Publisher: Harper Perennial
Authors: Jay Parini
List Price: $15.95
Amazon Price: $10.85
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Reviews:
Summary: Still Waiting
After 4 decades of reading and studying Faulkner, I believe Parini's book gets us closer to taking the measure of the man; but I wonder if even Parini realises what a true genius Faulkner was. I want some scholar to say finally that he's not only America's greatest writer (of all time), but the finest writer in English that the 20th century produced. The literary criticism here is a bit hit and miss, but mostly hits. The current literary fads and obsessions at times tend to dilute the focus on Faulkner's achievement, but this could have been a lot worse. In general, Faulkner scholarship has yet to rise to the level of quality of Faulkner himself. The one notable exception is Cleanth Brooks' WILLIAM FAULKNER: THE YOKNAPATAWPHA COUNTRY, which after over 40 years is still the most distinguished, best written, most level-headed, and downright brilliant exploration of the Yoknapatawpha novels.
Summary: One Matchless Time is time spent with Southern genius Wm. Faulkner
William Faulkner was a genius! The 1949 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was a complex man, He was "a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Faulkner was a great artist but a troubled human being. He was an alcoholic, womanizer (several affairs followed his marriage to the troubled Estelle Oldham), lier
(such as his wild tales of his spurious adventures as a flier in the World War I RAF!), poor husband, prodigal son of the rich soil of his Mississippi birthplace.
Faulkner was more! He was the creator of Yoknapatawhpa county
bringing to the realm of world literature such characters as
Flemn Snopes, the Bundren and Compson families, Temple Drake,
Joe Christmas and so many more. Along with Balzac and Dickens he was the creator of a whole world of fictional life in what he
called his "postage stamp sized landscape."
Joseph Blotner has written the best book on FAulkner but I would use this fine work by Parini if I was teaching an English
class on the great "Dixie Epress" from Oxford.
Though an academic, Jay Parini does a good job in summarizing the complex novels; relating the life of FAulkner and putting this material down in an easy to read style free of pyschobabble.
I enjoyed this fine book especially the details on Faulkner's
complicated family history in Mississippi which was dominated
by the memory of his great-grandfather Colonel Falkner.
If you need to know a lot about Faulkner in a short space of time turn to Parini. Well done!
Summary: One matchless eternity
This briskly paced biography of Faulkner summons the image of the man very well, and brings some resonance to the extraordinary period from 1928 to the nineteen forties when the inspiration to create a mysterious world in a series of masterworks overtook this shambling southerner breaking out of the initial conditions of his birth. The gestation of the first novels then sudden appearance of Sound and the Fury is one of the great literary tales of the twentieth century, and the extant vision is of the Golgotha of a lost and passing world, no sentimentality needed for this tragic view, of the peculiar and flawed society of the South after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Faulkner's work echoes this ominous mood in his matchless evocation and cathartic cutting to the core of the unconscious of that world and summons, next to Moby Dick, the tragic genre to the telling of the tale of the American Dream.
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