Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Absalom is the stor of Thomas Sutpen, who in 1833 strives to create a dynasty out of a swamp, and who ultimately self-destructs....Absalom! Absalom! is about the South, taking on one of Faulkner's major themes: the region's destruction, or self-destruction, through human will, racism, slavery, and miscegenation. This is a stunning work—exciting, even breath-taking—and challenging. It is, after all Faulkner. But it's the story that Gone with the Wind never told...
A LitLovers LitPick (Feb. '09)


[Absalom, Absalom!] represents an entirely new departure into complexity for Faulkner. He nas been complex before, but never uncommunicative. Occasionally there are passages of great power and beauty in this book, which remind us that Faulkner is still a writer with a unique figt of illuminating dark corners of the human soul.... For the rest, Absalom, Absalom! must be left to those hardy souls who care for puzzles.
Harold Strauss - New York Times Book Review  (11/1/1936)


The critics...now tell us that his style is florid, that his plots are hard to follow, that he sometimes shows bad taste in his choice of material.... On the other hand, I can think of no other living American author who writes with the same intensity or who carries us so completely into a world of his own. There is no American author or our time who has undertaken and partly completed a more ambitious series of novels and stories.... Faulkner has been writing a sort of human comedy that was partly inspired by his reading of Balzac.
Malcolm Cowley - New York Times  (10/29/1944)


Faulkner…belongs to the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust.
Edmund Wilson


For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must return to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.
Ralph Ellison


For all the range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country.
Robert Penn Warren