Absalom, Absalom!

Hot take: multi-page paragraphs is actually bad writing and I don't care if it was intentional or a hallmark of the modernist style.

This text's inaccessibility is irritating.

A spiraling retracing of a family's demise in the South, coincident with the South coming part and destroying itself in slavery's contradictions through the Civil War. Nasty, circuitous, telling.

I'm not sure I would have given Absalom! 5 stars if I hadn't spent so much time with it for my senior seminar. It's a mean book. It's mean to the reader. It's only marginally more legible than The Sound and the Fury, and most of the book is flashbacks and if I recall correctly, a 100+ page interjection into a sentence. But it's also a beautiful book. The characterizations, through grotesque, are amazing studies in a sort of literary psychology. Faulkner just builds these layers into his characters, layers of flaws and generational weight.

It's also full of beautiful prose, of the especially Faulknerian bend. Sprawling, heavy sentences abound. But I'm into that.

This is a masterwork of style and substance.