Greatest Hits: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

This week we’re featuring some of our “greatest hits” – the most popular Book-a-Day blog posts since we started this almost three years ago. Today’s is As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, reviewed by Clare B.

Story telling is considered a Southern tradition, and perhaps one of the greatest of Southern storytellers is William Faulkner.  I often hear people say that Faulkner is too difficult to read.  He can be difficult. As I Lay Dying is certainly is not.

As the novel opens Addie Bundren is dying.  Outside her window, her son Cash is building her coffin.  Addie has had a difficult life.  Her husband is no count; her children are hardly better.  She has made her husband promise that he will bury her body in Jefferson, a neighboring town where she grew up.  This simple request is actually anything but simple.

Sons Jewel and Darl are away with the wagon, and return two days after Addie is dead.  Floods wash out two bridges, further delaying the trip.  Two days into the trip, an accident while they are attempting to ford the flooded river leaves Cash seriously injured and the mules dead.  In the mean time, buzzards are following them, and the smell of the Addie’s body is overwhelming.

As I Lay Dying is funny, horrifying and fascinating.  Each chapter is told in the voice of a different family member or friend.  We see this journey in the bewilderment of young Vardaman, who cannot understand his mother’s death; of Dewey Dell who is too absorbed in her own unplanned pregnancy to grieve, and Anse Bundren, whose main goal, besides burying his wife, is to buy false teeth.

I think the key to reading and enjoying Faulkner is to not think about it too much.   We read him in English class, and spend hours examining what he was trying to say.  Instead, perhaps, we should just read him.  Enjoy the language and loose ourselves in the humor, satire and train of thought.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Lit by Mary Karr

If there was an award for most meaningful short book title I would nominate Lit, the third installment of Mary Karr’s critically acclaimed autobiography (following The Liar’s Club, which was previously blogged by another reviewer, and Cherry). That small three letter word can be interpreted in several ways; there are at least three ‘lits’ in the life of Mary Karr.

One is literature. Her love of words began in childhood and found expression in her poetry (her latest collection is Sinners Welcome) and prose. The second is her taste for alcohol. Unfortunately, her appetite for liquor becomes an uncontrollable craving to get ‘lit’ as often as possible. As you can imagine, this creates problems, both professional and personal. She discovers a third ‘lit’ when she seeks to control her addiction and she finds faith in a higher power (she has described herself as a “black belt sinner”).

Mary Karr is unflinchingly honest in her portrayal of a talented woman battling to overcome her own self doubts and weaknesses. She writes movingly of her love for her son, her failed marriage, her complicated relationship with her mother and the kindness shown her by others when she reaches out for help. Beautifully written, unsentimental and, in parts, screamingly funny, Lit delivers what great autobiographies always do–a chance to experience the life of another from the inside out.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Mama Makes Up Her Mind by Bailey White

Don’t mess with Bailey’s Mama. She’s not afraid of anything. She sleeps on the front porch during a hurricane. She kills rattlesnakes by rapping them sharply on the head with her walking stick. She keeps skydiving worms in a bowl in her kitchen.

Bailey’s Mama is feisty, but you can’t help but love her. She’s the only elderly white lady campaigning for the town’s only black political candidate. When a crowd of marine biologists start poking around in the swamp next door, Mama spends hours staring at them with her binoculars. Next day they invite her to join them, so she spends the afternoon examining clam specimens and then stays up all night reading books about bivalve mollusks.

Along with her incomparable Mama stories, Bailey treats us to tales of her other eccentric friends and relations, from Aunt Belle, who tames an alligator in the swamp, to Luther, the town taxidermist, who is so desperate to learn how to cook that he asks Mama to give him lessons.

Bailey’s adventures as a first-grade school teacher are included, as well as tales of her travels, from taking the train to New York City disguised as a pregnant lady to her trip to the North Florida town of Micanopy, which is so overgrown with vegetation that tendrils of wisteria creep in through the back door and curl around the bookshelves.

In fact, Bailey can make anything sound like an adventure, even if it is just buying a used car or taking Mama to the doctor. It is nice to know that Southern literature does not have to be just dreary tales of family skeletons in the closet. Bailey’s “skeletons” are on display, right next to her brother’s snakeskin collection, the rusted 1930s typewriter on which Mama writes her memoirs, and the dark oak bed that has a disconcerting habit of folding up on its occupants in the middle of the night.

You never know what you are going to find at Bailey’s house, but you can be sure it will be an interesting experience.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman

I know you. You think you don’t like to read short stories. You’re not sure why, since you haven’t ever really read a collection of short stories penned by only one author, just the various stories you were assigned in school. But you’re pretty sure you don’t like them.

I’m a huge fan of short stories. I love their compactness, their conciseness, their ability to slay you with just a sentence, a phrase, a word. If I were in charge, the New York Times would have a bestseller list just for short story collections.

I want to issue you a challenge. This summer, in addition to your usual beach read of choice — mystery, romance, biography, bestseller — mix it up a little. Make a librarian happy and try a short story collection. Specifically, try Megan Mayhew Bergman’s Birds of a Lesser Paradise.

I loved so many things about these stories. I liked that many of the tales are set here in North Carolina. Bergman is a native and it shows. She chooses just the right details to make you not only see, but feel and taste North Carolina. The overarching theme of how we relate to each other within families resonated with me, especially the stories centered on parent/child relationships. The emphasis on nature and how people experience it is also used to great effect. But what I liked best about this collection is that each one is memorable. I cannot choose a favorite. I recommend you read them all.

Find and request this book in our catalog.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Story telling is considered a Southern tradition, and perhaps one of the greatest of Southern storytellers is William Faulkner.  I often hear people say that Faulkner is too difficult to read.  He can be difficult.    As I Lay Dying is certainly is not.

As the novel opens Addie Bundren is dying.  Outside her window, her son Cash is building her coffin.  Addie has had a difficult life.  Her husband is no count; her children are hardly better.  She has made her husband promise that he will bury her body in Jefferson, a neighboring town where she grew up.  This simple request is actually anything but simple.

Sons Jewel and Darl are away with the wagon, and return two days after Addie is dead.  Floods wash out two bridges, further delaying the trip.  Two days into the trip, an accident while they are attempting to ford the flooded river leaves Cash seriously injured and the mules dead.  In the mean time, buzzards are following them, and the smell of the Addie’s body is overwhelming.

As I Lay Dying is funny, horrifying and fascinating.  Each chapter is told in the voice of a different family member or friend.  We see this journey in the bewilderment of young Vardaman, who cannot understand his mother’s death; of Dewey Dell who is too absorbed in her own unplanned pregnancy to grieve, and Anse Bundren, whose main goal, besides burying his wife, is to buy false teeth.

I think the key to reading and enjoying Faulkner is to not think about it too much.   We read him in English class, and spend hours examining what he was trying to say.  Instead, perhaps, we should just read him.  Enjoy the language and loose ourselves in the humor, satire and train of thought.

Find and reserve As I Lay Dying in our catalog.

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

“I have a thing to tell you. I know all souls are one and all souls lonely.”

If you are a fan of McCarthy but have yet to read Suttree, don’t even bother to finish reading this.  Just go get the book.  But if you’ve stayed away from McCarthy altogether for one reason or another (violence, despair, apocalypse), you may be surprised by this often comic, generally optimistic novel.

But I should also mention that the novel’s comedy and optimism is peppered with death and despondency and general nastiness.  So if, say, Escape from Bridezilla is your idea of literary fun, be forewarned: there’s a junkyard hangover, watermelon rape, and at least one soiled prophylactic fished out of the Tennessee with the intent of reuse. Et cetera.

The novel is named for protagonist Cornelius Suttree, who has rejected his family’s middle-class values and has chosen instead an unseemly life on a houseboat near the underground world of Knoxville’s McAnally Flats—urban Tennessee home of drunks, derelicts, gamblers, prostitutes, murderers, street preachers, and thieves. From autumn of 1950 to the spring of 1955 we follow Sutree around and beyond the dilapidated river district while he carouses with J-Bone, Oceanfrog, Ab Jones, Blind Richard, Trippin Through the Dew, and (my favorite) Gene Harrogate, infamous violator of watermelons. There’s also a ragpicker, a black sorceress, an Indian fisherman, a family of mussel hunters, and a drunken whore.

But Suttree remains intensely lonely, despite this motley (and often hilarious) company.  He has neither a place among the moneyed middle-class nor among the outcasts; it’s as though he’s in limbo, a social ghost with a biblical inner monologue.⁺⁺ Despite this, he can’t seem to leave: regardless of where or how far he wanders, he continuously returns to his lonely river houseboat and regular carnival of Knoxville weirdos; that is, until the Flats are threatened by demolition to make room for a freeway. But it’s with the threat destruction and “progress” that McCarthy offers Suttree –and us– a release from self-abnegation and abjection, redemption from nihilism.

Check out or reserve a copy.

⁺⁺Some critics like to point out similarities between McCarthy and Suttree:  McCarthy’s father was a Knoxville lawyer, and Cormac McCarthy is Cormac McCarthy, etc. etc.  After publishing Suttree, McCarthy moved to El Paso and published Blood Meridian, physically and artistically moving Westward (Suttree’s conclusion is a literary egress from the East).  Though, as interesting as these details are, it doesn’t strike me as particularly revelatory that Cormac McCarthy would feel alienated among businessmen and more at home among bleaching bones and lizards.

The Liar’s Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr

I know, I know, everyone and their mother has a fricking memoir.  But this one is worth reading, even though I’m having a really hard time writing about it.

See on the one hand this book is a page-turner about a scrappy trash-talking kid who lives with her mother, father, and older sister in a miserable, swampy gulf town in Texas.  Her family is bizarre in a stranger-than-fiction sort of way, and remains so throughout the book.  There’s lots of drinking and lying and yelling and sex and guns.  Her momma has a psychotic episode with a butcher knife.  You will be titillated.

But then also Ms. Karr is an award-winning poet, and her command of Southern idiom and turn of phrase is so incredibly beautiful and pitch-perfect that bringing up her wackadoo family in a book review feels like a cheap or dirty trick.  Mary Karr is a fine writer, and it’s annoying that describing her memoir to anyone sounds like summarizing an episode of “Cops.”

Now, I’m not so stupid as to think that eloquence and entertainment are mutually exclusive, nor do I believe that all memoirs are horrible:  St. Agustine’s Confessions is amazing, as is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.  It’s just that so much of what’s been published lately is, frankly, crap.

Recently I was reminded of this beautiful quote from Aleksander Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project: “All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”  It seems to me that this is why we read literature in the first place–for an experience by proxy that provides us with some kind of awareness.

Mary Karr’s book made me aware of how marvelous it is to hear a Southern person tell a story (no matter if it’s entirely, or at all, true).  It reminded me of what a strange thing memory is.  It enforced my conviction that even a funny, ribald tale can be told in language that is purposeful and lasting.  It emphasized why we should all know the meaning of the Greek word “atë.”

Check the book out.