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« Diaspora Review | Main | $12,000 for Tom Defalco to sit around and think up Speedball »

As I Lay Dying Review

Just finished Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. It's a crappy book. Not in the sense that it was badly written. It's well-written, the characters are portrayed well. It's crappy in the sense that every single person in the book is cracked in the head, and as you read it, you wish someone would just beat them all to death with a stick.

Man's wife dies. He insists on taking her to some other town to bury her, claiming it was her wish. Well, they've only got a rickety wagon and all the bridges have washed out in a storm, so they have to go the long way. In July. Can you imagine the condition the corpse had to be in after 9 days on the back of a wagon in July? Not to mention the coffin got submerged in the river at one point.

All the while, the husband just keeps going on and on about how hard life is to him but he doesn't begrudge anybody anything and blah blah blah. I hate martyrs. I share the sentiment of the doctor at the end of the book. "Of course he'd have to borrow a spade to bury his wife with. Unless he could borrow a hole in the ground. Too bad you all didn't put him in it too..." [emphasis mine]

He clearly deserves to be beat to death. The reason the everyone else deserves a good beating is because they all see he's a good for nothing whiner but they go along with all his bullshit. Sure, living with him has driven all of his kids insane, so you can't blame them too much, but the neighbors are more than willing to go along with his seriously bad judgment and his "poor me" attitude.

If i could, i'd have jumped into the book and wrung his neck about 2 chapters in.

Other than that, it was a good piece of literature.

By min | July 28, 2006, 1:26 PM | Boooooks


Comments

i hated that book. i was really rooting for something bad to happen to him. especially since everyone else went along with his ideas. and then nothing did. and i wanted to hit him. ugh. now im angry about that book all over again.

Well, since you've finished that book, you can always pick up "Atlus Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. I think you'll love that one. And it�s a quick read too, only a little over 1,000 pages to it. Of course, the novel could probably have been written in 250-300 pages, but Ayn Rand wanted to make a point! So, she just kept repeating events thematically. Great book! Almost as much fun as major dental surgery without anesthesia!