For me, this was a hard read. A stream-of-consciousness book which was harder than Rimbaud and William S. Burroughs at the same time, once "cracked", gave a lot.

It's the insight into 1920s America, of children and adults and the lives and differences between the idiot and the people who are not idiots.

Still, I wouldn't be able to say I've understood this book. I think I'll have to re-read it a couple of times to fully get into it. Maybe it just wasn't my time.

On the other hand, it was my time; just like eavesdropping on a conversation that you start listening in on mid-conversation, or if the people speaking don't make much sense, it leaves you with what you pick up from it.

As Faulkner himself said of the character Benjy:

“To that idiot, time was not a continuation, it was an instant, there was no yesterday and no tomorrow, it all is this moment, it all is [now] to him. He cannot distinguish between what was last year and what will be tomorrow, he doesn’t know whether he dreamed it, or saw it.”

Despite the static discussions found in the text, the book is very rewarding, if you can get past the language barrier; Faulkner has written dialogue much in the same way as José Saramago wrote "Blindness", and that Irvine Welsh wrote "Trainspotting": it's quasi-phonetic and at times lacking exclamation marks and question marks.

And to finish, I quote Shakespeare's "Macbeth":

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ To the last syllable of recorded time/ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!/ Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”