(Henry is clearly infatuated with Charles Bon. Charles is older and more worldly-wise and sophisticated than Henry. There he meets and becomes good friends with one Charles Bon. When Henry Sutpen is grown (or almost grown), he goes away to college in Oxford, Mississippi. The part that Rosa Coldfield plays in the novel is more of an observer than active participant in what is going on. The first part of the story is being told by the elderly Rosa Coldfield to Quentin Compson, whose grandfather was the best friend of Thomas Sutpen. (Thomas Sutpen also has a half-black daughter named Clytemnestra, or “Clytie,” that he had with a slave woman.) Ellen Coldfield has a sister, Miss Rosa Coldfield, who is twenty-seven years younger than she is (younger than her own children).
To the unlikely union between Thomas Sutpen and Ellen Coldfield are born Henry and Judith. (Faulkner compares her throughout the novel to a butterfly.) He drives away his male friends and proposes to a town girl named Ellen Coldfield. Thomas Sutpen confounds the town of Jefferson, Mississippi-and particularly the Coldfield family-when he comes from nowhere and acquires a huge tract of land, called the Sutpen Hundred (square miles, not acres), and builds an enormous house on the edge of a swamp with the help of his band of wild black men and a French architect, who he more or less treats as a captive.įor years after the house is built, Thomas Sutpen entertains a band of his male friends with wild hunting and drinking parties and wrestling matches, until the day arrives when he decides he wants to acquire respectability in the form of a wife and children. (There’s no linear structure to the novel.)Ībsalom, Absalom is the multilayered family saga of the Sutpen and Coldfield families in the American South in the decades leading up to the Civil War. If you are able to make it through the first chapter, however, the following chapters are easier. When I first started reading Faulkner’s 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom, I found the first chapter (told in the voice of Miss Rosa Coldfield in 1909 when she is 64 years old) so difficult that I almost gave up. If reading a novel by Faulkner is frustrating and tedious at times (a painful slog), you must also know that it is worth the effort or you wouldn’t be doing it. If you are trying to follow the thread of a sentence, you might have to go back and break it down into its many parts to figure out exactly what is being said. He has the longest sentences and the longest paragraphs of any other writer. His style is dense, sometimes fragmented, wordy and difficult to read. His works are deep, cerebral, rich and complex. William Faulkner (1897-1962) is arguably the best American novelist of the twentieth century, the supreme literary stylist. Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp
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