Walking along the side of a muddy path, having deemed the right-hand-side to be the easiest route, the route least likely to end in muddy disaster, I felt committed to my path. Towards the end of the path, it became apparent that the people behind me who had taken the left bank clearly knew what I hadn’t. I was wearing my fuchsia Crocs snow boots, made of Croc-y rubber around the foot area, then becoming a pulled-up-short-sock height puffa-jacket-esque ruffle. The boots had always seemed waterproof, though never previously tested above the join with the ruffle with anything other than snow. I suppose snow is absorbed through fabric less quickly than water. Anyway, I messed up. Wrong route, no way to avoid having to ford the muddy river, no way of avoiding knowing looks from the family behind me. You probably saw where this was headed. I was committed to that path, which meant crossing what genuinely did resemble a brown water rapid of muddy water (ever so slight an exaggeration). I decided to walk across it with the grace and dignity of one who had always planned to make this perilous crossing. To my credit, the tactic worked and I so looked like I meant to do that. Well within a minute, the cold, wet mud started seeping through my socks and my previously warm and toasty feet were wet, gritty and pruning. I did not cut short my walk, I barely faltered, but I did grimace and I know I gave myself quite a talking to (has anyone else noticed they talk to themselves more in this post-March-2020 world?). I ended up washing the boots when I got back and soaking my cold, shrivelled, dirty feet in a bath of warm water. I did it though, I made it through the mud.
5/10
The Sound and the Fury is one of those books that smart people read. Actually, I read it because Margaret Atwood is a bit of a heroine of mine and she said it was a good example of narrative styles (each of the four sections of the story told from a different point of view with a different style of writing). If Margaret says it’s good, well it has to be.
I gave it a five because anything lower would make me feel even more unsmart than I now feel from having read it. For my enjoyment, I would have given it a one, one and a half at a push, and largely because I went to university in the town where William Faulkner lived and the setting is evocative of somewhere I’m familiar with. But it’s William Faulkner, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, blah, blah.
I didn’t get it. I found myself turning pages without having absorbed, let alone understood, pretty much any of it. But I was not going to be defeated. I kept going. Part way through the second of the four sections, while it was supposed to get easier to piece together in each section (the intro told me this), as I really had pretty much no clue what was going on, I decided to read a synopsis by Professor Google. Turns out, it’s not a story you read for the plot, though I do like stories where not a massive amount happens. I then read quite a few people saying they had read the book multiple times. A general consensus seemed to be that after the third reading, wow, it all became much clearer and, wow, what an amazing book. Whatever.
Professor Google did help a little in that I realised I hadn’t missed great events; rather, it’s more about the happenings within a family and household with a specific historical backdrop (not Downton Abbey but an American South post-slave-era-but-still-slavey kind of similarity. Yeah, a shaky link but I’m all about simplification where The Sound and The Fury is concerned). It also made me fully realise that the reasons I got my proverbial knickers in a twist in the first section (there is almost no punctuation and what there is doesn’t really help – really; that isn’t a ‘brown water rafting in Crocs’ kind of exaggeration) was because the point of view was a thirty-three-year-old man with a mental age of three going through a seemingly random recall of events mixed up from childhood to present day. In one long sentence. With very little punctuation. Someone had given the helpful advice to take note that the names of the resident servants (I’m thinking slaves would be more appropriate but the book is set after slavery was, on paper, abolished) were an indication of where in time the stream of consciousness related. That didn’t really help as I had already read a section, but I don’t think it would have made it easier for me to read and I have absolutely no intention of reading it twice more so I can get it.
I have subsequently read quite a lot about the book and it is clearly a much-loved and massively respected work of literary art. The novel follows, in a back and forth way, the falling apart of a once-wealthy slave-owning family, falling apart financially, mentally and in social and moral standing. I’d suggest not to even take up the challenge of trying to read it and understand it if you’re hopeful for a cheery read. There are no characters I particularly cared about, though I appreciate you get a sense of what all the characters are like, which is interesting.
I feel like the dunce of the class for not getting it and not being able to particularly appreciate it. Professor Google has enlightened me to lots of themes and elements of the novel that make it amazing. And I’m sure it is if you are more able to concentrate on elements of reading a book, indeed a sentence, which you’d not normally have to think so much about.
To my credit, I didn’t give up on it. I would recommend it to someone very smart who I wanted to impress with my, “Oh, yah, I’ve read The Sound and the Fury. A. Mazing,” but they’d probably have read it already and, gasp, might actually try to engage in discussion about the marvels of the novel. Gah, a muddy puddle too far. I must never tell anyone I’ve read it, except in a public blog post … oh well. If anyone I know has read it only once, understood it and enjoyed it, I really don’t want to know, you’ll just make me feel even more duncey than I already feel, though I do have the advantage of having read the modern day equivalent of York Notes about it so maybe I could wing an intellectual discussion about it. I’d rather ford another muddy river and get my feet dirty and cold. Every day for a week.