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“Spanning about 1900 to 1928, The Sound and the Fury tells the story of the Compsons, a family with deep Southern roots, but which is falling on hard times and whose pride is now suffering from self-inflicted wounds. The family patriarch is an alcoholic. One of the Compton brothers, Benjy, is severely mentally retarded while another, Quinten, is mentally unstable. The third brother Jason is mentally healthy, but a real jerk. And finally sister Caddy is sweet and loving, but sexually promiscuous to the point of scandal and unwanted pregnancy.
One of the things that makes The Sound and the Fury remarkable outside of being a period piece that allows the Compsons to stand in for many other fading families in the U.S. South during that time is its avant-garde structure. Each of the book's four sections follows one member of the story, and two of them are told in a dizzying stream of consciousness style. The fact that these two sections stream along with the abnormal minds of the mentally retarded and mentally ill brothers makes the book all the more challenging and impenetrable at times, since things bounce around in time and place to the point where you really have to study passages hard to keep track of what's going on.
In the end, I'd have to say I appreciated The Sound and the Fury but I didn't enjoy it at all. This is obviously the work of a master, and you can see the skill and effort that went into constructing this elaborate work. There's also a lot of symbolism, allegory, and commentary going on in the work, and that stuff is hard to do subtly. But in the end the story told by the book is both too uninteresting and too difficult to pull out to make it actually enjoyable, and the rest of the rewards are too difficult to separate from the style to appreciate. For me The Sound and the Fury mattered most as an experience and a visit to a historic sign post on the literary landscape --a suffocating plunge into the stream of consciousness, unreliable narrator, and multiple narrative styles that became all the rage in the early to mid 20th century.
Finally, I'll address a post script to anyone who has ever told me that reading audiobooks is a poor substitute for reading print: this is one of the few works where I think you're right. The printed version of The Sound and the Fury would be challenging enough, but the audiobook version I listened to was often an impenetrable literary block upon which I couldn't find any purchase. This is the kind of book where you NEED to be able to re-read sections and flip back and forth to appreciate how the different points of view fit together or, more importantly, how they don't. This just isn't something you can do with audio. ”
jmadigan wrote this review Friday, December 26 2008.
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