The late great audiobook reader Wolfram Kandinsky reading 'Absalom, Absalom!' by William Faulkner. This is the first of eleven parts. Please leave a comment if you notice any flaws in the file.
I just wish that there was really a southern reader for this book.... It's so "academic" without the pauses, the expression, the languid sanguinity, the slight humor, the vague sadness.
It's a good try, with the voice used for Quentin's father, the kind drunkard Mr. Compson, and the reading is better for it. At least he didn't do a full on Foghorn Leghorn impression. If you are just coming to this book, you should know that some of the point of it is to lead you into the swamp, in a world without more distraction than a bird landing or the memory of a two headed snake on a tree -- dappled sunlight at some ambiguous hour of the afternoon, or the far off shot of a bird shoot. Then, it is back to the past. That is the quick of the river, pulling you along, though you can't see the surface. It's a novel about despair and outrage trying to be past down, and the inability to do this fully, and the feeling that can leave behind. Yet trauma, memory, story telling survives. "History", Quinton says, at some point, "is a nightmare that I'm trying to forget." Yet in a way, idea that it could seems terrifying, in that it wouldn't be expression, not honesty, and would leave people feeling in the dark, or at the very least ignorant. It is very dense, and I don't think that it's a novel for everyone or even for most occasions. Yet I think that with a little patience it can leave one with something that many today lack -- an appreciation, even in spite of youth's immediate rejection, and desire for understanding an almost old testament story, inherited. The true gift here, riddled with "the curse" of slavery, of cruelty, of pride, of indignance, may be the experimentation and representation of a communities' (not one person but a story of many, retold in time, by different people, young, old, in memory, and through different people's memories of them and without rush but into their souls there in the memory and the telling and the retelling) stories of desire, conflict, passion, pride, indignance and ruin and recompense. "Absalom Absalom" may be Faulkner's densest, most difficult work. If to be understood it should be as an inherently fractured tale, a community in elapsing time, and voices repeating a ghost story, taken with the necessity of humor and morbid curiosity that alone may ease one seducing one to it's terror.
Any reason why you wrote this in adorned prose, in the vein of Faulkner himself? What you said here could have also been stated concisely, with less purple. It may also have been better understood. I notice that many people who espouse Faulkner’s work tend to imitate his bloviated sentences, as if reader and author have been made into one. It is nothing short of pretentiousness.
@@MaximTendu I have some other of his readings on cassette, Updike's 'Rabbit Redux', Thurber's 'Alarms and Diversions', I.B. Singer stories, etc., but haven't had time to digitize & upload them.....
Recommended by a friend: it's not to my taste. Dark dense relentless detail unpunctuated by daylight. No. When I'm older. I'm too optimistic and positive to understand why dreary dank disturbing humdrum livesneed to be noticed.
You will be amazed at how the tragedies of The Greeks and The Southern Gothics could have prepared you for the trials and crisis of adulthood, integrity, honor. But then, those are pontifical words and abstractions to a generation bred by another generation estranged from old outmoded notions of honor, grace, bravery. Good Luck.
I understand you, even though my perspective maps differently. It can deal you a blow when it’s not necessarily what’s needed at, say, some point in time. But as an empath and existentialist, I am moved by the shadow lives that lie at a distance to the peripheries. They are very much as human as the lives at center, the ones full of hope and comedy. And so their experience, including each and every painful lamentation, deserves ears-should be heard, expressed, and wrestled with through thought, so that we may find something paramount within it about the human condition. It might not make you feel warm inside, but in my experience, there’s an abundance of beauty in the hardest of stories.
