Faulkner has taught us how to read : Absalom, Absalom!

William Faulkner has taught us how to read - that is - how to read Faulkner novels, which have profoundly influenced must of the great writing of the 20th (and 21st?) century/ies. Yesterday started re-reading "Absalom, Absalom!," from about 1930, and I don't think any reader in its day could have read and understood it without having first read Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August - and I don't mean for the literal contents of the novels (thought that's helpful - Quentin Compson, for one, is a key player in both S&F and A,A!) but because the novels become increasingly in structure and arcane and baroque in language - AA is a difficult and challenging novel by any measure and at any time, though I think S&F is relatively straightforward now - though was a shock to those who first encountered it. AA tells the story of the Sutpen and C. (?) families, as narrated to Quentin by the elderly Rosa C. and with some details filled in for Q by someone, perhaps his father - the point is there are multiple narrative layers and several narrators and the story is told in increments and not in straight chronology, so the first chapter or two are very difficult and obscure but the whole picture begins take shape and cohere as we proceed through the novel - much like life itself, as we build understanding of people and places incrementally over time. In its scope and in its telling of the story of an entire (small) community over a long span of time through the lens or focus of a single deeply troubled family, AA (and other Faulkner novels) set a course and showed the way for many other great novels, though each of these has its own style: One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Leopard, The God of Small Things, The Known World - to name just a few of the best. I recommend, if you pick up AA, that you buy a book so that you can write extensively in the margins to keep on top of what's going on in the story - it will help. A few sentences are so baroque and obscure that they elicited from me a marginal note of : huh? I think Faulkner moved more and more toward obscurity later in his career, almost to self-parody, and we can see the early shadings of that in AA - even the title. What the hell does that mean? - but the novel still stands as one of his greatest, perhaps the last great work (along w the Snopes triology) before he descended into alcoholism.