A Fable

I am not entirely sure why this book recieved some of the lousy reviews it did. This book is brilliant, it requires more from the reader than passive reading, so if you are looking for a story you don't have to think about look elsewhere. Anyone familiar with post-Great War literature will find this book to be par for the course. Dos Passos's "Three Soldiers", comes easily to mind. Don't pay attention to the other reviews, this book won awards for a good reason. If you read the book and find yourself frustrated go back and reread sections. Literature is not always meant to be read in a passive state. This book requires active reading and should not be taken lightly. This book does carry a message about the horrors of war, but also our own individual responsibilty in allowing those horrors to go forward.

I've read some other novels by Faulkner, and this is the first away from Yoknapatawpha. Personally, I like most of the time difficult reading, with which I can struggle to understand it, even when sometimes (like this) I don't get it at all. I find that is brave in an author, to write whatever his head produces, without caring if the reader is going to get it. I think Faulkner wrote a great part of this novel without caring. The story is captivating in its resemblance to jesus life not quite accurately, but in the exact level to find it believable. And it shows how a single life is important for the rest of us.

I must agree that, at times, the experience of reading _A Fable_ is much like feeling one's way through a very dark tunnel. However, there is indeed a light at the end of that tunnel; as with many of Faulkner's works, the individual stories that make up the novel dont come together until the last hundred or so pages. It takes a very patient reader to glean the important details from the beginning and middle of the novel, and to remember those details when they emerge again later in the book. One must also be fairly well-acquainted with Christ's passion in order for a true understanding of the correlation to reveal itself (which, in many places, it didn't for me). Contrary to the book's selling-points, Faulkner is not merely retyping the Christ story in _A Fable_. He's updating a myth (or "fable," if you will), and using his narration to describe humanity's condition in mid-century (cf. many paragraphs w/ 1950 Nobel Prize speech). This is a long, tedious, and fanatically detailled narrative, but a great novel that pays off with a terrific closing 50 pages for the patient reader. Both the new and the acquainted should be prepared for Faulkner at his most brilliant and difficult.

It seems every modernist attempted to write a great work concerning the great war (except fitzgerald, who didnt get to go himself). Faulkner's attempt may be second only to Hemingway's "A Farwell to Arms." "A Fable" is classic, which won the pulitzer prize,has long been overlooked simply because it represents a change from Faulkner'susual subject matter. In reality though, it may be his second greatest work behind "the sound and the fury." THis work is a brillian anti-war novel that looks at wars affects both on soldiers and civilians, and even on religion. A must read for any fan of Faulkner or modernism.

One of Faulkner's finest achievements of almost Dostoevskian intensity, second only to "Absalom, Absalom!", this anti-war novel is a must read for anyone wishing to understand our century.