A beautiful story of obsession

For any out there who think Faulkner doesn't have a sense of humor and isn't "funny," suggest you read the 2nd part of The Hamlet, section called Eula, about Eula Varner (later Snopes), daughter of the wealthy but extremely lazy patriarch of Frenchman's Bend. Eula is sexy, beautiful, extremely lazy and languid herself - she goes to school but refuses to walk, so brother Jody takes her on horseback , and back home, twice daily; he has to meet her at a fallen tree so she can step from the log onto the horseback. Her contributions during the school day throughout her childhood and teen years are limited to: I don't know and I haven't got that far yet. Some of F's descriptions of her are laugh-out-loud, especially her riding behind Jody on horseback with what I think F calls "mammalian pulchritude." But this section is more than just a comic turn; it's sorrowful and tragic in many ways as well: the high point being the school teacher, who road horseback 40 miles every day to go to classes at Ole Miss and play "the football" - whose career ambition was "Governor" but who stayed on at the school too long because of his obsession with Eula's beauty; there are many other books and films about teachers obsessed with their students or with one particularly alluring student. This one is among the most sensitive and sorrowful: just compare it with the cruel and insensitive Lolita and you'll see - the schoolteacher working so hard to be a good man and to overcome his yearnings and his fears, the young woman so cool and oblivious. For Faulkner, the writing is pretty efficient - this section contains a lot of narrative in only about 50 pages - but the style is typically abundant and rewards close and careful reading, much like Proust. There was only one point that I had to scrawl in the margin: Huh? In some later (?) works such as Absolum I had to scrawl that almost every other page.