Sanctuary

For many readers, "Sanctuary" doesn't seem to fit into Faulkner's canon. Although the prose is recognizably his, the tone and subject matter seem more appropriate to the genre of pulp fiction--closer to Hammett than to O'Connor. And, for the time it was published, it is shockingly gruesome and graphic. (Arnold Bennett said that it was a "terrible" book and "a great novel.") Once you figure out who everyone is and what's going... Read Full Review

In SANCTUARY-- an ironic title if there ever was one-- we see what happens when a genius writes a potboiler. We have one terrific roller coaster ride. Faulkner said he wrote this novel to make money after the disappointing sales of THE SOUND AND THE FURY and AS I LAY DYING. About SANCTUARY, published in 1931, he wrote: "I began to think of books in terms of possible money. . . . I took a little time out, and speculated what... Read Full Review

Imagine it's 1929 and you're reading a book about bootlegging, couples living in sin, rape, whorehouses, with near-explicit sex scenes. Faulkner's SANCTUARY must have been mind-blowing to the genteel masses. They were reading material that they still don't show on network television today, in an age where such things are so commonly discussed in the media that we hardly look sideways at it. This book must have arrived like... Read Full Review

William Faulkner stands in my mind with only a few authors whose writing does not seem like writing. His novels seem more moments of real life. While I was reading "Sanctuary" you forget you are reading a book and the characters take on a virtual reality in your mind. Like all of Faulkner's books, this one is disorienting at first, simply by the author's strength of vision. The main plot revolves around Temple Drake, a coquettish... Read Full Review

While _Heart Of Darkness_ portrays the bleakness of the unchecked human spirit, it is Faulkner's _Sanctuary_ that places it squarely in our noses, our ears, our eyes as well as our hearts and souls. In this purely American novel we see not "adventurers" in Conrad's traditional sense, but American debutantes causually thrust into the orbit of the Memphis Prohibition underworld. As in _Sound and the Fury_ Faulkner uses his... Read Full Review