceful people are passive or even cooperate in the face of injustice, brutality and violence? Is there a case for saying that once violated, each of the women in the novel did little or nothing to protest and even cooperated with their violaters?

Extending this somewhat outside of the novel, why do we find criminals so interesting when essentially their behaviour threatens us - or have I answered my own question? A thought-provoking novel.

William Faulkner stands in my mind with only a few authors whose writing does not seem like writing. His novels seem more moments of real life. While I was reading "Sanctuary" you forget you are reading a book and the characters take on a virtual reality in your mind. Like all of Faulkner's books, this one is disorienting at first, simply by the author's strength of vision. The main plot revolves around Temple Drake, a coquettish college girl who likes to secretly sneak out of her college dorm to attend dances. One of her rides back from one of these dances is a boy named Gowan Stevens. He decides to stop off at an illegal moonshine operation and promptly sets about getting drunk. Temple is trapped at the house surrounded by all sorts of shady characters you would associate with such an operation. One of these is named Popeye, and trust me he is not a hero, he rapes Temple. One of the things I found slightly disturbing was the sense that Temple is a flirt and you get the sense that Faulkner felt that eventually some sex crime was going to be committed against her. She could get away with things around college boys but she fails to realize that with criminals, its a very bad move. It's the beginning of her great moral slide that was always just waiting to happen. There are other subplots going on around it. The owner of the moonshine operation is a convict and his wife supported herself through prostitution while he was in the joint, which is a source of tension between them. Horace Benbow is a lawyer who has left his wife simply because he recognizes the hollowness of his marriage. These characters are connected by the crime against Temple. The depressing thing about this novel is that noone really gets a sanctuary. The ending is not pretty. That's what makes it so powerful and so real. This book is right up there with Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in sheer power of vision.

This novel was written in perhaps Faulkner's most creative period. Simultaneously, he was writing, re-writing, or revising The Sound and the Fury, Flags in the Dust (Sartoris), As I Lay Dying, and several major short stories. It is not surprising that elements of these other works find their way into Sanctuary. Although Faulkner maligned the original text and the published novel quickly gained a reputation for senationalism and a certain lasciviousness, it is an important work which probably ranks right behind the author's masterpieces.

When Faulkner began to revise the galleys of the original text, he was supposed to have been upset at the poor quality of the novel and concerned about possible legal suits from a puritanical reading public. His revision was to remedy both deficiencies. However, if a comparison between the original and revised text is made it becomes clear that Faulkner left all the lasciviousness in but worked hard to change the way in which the narrative was told. In the original version, flashback was the main instrument of narration (indeed, in many cases flashback within flashbacks) and bore an uncanny similarity to the style of Flags in the Dust (the original text of Sartoris). The revised version attains something of the feel of a detective novel: straightforward prose with concrete nouns and strong verbs, action, stock characters and sex.

However, when Faulkner re-worked his galleys and centered the action around Temple Drake, the character of Horace Benbow is relegated to a supporting role and I think that in the end, this change in emphasis robbed the novel of some of its complexity and deprived readers of some of Faulkner's most serpentine prose, prose as thick and profound as the wisteria Faulkner describes growing around the eaves of the Benbow family home.

este es el libro mas comercial escrito por faulkner y por eso creo que es el mas facil de leer, ya que el autor estaba pensando en un publico a la hora de escribir antes de que dijera su famosa frase..... un dia me encerre y me olvide de los criticos y del publico y empeze a escribir para mi mismo ....... este libro es mas de horror que del sur, aunque ya muestra personajes que apareceran en otras historias suyas. es excelente y uno de los mas faciles de entender es muy recomendable para quien quiera iniciar una lectura sobre faulner.....

LUIS MENDEZ crazzyteacher@hotmail.com