FALKNERIANA

Speranza


To some, incredibly boring and pretentious.

Hemingway said, this is phony book.

Did you see Ridley Scott's The Counselor?

Same thing here.

The story is slow, so slow... and in order to make it interesting, Faulkner used techniques like confusing dialogues, over-and-over holding back information and names so that you have to turn the pages to learn who the hell he was talking about.

"It's so phony," some say.

One may have to make an effort to finish "the damn book".

SPOILERS COMING.

The story is simple: a spoiled 18-year-old girl goes partying with her boyfriend and they end up in an illegal whiskey house.

The boy-friend (a Virginian aristocrat) leaves.

And all the whiskey-seling gangster try to sexually abuse her.

A guy name Pop-Eye kidnaps her, but he is impotent, so he uses her to satisfy his voyeuristic fantasies and so on.

The main problem is that Falkner was in love with his description power.

So he describes and describes like a degenerate and moves the plot forward as swiftly as a turtle would push a car.

"Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail!"


"Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail."

So said Faulkner's publisher prior to this novel being published in 1931.

This was Wm. Faulkner's commercial and critical literary breakthrough.

A tale revolving around Faulkner's second favorite female character, Temple Drake (after, of course, Caddy Compson), an Ole Miss co-ed cutie thrown into the devil's pit by circumstances.

This book is not for the weak of will.

It's the only Falkner novel, I think, that describes in Faulknerese masturB, and centers on rape and murder.

Faulkner claims it was a "potboiler" written solely for profit.

There is evidence otherwise, though it's not nearly on par with his 3 most famous, "The Sound and the Fury," "Absalom, Absalom!" and "As I Lay Dying." "clock face...to a crystal ball holding in its still and cryptic depths the ordered chaos of the intricate and shadowy world..."

It's a better place to start on Faulkner than the 3 above.

One may  started with The Sound and the Fury, and some have tried twice and quit.

If you haven't read it, and you don't have to read it as part of a lit class, you will need a companion book.

Believe me.

In my own personal Southern Renaissance, I came back with a fury in the past couple of years and have nearly finished them all.

In any case, you might start with this or "Light in August" (which is more accessible and, in my opinion, as outstanding as all but The Sound and the Fury) and go from there.

I'll say 4.5 stars, and round up.

Faulkner is brilliant, but I didn't enjoy the experience of reading this, alas.


There's a bunch of commentary about whether Faulkner took this book seriously or not etc.

I personally don't care about that, because his gift as a writer still comes through either way, so it doesn't matter.

What I disliked about this book is that, like so many 20th Century literary works, especially American ones, it's all about a bunch of nobody jerks.

I never have much gone for that 20th-Century "the regular guy" aesthetic that took over all the arts.

I much prefer to read about extraordinary people and things.

So for me personally, this was a bad match.

Having said that, I can still see the artistry in it.

And I can see the various points he was exploring.

And I even think that, as part of the flow of history, it probably will be important at some future, distant time, for people to be able to read these books and understand the culture and societal structures of our times, and how people were.

It's quite nihilistic and therefore partial.

But there are certainly tons of people just like this leading utterly pointless lives.

So if you get into that kind of analysis of people, and you like Faulkner's very poetic and a bit stream-of-consciousnessy writing technique, then you might really enjoy this.




Interesting but not Faulkner's best.

There are some spoilers in this review. You have been warned.

I should begin by saying: I am a huge Faulkner fan.

However, I have mixed feelings about this book.

This book was Faulkner's most popular book for many years, largely because of its outward accessibility.

On its surface, the book is much easier to follow than some of Faulkner's other (and I think, better) books.

The book's critical reputation has fluctuated.

For awhile, I think, it was considered an artistic failure but it has been rehabilitated somewhat.

It is not a bad book but I do not think it can be ranked as high as some of Faulkner's other works (Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Abaslom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying).

I will begin with what I liked about the book and then explain why I did not like it more than I did.

Faulkner manages to create an interesting cast of characters.

Pop-Eye is quite terrifying and Faulkner deserves a great deal of credit for creating such a complex and terrifying character.

It is not often that we see (in books or television or the movies) a truly terrifying character who is afraid of the dark.

Horace is also quite complex.

There is a lot to admire about Horace: his idealism and his disgust with the moral hypocrisy that surrounds him.

But there is also a lot to criticize: his lust for his step daughter, his own hypocrisy, and his lack of moral courage.

Clarence Snopes, as the corrupt politician, is also another great character.

There are also characters that you love to hate: Gowan, the "gentleman" alcoholic who is responsible for Temple's kidnapping and rape, and Narcissa, Horace's hypocritical sister who is largely responsible for having an innocent man convicted of a crime he didn't commit in an effort to protect her own reputation.

Faulkner has also created an interesting and fairly intricate plot.

There are a number of individual plots that are all seamlessly interwoven.

-- Horace leaving his wife and stepdaughter.
-- Temple and Gowan's relationship
-- Temple's rape and kidnapping
-- Lee and Ruby's marriage
-- Lee's bootlegging operation, and, of course,
-- Popeye's antics and shenanigans.

At the beginning of the novel all of these characters are pursuing their own individual paths and, by the end, their fates are all intertwined.

Faulkner does a great job building all of these individual stories to a crescendo so, when you reach the climax, when Temple enters the courtroom, and Horace realizes that his case is lost, you feel as devastated as Horace does.

Finally, Faulkner explores a number of very interesting themes in the novel.

Ultimately, I think the novel is an attack on the hypocrisies of "high society" and Christian morality.

Popeye's rape of Temple is, of course, extremely brutal, but Temple is treated just as horribly by the court and the justice system.

The district attorney claims that they are going to "right her wrong" for her.

But they really just use her to turn social opinion against an innocent man, simply because he has sinned against public morality by living with his common-law wife.

Meanwhile, they let the person who is actually guilty of Temple's rape go free.

I think one of the themes of the novel is: "high society" is guilty of all the same crimes as "low society".

They are just less honest about it.

They cover it up.

In "high society" sexuality becomes an elaborate ritual, which allows its members to hide their own impulses from themselves.

For example, Temple feels very comfortable getting dressed up and going to a dance with the college boys, or going out on dates with the town boys, but she is terrified at the Old Frenchman place.

In both arenas she is surrounded by seething male desire, but at the dances it is hidden behind propriety.

Within Society's rituals it becomes possible to pretend that we are "safe".

To pretend that the uncontrollable urges boiling beneath the surface are under our control.

There is a kind of Freudian theme here.

Civilization requires us to mask our own impulses even from ourselves.

While Faulkner is clearly critical of society's hypocrisy, the novel is by no means a celebration of the unrestrained id.

While the boys at the dance might be more hypocritical than the men at the Old Frenchman place, it is at the Old Frenchman place that Temple is actually raped.

If given the choice, hypocrisy is certainly preferable to rape.

However, the town's hypocrisy ultimately leads them to burn an innocent man alive and claim, in the same breath, that they are serving "justice".

There has to be another way out of this dialectic between repression/hypocrisy and the unbridled id.

Neither solution works on its own.

So, the novel has interesting characters, an interesting storyline, and explores some interesting themes.

The novel does, however, suffer from some flaws.

I will merely highlight three.

First, Faulkner uses some of his trademark language in this book.

Some people find Faulkner's language annoying.

I generally find it beautiful and it is one of the things I love about Faulkner.

However, Faulkner mixes styles in this book in a way that I don't think works that well.

I will use an analogy to describe what I mean.

Sometimes I hear a song that I think is a kind of seamless web.

All the parts fit together perfectly.

It is integrated.

I do not hear the guitar, the vocals, the drums and the keyboards all as separate pieces merely thrown together.

I just hear one integrated song.

Other songs are not integrated and I start to feel like the vocals are just floating on top of the guitar.

This novel did not feel like a seamless web to me.

The language is not integrated and seems to "float on the surface".

Absalom, Absalom! has a lot of difficult language but the novel is told in long run on sentences that are meant to reflect the unconscious thought processes taking place in the characters.

The novel takes place in the depths of consciousness where poetic language seems entirely appropriate.

This novel takes place on the surface (for lack of a better term).

It is a story that is based around plot - outward events - not the inner lives of its protagonists.

Faulkner has sentences where he is describing very matter of fact things, but then he throws in one of his trademark words and it is jarring.

For example: Horace and Narcissa are driving and Faulkner writes:

"Soon they had left the town and the stout rows of young cotton swung at either hand in parallel and diminishing retrograde."

The word "retrograde" just seems out of place.

It is not integrated.

It is like a bulge on a piece of straight thread (whereas Faulkner's other novels are more like knitted sweaters: all the pieces contribute to the whole).

Faulkner is trying to write a poetic crime novel or potboiler (almost) and it is jarring at times.

There are beautiful passages in the book that I think really work, and fit in the novel (when Faulkner describes Temple looking at the clock face in Reba's house), but there are also lots of places where the language just seems out of place and almost sloppy.

The novel does not feel like an integrated and aesthetic whole to me.

Second, I found myself getting frustrated with Faulkner's indirectness.

Some degree of indirectness is necessary.

If, for example, Faulkner had described Temple's rape in brutal detail when it happened, then there would have been no shock in the courtroom.

It is important that the reader learn exactly what happened at the same time as the jury and Horace and the rest of the town.

There are places, though, where the indirectness just seems annoying and unnecessary.

Faulkner often has his characters speak in half sentences, letting the reader infer what they were going to say.

The novel is a book about rape, but I am not sure whether the word "rape" even appears in the book.

It is always just hinted at, indirectly.

In the filmed version ("The story of Temple Drake"), she says, "I was attacked."

While I generally prefer Faulkner to Hemingway, I do sometimes prefer Hemingway's directness to Faulkner's indirectness.

There is something healthy about being able to say exactly what you mean and, in a way, Faulkner's prose mirrors the hypocrisy of the society he is criticizing; a society that is incapable of saying anything directly.

Finally, there is some behavior in the novel that is hard to explain.

For example, why doesn't Horace take Temple with him after he goes to visit her at Reba's?

He must know she was kidnapped but he just leaves her there.

In "The story of Temple Drake", a romantic affair between them is 'implicated'.

Some people might argue that this adds to the mystery of the novel, or the complexity of the characters, and scholars have indeed spent a great deal of time speculating about Horace's motives.

While it might provide food for the critics, I am not sure whether, artistically speaking, that is a good thing. '

I think the reason that critics have found it so hard to explain why Horace leaves her, and why there have been so many different and competing theories, is because there is not really any very good reason, so the ground is free to invent reasons.

Faulkner, of course, needed to leave her there in order to have his great climactic moment in the courtroom.

But it feels like he wound up stretching believability a bit in order to save his climactic moment.

There are other examples of this in the novel as well.

Ruby, at one point, asks Temple "If you are so afraid here, why don't you just leave?" (that is a paraphrase).

Good question!

The critics I have read speculate.

Temple is used to being led by men, she is unable to take initiative on her own, etc.

Maybe.

Or maybe Faulkner just did not do a good enough job providing a reason for Temple to stay.

Maybe that is a genuine flaw in Faulkner's design.

I think it is.

Other readers might disagree.

So, that is my assessment of the book such as it is.

Faulkner used to say that the artist should aim for "splendid failure"; meaning: the writer should take risks even if they wind up failing.

I think what Faulkner was trying to do in this novel was very interesting and he made a worthy attempt.

I am not convinced he was entirely successful.


 Just ok.

This title is mis-leading.

 I wanted to read something calm, peaceful and what I got is more of the dark and narrow minded bigotry of the South.

Real but enough already!

Excelent writer.


It is difficult to read because there are many persons in the novel but the description the ambiance and the story are very well done, also it is a sad story .

Great!

This book arrived numerous days early at was in the absolute best condition! Great buy! I highly recommend anyone who is a classic literature lover to read william faulkner

An Often Overlooked Faulkner Gem.


An easier read than many of Faulkner's works, Sanctuary's plot and characters are engrossing and occasionally humorous.

Anyone who has read and liked To Kill a Mockingbird will see similarities in this work's theme.

Low-lifers, at every social level.

I've been reading, or re-reading numerous of Faulkner's works, all in the hopes of someday attending the annual Faulkner love-fest, which takes place in Oxford, MS, each July.

Since I am still rolling a large stone uphill, a la Sisyphus, it seems that it will again elude me this year.

And I've received assurances that it is not just "de-constructionist academics" honing and displaying their latest scrap of arcane knowledge that attend such events - there are numerous plain old simple folks... who've had some other sort of "day job," with "rough-hewed, labor-worn hands," but have been mesmerized by the master of Yoknapatawpha County's ability to render deep insights into the human condition.

In this case, "Sanctuary" is a re-read, of some years ago.

Warning Label: It is not for the "fun-read" crowd.

And if you're looking for inspiring characters, there might be all of which you can count on one finger of your hand.

The story is set during the days of Prohibition, and much of the action centers around the "moonshiners," and their interactions with the "higher" social classes who seek out the solace that is purportedly provided by their principal product.

"Put a Mississippian in alcohol, and you have a gentleman," as Faulkner sardonically observes, and, I suppose, he did know a thing or two on the subject.

Gowan Stephens, "educated" at Virginia, and Oxford (ENGLAND! not to be confused with the locale of Ole Miss) in the proper methods of drinking, demonstrates, in the company of the ever-flighty Ole Miss co-ed, Temple Drake, that he has not only learned nothing, but is far lower, in terms of ethics, than even the moonshiners who lead a very hard-scrabble, difficult existence.

But Stevens himself is a paragon of virtue compared to Temple Drake, one of the most scathing portraits of evil in the female gender available in literature.

So much so that a critic might accuse Faulkner of being somewhat misogynistic, save for the fact that virtually none of the men seem to come off much better.

At least Popeye, as Faulkner reveals towards the end, has some sort of "excuse."

But what does Temple have - save a fine Old South upbringing?

She is, indeed, the heart of darkness.

 There are those evil women who seem to delight in stirring the passions of men into a fight over them.


Faulkner needed to make some money since two classic masterpieces of American literature, The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text with Faulkner's Appendix (Modern Library) and As I Lay Dying (Norton Critical Editions) barely stirred the sales chart.

As I once told my boss, who wanted to encourage greater readership of an electronic medical newsletter: "just put in some sex and violence."

Hardly an original idea, which Faulkner had had, in spades, some 70 years earlier.

Thus we learn about the various versions of prostitution in the Old South, from the "respectable" reason of getting your man out of prison to the running of a "respectable" house, in Memphis, suitable for visits from all the local power structure.

There is the obsession with "appearances" that dominates actions in most small towns, in most cultures, but particularly in the Old South.

The lawyer is the Good Guy in this one, flawed though he might be, and operative in a most flawed judicial process.

Faulkner being Faulkner, he obscures the identity and relationship of the characters early on... ya gotta pay attention.... as he might say, and masterfully reveals them as the novel progresses.

And some are brilliantly etched, and will remain vivid and memorable, hopefully forever.

And whatever your fate in life, consider that it is better never having crossed the path of Ms. Temple.

Feel that no spoiler alert need be mentioned, but somehow the novel ends in the tranquility of the Luxembourg Gardens "...where the children and an old man in a shabby brown overcoat sailed toy boats..." and the band in the pavilion played "...Berlioz like a thin coating of tortured Tschaikovsky on a slice of stale bread, while the twilight dissolved in wet gleams from the branches..."

Quintessential prose from the master. 5-stars.

Boring.

I'll preface with my review by admitting this is the first work of Faulkner's that I've read.

I'll follow that by warning you that it might be my last.

With all the praise so often attributed to Faulkner, I expected to find something of a literary masterpiece (maybe that was my problem).

At the very worst, I hoped for a mildly interesting story.

Unfortunately I have to say even my lowest expectations were not met.

What this book offers is a dreadfully boring plot with poorly developed characters.

Reading the synopsis on the back cover, you might be tricked into thinking something exciting actually happens in this book.

Don't get your hopes up.

The kidnapping of Temple Drake is painfully bland.

Temple herself is a whiny, pretentious, wanna-be "whore" who literally spends the first half of the book running from room to room.

Faulkner describes one scene in which she runs from the front porch through the house off the back porch up the hill then back down the hill onto the porch and into the kitchen.

And the second half lying in a hotel room drinking gin and smoking cigarettes.

The other characters are similarly uninteresting.

Pop-Eye must be the lamest villain in the history of literature, a half-wit wearing dirty suits with a gun in his pocket who Faulkner several times describes as having "rubber knobs" for eyes.

What the hell does that even mean?

Is this supposed to make him more or less intimidating?

Horace Benbow, however, is one of the more intriguing characters in the books, and the passages in which his introspection is detailed are somewhat amusing.

Yet these are few and far between and hardly redeem the entire novel.

You turn the last page feeling like you haven't really gotten to know what makes any of these idiots tick.

I'm sure if you read this book very, very carefully with an intensely analytical eye (re-reading each sentence and passage "until it makes sense" as one reviewer put it), you might find a hidden gem here and there, some theme worth discussing.

To me, it just isn't worth it.

The idea of reading this book again incites nausea.

It strikes me as the kind of book that would be read in a high school literature course, somewhere between Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Chopin's The Awakening.

It's just boring enough to make a 16-year old kid hate reading forever!

Again, this was my first foray into the world of Faulkner.

Perhaps after a period of recovery I might muster up the courage to subject myself to As I Lay Dying or A Light in August, but at this point I'm still fatigued from the abominable listlessness of Sanctuary.

Read it! But don't read it first.

 

Rape, murder, sexual slavery and moonshine.

Sanctuary is a story that would be shocking TODAY.

In 1931, however, Faulkner and his publisher were taking a huge risk by publishing such a tale.

It does not disappoint, and although it is written to be hard on the reader, it is not so hard (or as rewarding) as “Sound”, but what is?

Sanctuary is the third of three books that Faulker wrote and published in just 18 months and that changed literature forever.

I think it is the least of the three, but you still see that same Faulkner here, deconstructing the narrative, showing the scenes in ways that seems often to IMPLY (alla Grice), rather than tell, and giving the reader important details, hidden in strange places.

 

His characters are colorful and interesting enough, and his themes are pure Faulkner.

I was happy he stuck to a relatively straightforward timeline with this one, rather than abstract it, as he could have done.

I would not make this your first Faulkner book, but I would not forget to get to it if I were discovering the great author.

 

Its okay......, February 5, 2013

 

 

 

 

I started reading this book and at first was interesting but after a while I just couldn't get into it.

Many times I haven't been able to get into a book and later on I breeze through.

It was kind of depressing after awhile.

Kind of a brutal book.

 

 

 

 

 

A must read

 

 

Sanctuary is a hard-boiled, in-your-face novel that explores human ambivalence and the slippery slope it paves to evil.

Reads well so many decades since release and remains relevant. No doubt: A classic.

 

 

 "The friction of the earth on its axis"

 

Numerous other literary authors have done what Faulkner did in SANCTUARY - set out to write a novel that catered to popular as opposed to literary tastes -- but few have done it as well.

After publishing "The Sound and the Fury", one of the greatest American novels ever, to an underwhelming public reception and desperate for money, Faulkner set out to write something along the lines of the mystery, detective, and gangster pulp fiction of the day.

As he later told a friend:

"I made a thorough and methodical study of everything on the list of best-sellers."

"When I thought I knew what the public wanted, I decided to give them a little more than they had been getting; stronger and rawer--more brutal."

"Guts and genitals."

 

By and large he succeeded. SANCTUARY is raw and brutal.

It has guts and genitals.

And it made a much bigger splash with the buying public, selling within a month more copies than his earlier classics "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying" had combined.

But Faulkner being Faulkner, SANCTUARY is not just a salacious potboiler. It, too, is literature.

 

Here is SANCTUARY in a nutshell (without the ultimate spoiler).

Temple Drake, pampered and fatuous seventeen-year-old Ole Miss coed and daughter of a judge, goes off for a weekend of fun with a slick but thoroughly shallow Oxford (England) educated young man, Gowan Stevens.

Stevens gets rip-roaring drunk and crashes their car into a tree near a backwoods moonshiner's still.

Temple and Gowan have to hole up with the moonshiner and his riffraff cronies, one of whom, Popeye, is a psychopath.

The young female ignites the passions of the men, which are further fueled by moonshine.

Temple is raped with a corncob, losing her virginity, and one of the men is shot and killed by another of them.

Popeye flees, taking Temple with him.

He installs her in a brothel in Memphis, run by Reba Rivers.

Meanwhile, the police arrest Lee Goodwin and charge him with the murder.

Horace Benbow, local attorney and somewhat idealistic intellectual, assumes defense representation of Goodwin and also takes responsibility for Goodwin's common-law wife Ruby and their sickly baby boy.

With a tip from Clarence Snopes, an intermeddling state senator with roguish charm, Horace tracks Temple down in the brothel in Memphis.

He builds his case around her, and the novel culminates when she is called to testify at the trial of Goodwin.

 

In Faulkner's telling, which jumps back and forth in time, the plot can be dizzying and certain key details are obscure.

Most of the characters are quite distinctive, though in several cases - especially that of Temple Drake - their motivations don't always make sense.

Along with the guts and genitals, there also are several wonderful comedic scenes.

And Faulkner tackles several big themes that elevate SANCTUARY well above the usual potboiler.

One has to do with the battle between the sexes, on both the physical and the emotional fronts.

Temple Drake, flirt though she may be and kept woman she becomes, clearly hates men, beginning with her over-protective father and her four brothers.

Horace Benbow is almost pecked to death by women - from his estranged wife Belle, to his sister Narcissa (who in demonic evil is exceeded only by Popeye), to Ruby Goodwin, and even to his step-daughter Little Belle.

Another theme has to do with the Southern façades of social appearances and honor.

And finally, the overriding theme of the novel is evil, and the inefficacy of intellectual humanism (embodied by Horace Benbow) in confronting it. Sanctuary, indeed.

 

At times, especially early in the novel, the writing is overwrought: people springing here and flinging things there, imparting an annoying herky-jerky feel to everything.

But as the novel progresses, the writing improves, some of it as good as anything Faulkner wrote.

Particularly striking is Faulkner's masterful use of similes.

And then there are passages such as this:

 

"He walked quietly up the drive, beginning to smell the honeysuckle from the fence.

The house was dark, still, as though it were marooned in space by the ebb of all time. The insects had fallen to a low monotonous pitch, everywhere, nowhere, spent, as though the sound were the chemical agony of a world left stark and dying above the tide-edge of the fluid in which it lived and breathed. The moon stood overhead, but without light; the earth lay beneath, without darkness. He opened the door and felt his way into the room and to the light. The voice of the night--insects, whatever it was--had followed him into the house; he knew suddenly that it was the friction of the earth on its axis, approaching that moment when it must decide to turn on or to remain forever still: a motionless ball in cooling space, across which a thick smell of honeysuckle writhed like cold smoke."

 

Any novel with writing like that is worth reading. SANCTUARY has its minor flaws and it is not quite on the same plane as "The Sound and the Fury", "As I Lay Dying", or "Absalom, Absalom!"

Therefore, perhaps unfairly, I settle at four-and-a-half Amazon stars. Based on a coin flip, I have rounded up to five.

 

 

 

Don't drink with Gowan Stevens.

 

 

SANCTUARY is a straightforward narrative that is terrific when Faulkner operates in his comfort zone, which encompasses the first three-quarters of this novel.

Then, Faulkner is examining the bogus decorum of the well-to-do, the raw and rugged lives of poor whites, the conniving stupidity of the upwardly mobile, and the helpless innocence of men in worlds governed by female expectations.

Within this rich milieu, Faulkner produces a story with power, lyricism, and drama, which he leavens with humor from Miss Jenny, social commentary from Reba, and buffoonery from Clarence Snopes.

But then, SANCTUARY hits the homestretch and becomes a feeble courtroom drama.

In the end, Faulkner ties everything together; but, IMO, the fates of several characters seem arbitrary.

 

There are many reasons to read SANCTUARY.

These include Faulkner's amazing rendering of the cluelessness lawyer Clarence Benbow, whose simple decency is thwarted by the worldview of Southern women; the sheer terror of the shallow Temple Drake, whose date with a young dipsomaniacal gentleman becomes a nightmare; and the hilarious interplay at Reba's brothel, where ideas of proper behavior are twisted but familiar.

And, there is Bill's great writing.

Here, for example, is the decent Benbow's disdainful reaction to the oily Snopes:

 

"Snopes began to speak in his harsh, assertive voice. There emerged gradually a picture of stupid chicanery and petty corruption for stupid and petty ends, conducted principally in hotel rooms..."

 

SANCTUARY does have brutal aspects, which emanate from the malfeasant bootlegger Popeye and the stupidity of mob justice.

But you know what?

Faulkner took Popeye's marginal and malevolent presence and the dynamic of the mob, tweaked them, and then put them at the center of the great LIGHT IN AUGUST.

Maybe Bill (or his society) wasn't quite ready for his themes in SANCTUARY, even though he had already written masterpieces.

Faulkner first used Horace Benbow, his sister Narcissa, and Miss Jenny, as well as the Old Frenchman place where Popeye operated, in FLAGS IN THE DUST.

This, or the associated SARTORIS, will probably be my next Faulkner novel.

 

Recommended.

 

 

 Brutal.

 

 

 

 

Sanctuary is a brutal novel - a starkly misanthropic novel that spares no one, no type, and no clinging idealism.

By the author's description, it is a `potboiler', and `the most horrific tale I could imagine,' written with an eye specifically toward financial interests after the lackluster success of AS I LAY DYING and THE SOUND AND THE FURY.

Yet there is no doubt that Faulkner's talent transforms the sensationalistic nature of the story into a pitiless tour de force - but to what purpose?

Some may see the tale as a symbolic representation of the South's decay and corruption, and, as far as any microscopic character study can stand in for national types, they would probably be correct to do so.

But regardless of its power or literary skillfulness - SANCTUARY strikes me as an author lashing out; the reason why would only be guesswork.

 

Erskine Caldwel's most famous works have a going-to-the-zoo feeling about them (`See the funny, funny Southerners') which also make them seem like caricatures, but SANCTUARY skips pity and condescension; instead, it is intent on confirming the idea of total Southern blight and putrefaction.

Temple Drake, a young, flighty coed from Oxford slips away from a school outing to keep a date with a burgeoning alcoholic named Gowan Stevens, who then decides to stop at bootlegger Lee Goodwin's place for more alcohol.

In doing so, he wrecks the car, and the two are marooned at the bootlegger's home.

Gowan eventually abandons Temple to the unsavory crew residing at Goodwin's - murder and sexual battery ensue.

Temple is then forced to go to Memphis with one of the bootlegger's cronies, the psychopathic Popeye, who sets her up in a brothel for his own amusement, and where the girl's corruption is nearly completed.

Meanwhile, Lee Goodwin is wrongfully charged in the murder that happened on his place, and local lawyer Horace Benbow, who feels he owes a debt to the Goodwins, agrees to defend him.

Key to the defense is the girl, Temple, yet when he finds her, Benbow will regret ever having brought her back to testify.

 

Far more than TOBACCO ROAD, the novel I think of most after reading SANCTUARY is Blood Meridian, though to be sure, Faulkner's 1930's America would never stand for anything as explicit as McCarthy's prose.

Even still, Faulkner's publisher told him they'd both go to jail if he published the manuscript.

And McCarthy's effort is probably as far removed from SANCTUARY in brutality as Faulkner's is from his contemporaries.

 Still, it isn't the type of inhumanity in which they are similar, but the unsparing manner of relating it, each conjuring up a hybrid form of lyric violence that I've simply never seen anywhere else. (Most efforts in this direction end up cartoonish rather than chilling.)

 

And yet...while I believe there is a core meaning behind BLOOD MERIDIAN, SANCTUARY fails to meet that standard. It is what it is - perhaps the best ever at what it is - but I can't find any conclusions to take away from it.

My experience in the South tells me that Faulkner has chosen to dwell only on a portion of the picture, but yet to represent it as if it is complete.

Skill and craftsmanship carry the novel a long, long way, but the price Faulkner extracts from Yoknapatawpha - for whatever reason - is extreme.

Even with its faults, I still recommend it, but it fall short of what he attempts in the other novel of his which I've read, Intruder in the Dust.

Reader's accustomed to Faulkner's style from that novel, or that similar in The Hamlet, may well be surprised at the author's relative straightforwardness here - but that in no way dulls the force of the events. Four-and-a-half stars.

 

 

 

 Crimps, Spungs And Feebs.

 

This book is supposed to be Faulkner's potboiler-his answer to the depression era pulps.

But Faulkner can't really be trusted with any explanation of his own as the cold, hard truth. He was a fabricator, through and through.

For me, this 'potboiler' gets a 3 1/2 stars because it's Faulkner and because it's layered and interesting. But, it's also cheap and brutal.

I think he would agree.

That's why we get an excuse from Faulkner saying he wrote this relative to the sort of stuff that was being sold and he was looking to make a buck.

The story does contain some gems of intricate writing as well as stark visuals and things that take a while to sink in.

 

Temple Drake is a collage girl and she's a tease with boys.

She sneaks from her bedroom in her father, the judge's house, and cohorts with older boys.

Ultimately, one older boy she sneaks out with, away from college, likes to drink what's available, moonshine.

This leads them out into the sticks where the young man, already drunk, crashes his car near the moonshiner's abode-and they keep the area staked out.

The couple ends up at the mercy of a house full of degenerate people, mostly men.

Temple is freaked out as the men are pretty creepy (with one very memorable character, grandpa-but he's blind and deaf and rattles from here to there in oblivion).

Her boyfriend spends the evening, drinking, consorting with and getting beaten up by these roughnecks leaving Temple to fend for herself and even with the help of the house's only other women, Ruby, she doesn't fare well.

And this is the story of Temple Drake and the mess she gets herself into.

 

This is a gritty tale and I haven't read much pulp from the 1930s to compare it to.

I would not recommend Sanctuary for the faint of heart, nor to anyone seeking to unlock the mysteries behind true genious or great literature.

It's dark and offers little comfort in the way of the human condition-like Cormac McCarthy, who I also enjoy reading, but again, not for the faint of heart.

 

Faulkner was a great writer, capable of rare sensitivity and if you like him, you may like this, but being written in the 30s doesn't make this a more innocent tale-it's full of mean or down trodden people, hopeless people, and people who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag-if you like that sort of thing, don't say I didn't warn you and if Faulkner starts off a story telling you that a house is full of crimps, spungs and feebs, he is trying to warn you too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ripoff, a cassette, that has to have a player that has a funtion that doesn't exsist anymore!

A casette that no one can play, unless they are a time traveler and can go back to the late 70s&80s!

 

 Should have been called "Limbo".

 

...since that's where Faulkner leaves us at the end of the book.

I was captivated by this book and its seedy, amoral characters but what starts out to be an exciting story of murder and depravity dissipates toward the end with characters re-emerging from nowhere or disappearing without meaning. This is all the more frustrating in that Faulkner could have written one of the best murder trial narratives ever. The loose ends are never really tied up.

If only he had re-written this "potboiler" later and given the ending more depth and meaning...but that could probably be said about a lot of books.

 

 

 

 Composite View of Faulkner,

In reading this book, I find myself crystallizing so many of the impressions of Faulkner that I've been kicking around the past year in which I've been consistently reading him.

Bottom line is: I don't like him.

I've tried. But I don't like him. He offers these flashes of excellence, only to bog the whole thing down in artistic blather that muddies his own water.

In Sanctuary, he wrote "the most horrible story he could think of" in an attempt to sell books out of sheer controversy.

It *is* a horrible story, in so many ways, but it also presents a rather good portrait of Faulkner in composite.

Here we have humanity at its worst, but here we also find insight into that humanity.

Here we have excellent characters, but we also find them flashing on the page, only be buried beneath the weight of Faulkner's prose (which, ironically, is at its clearest in this book). In the end, Sanctuary feels like a titillating, shameless attempt at sales, which offers only a few bright moments in the midst of both its frustrating style and its salacious debauchery.

 

 

 

A Tremendous Ending to a Great Faulkner Book.

 

 

The ending here is completely brilliant -- it left me cold like almost no other book I have ever read. Whenever I think of this novel, I recall the ending and get chills. This is one of Faulkner's best works.

 

 

 

 

 Second best from Faulkner.

 

 

Sanctuary is a good starter for introducing people to Faulkner.

My all time favorite from Faulkner is Absolom,Absolom but this seems very difficult for people to follow. I grew up in the South, the story in Sanctuary could have truly happened 40 years ago in any community in the South.

The title is misleading, none of the characters ever find sanctuary, there is no place within the book that could be called a sanctuary -- except the Luxembourg Gardens in the very last chapter.

 

 

 

 

Tragic.

 

 

It's almost hard to describe what this book is about, without giving away spoilers. Sanctuary starts off with a well-to-do man from the city stumbling across a ramshackle farmhouse where moonshine is being made.

From there, the story spirals off to include Temple (a rich and popular teenage girl), Mrs. Goodwin (the moonshiner's common law wife), and Popeye (a deranged misfit).

Their paths continue to cross as the book goes on; sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.

 

Faulkner is fast becoming one of my favorite authors.

I've been slowly reading through his books after tackling all of Cormac McCarthy's work (the two authors are very similiar, in my opinion). One thing with Faulkner, I've found that it works best just to keep on reading even if encounter something that doesn't make sense. Chances are, it will come clear as the story goes on.

 

 

In the South.

 

Much has been said about the writing of Faulkner.

Specifically discussing "Sanctuary", one might suggest it to be dirty and perhaps gritty.

Faulkner never intended it to be a nice heart-warming story.

What the story lacks in niceties is compensated for in realism.

Though most can not directly identify with the story, most would agree with the portrayal of southern life.

 

The story centers around the kidnapping of Temple Drake.

Though it is not a kidnapping in the truest definition, Temple does find herself at the mercy of the feeble-minded Popeye.

As bothersome as the crimes against Temple may be, readers will question why she chooses not to leave.

The fascinating aspect of the story is this aspect of Temple's character sometimes referred to as "The Stockholm Syndrome".

In this syndrome, the hostage develops "loyalty" to the hostage-take.

 

Justice is not distributed as some might expect.

Even as justice seems apparent, the reader may find himself/herself angry.

It would seem easy to just to toss this book aside and hate it. At the same time, there is something compelling about it in the same way people look at the traffic accident at the side of the road.

 

 

 

 

Horrible.

 

 

Ok, so everyone has for years told me how great a writer William Faulkner was.

So, I read As I Lay Dying- mediocre at best, and no real strengths at characterization are revealed. Instead, a bunch of yokel stereotypes. So, I mark that off as just one of those things. Then I read his Collected Stories. Atrocious! Nothing but stereotypes in every tale. The Southern grotesques are not as noxious as in, say, Flannery O'Connor, but the tales are all wooden, dull, and generally- a mess! So, I read Sanctuary, which comes with the preface that it was Faulkner's `deliberately commercial' novel, and the one that `broke him' to readers. So, I think if the high literature of As I Lay Dying, and his acclaimed short stories, is bad then, perhaps, the real gem lies in his `commercial' novel.

 

 O for three!

What this book was was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before that film- except for the chainsaw, and not being set in Texas.

This has got to be one of the worst books ever penned, and all the more egregious because, despite its being `commercial', it's still the province of a high fictionist!

The characters are even more stereotyped than in As I Lay Dying, and the plot revolves around the kidnapping of a judge's daughter and a slew of murders.

Now, for those of you wondering which Texas Chainsaw Massacre I was referring to, the 1974 Tobe Hooper original, or the 2003 remake with nymphet Jessica Biel, I can state it does not really matter, but let me choose the latter, since that film was merely a reason to show off the nubile Ms. Biel's fabulous form and healthy wet t shirted bosom.

The title's meaning is multifarious, and rather obvious, since it's the one thing none of the cretins within the book get.

So what?

Mickey Spillane crafted much more interesting scenarios two decades later, and Mike Hammer would have jackbooted Popeye inside of a page of meeting him.

In the end, no lessons are learned, Temple perdures, and the last page or so of the book ends very poetically. But, it's simply air spray freshener used on a litter box. The odor underneath still permeates.

 

 I will have to read The Sound And The Fury, but I've given up on having any high expectations for it. Perhaps, that's the key, and I will be pleasantly surprised, although I doubt it will change my overall view of Faulkner as one of the most grotesquely overrated writers of all time. He constipates me with his plodding narratives, ridiculously stilted conversations, and outrageously thin plot machinations. I need an enema after all that, but sans that- pass the corn cob!

 

 

 

 

 Mississippi Noir.

 

 

I have read my fair share of Faulkner although I am hardly a devotee.

My main positive reference to him is concerning his role in the screenwriting of one of my favorite films- "To Have or To Have Not" with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

I have also, obliquely, run into his work as it relates to who should and who should not be in the modern American literary canon.

Usually the criticism centers on his racism and sexism, and occasionally his alcoholism.

Of course, if political correctness were the main criterion for good hard writing then we would mainly not be reading anything more provocative or edifying than the daily newspaper, if that.

 

So much for that though. Faulkner is hardly known as a master of the noir or 'potboiler' but here the genius of his sparse, functional writing (a trait that he shares with the Hemingway of "The Killers" and the key crime novelists of the 1930's Hammett, think "The Red Harvest", and Chandler, think "The Big Sleep") gives him entree into that literary genre. And he makes the most of it.

 

The plot revolves around a grotesque cast of characters who are riding out the Jazz Age in the backwaters of Mississippi and its Mecca in Memphis.

Take one protected young college student, Temple Drake, looking to get her 'kicks'.

Put her with a shabbily gentile frat boy looking for his kicks.

Put them on the back roads of Prohibition America and trouble is all you can expect.

Add in a bootlegger or two, a stone-crazy killer named Popeye with a little sexual problem and you are on your way.

 

That way is a little bumpy as Faulkner mixed up the plot, the motives of the characters and an unsure idea of what justice, Southern style, should look like in this situation in the eyes of his main positive character, Horace, the lawyer trying to do the right thing in a dead wrong situation which moreover is stacked against him.

As always with Faulkner follow the dialogue, that will get you through even if you have to do some re-reading (as I have had to do).

Interestingly, for a writer as steeped in Southern mores, Jim Crow and very vivid descriptions of the ways of the South in the post-Civil War era as Faulkner was there is very little of race in this one.

The justice meted out here tells us one thing- it is best to be a judge's daughter or a Daughter of the Confederacy if you want a little of that precious commodity.

All others watch out.

Kudos to Faulkner, whether he wrote this for the cash or not, for taking on some very taboo subjects back in 1931 Mississippi.

Does anyone really want to deny him his place in the American literary canon?

 Based on this effort I think not.

 

 

 

 

Faulkner should've stuck with not being a WWI Flying Ace.

 

Faulkner may be an author with many accolades, and maybe some of his other books are brilliant. Sanctuary is just bad.

 

Let's just start with the title.

Why is it called Sanctuary, what is the sanctuary he refers to?

"Frenchman's Bend", the Memphis brothel, Benbow's house, the jail or the jardin du Luxembourg in Paris?

It never comes out.

Personally I think it's just a ominous, pretentious title.

And that Faulkner might have just as well called his book

"Ikebana in 30 days".

 

To give you another example, in the first scene two men meet at a fountain in the middle of nowhere, and Faulkner tells us that, after exchanging a few tense words, they just sit there and stare at each other for literally two hours.

What? Why? Which drugs are they on?

Again, it never comes out. That scene alone is so absurd that it threw me completely out of the book, and Faulkner just packs in scenes like that.

 

I was particularly disappointed by the characters.

One of the reasons I read this book is because I had heard that Temple Drake was a legendary character and one of the most intriguing females in literary history, but she was a particular dud.

Faulkner describes her as a pretty 17-year-old who has many dates but is still a virgin.

He then attributes several extreme behaviours to her -- after being raped she suddenly becomes a languid gangster moll and then transmogrifies back into a daddy's girl.

I think Faulkner is just trying to bluff his readers by dishing up the most outlandish, far-out, tallest tales he could think of to shock them into submission.

And at the same time he is trying really hard to blame the victim, trying to turn this clearly victimised girl into a men-eating "femme fatale," when in fact her behaviour only appears erratic because of the author's complete lack of writing skills.

 

Then the Southrons -- about as subtle as Cletus and Brandine ("Meet my wife and sister!") out of The Simpsons.

There's the corrupt senator, the gospel-singing African-Americans, the fat madam, the local lynchmob and other repulsive stereotypes.

The only variation here is that the inbred degenerate suffers from innate syphillis instead of inbreeding this time, and is variously described as a colossal pervert, dreamboat, successful gangster and loving son.

 

I had read that Faulkner was an alcoholic, and there is a lot of drinking going on in the book, so I at least expected him to be good at those scenes.

But again, zero credibility.

Faulkner never makes any attempt to convey the notion of drinking to excess, and is probably unable to do so even if he had tried.

It's all superficial comic-book clichés.

 

Faulkner employs a style of writing which is called "Stream Of Consciousness".

What this boils down to is terrible dialogues, drawn-out tedious descriptions and the most ludicrous similes I have come across in a long while.

  Most of the time it is very difficult to figure out what is going on, often it is impossible, and other times it makes absolutely no sense.

Faulkner seems to be getting a kick out of describing tedious minutiae in an almost psychedelic way, and then making the dialogues intentionally dire.

It all boils down to a massive disregard for the reader.

 

Faulkner also likes to pepper his writing with an intentionally opaque and cruelly arcane vocabulary, which makes the reading even more of a slog.

In fact, Sanctuary is the only example I know for the usage of the word "holocaust" prior to the Nazi genocide of the European Jews, namely -- to also give you a taste of his style -- in this description:

"their puffy faces were washed lightly over as with the paling ultimate stain of a holocaust".

In case you wondered, you have just read a description of sleeping train passengers.

 

I'll come to the end. Sanctuary is an awful book without any redeeming virtues.

It's a mess.

It is so awful that it is difficult to believe, especially coming from someone who is widely regarded as one of the greatest American authors.

The best thing I could say about it is that in maybe three or four scenes, Faulkner gets a sort of flow together and the reading becomes fluent for a few pages, but that's it.

 

 

 

Beautiful, Haunting, and then Nothing.

 

I am by no means an expert in literature. Most of my reading is the current fiction of today with some non-fiction mixed in. So I decided to try my hand/mind at something written by one of the great authors of yesteryear. A couple of quick thoughts:
 - very difficult to read
 - extremely difficult to know which characters are talking and which are being talked to.
 - imperative re-reading of sections to see if something was missed, because the plot changed directions and I wasn't on the same page.

 

Now, those things being said, after 100 pages or so, I couldn't wait to get back at the book. The characters are richer and deeper than anything I've read in years (except maybe "The Main" by Trevanian). The short dialogue segments, the way things are said and not said are not found in today's writings and make the characters stick with you after the book is finished.

This writing gives us a very real peek into life it the United States in the late `20s and early `30s; it's a slice of Americana that you can hardly read today.

The simple text that tells of complex human interactions was beautifully written and therefore I was excited to get to the climax. And then...

 

There was no climax.

The book ended, the story ended and nothing. Emptiness. The conclusion was anticlimactic without the climatic part of the story. So I'm giving it a 3, but I was very close to a 4 just for the beauty of the writing. And it isn't beauty for beauty's sake; it is necessary explanation that tells the story slowly and carefully. You get to pick up things about the characters in this short novel that the fiction novel of today couldn't even come close to.

As you forget the books quickly that you read with today's authors, you will likely remember Popeye, Tommy and Temple for long while.

 

 

 

 

 

  The Story of Temple Drake

 

 

 

Sanctuary is a shocking book, especially because of the time period in which it was written.

Most modern readers have been desensitized to highly sexual themes, but in the early 30s, this book was a best seller.

 

Here we have the story of a young girl named Temple Drake.

She is the daughter of a judge and a tease around town.

She dates many men but never loses her morality to them.

One day, she meets up with Gowan Stevens, a drunk around town.

He takes her for a drive, and since he is completely drunk, he smashed up his car.

The two take to walking, and they stumble upon a boot-legger's hideout.

Gowan proceeds to get drunk there again while Temple fears the nasty stares she gets from the men.

The three men Lee, Popeye, and Tommy outnumber the only woman living there.

She warns Temple to leave as soon as she can before night falls, but Gowan is uncooperative and Temple too innocent to heed the warning appropriately.

She stays, and her life changes forever at the hands of the violent and twisted Popeye.

In the meantime, Horace Benbow takes on the murder case against Lee.

The whole town is against him succeeding, but Benbow believes in his client's innocence.

He even believes in him after discovering Temple's story.

 

I decided to read this book in lieu of seeing the film version starring Miriam Hopkins titled The Story of Temple Drake.

It is hard to find, but notoriously scandalous.

 I imagined that the book would be a good substitute.

 

Unfortunately, the book is significantly slower paced than the average pre-code film, and the descriptions are often slow and erratic.

It is sometimes difficult to figure out who is talking and who is doing what. There are also some boring patches due to the writing style. The dismal setting is certainly appropriate, but it brings the mood of the writing down, making it a less exciting read.

 

 

 That's Why I Only Eat Canned Corn.

 

We can't have any corn cobs lying around.

 

If you've read the book, you know what I'm alluding to.

 

Sanctuary is a grimey novel.

It deals with grimey people in grimey situations.

The story is just so weird; it's almost surrealistic.

 

Spoilers

 

Temple Drake is the 17-year-old daughter of a judge.

She is dating a guy named Gowan Stephens who is a drunk.

They end up at some "in the middle of nowhere" house owned by a guy named Lee Goodwin in an attempt for Gowan to get more illegal liquor.

Lee Goodwin is a shady character, but nice compared to the company he keeps.

Gowan deserts Temple more than once.

At first by being passed out from drinking, and then by completely leaving to go home.

Once alone, Temple is at the mercy of the shady characters, specifically Popeye.

Popeye hasn't had his spinach, therefore he is impotent, mentally and sexually.

Temple is attacked and kidnapped by Popeye after witnessing a murder, and is forced into a brothel where she prostitutes herself and hooks up with more shady characters.

This is just a partial summary of the story.

There is much more concerning Lee Goodwin, his girlfriend Ruby, and a lawyer named Benbow who has deserted his family.

 

Bottom Line: A twisted tale woven by a literary master who needed to write something sensationalistic in order to make some money.

Certainly not one of his best, but certainly not terrible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps it is because I get extremely bored when I read "stream of conscious" types of books.

This book simply bored me to death.

The technique is written in prose form, I respect it, to some degrees, it is a type of art.

However, the backcover of this book did a poor job of explaining what this book was supposed to convey.

Maybe it is because there's nothing to review about!

 All said, this book showed the heart of evil as well as violence through the bleak characters of Popeye, Gowan Stevens and Alabama Red.

They kidnapped the promiscuous girl named Temple Drake and took her to Memphis, where we meet a even more feared underground criminal gangs and boot-leggers.

 

 Overall, I'm really disappointed in this book because I thought that William Faulkner, one of the best writers in the last century, should've done better.

A lot of has to do with the style that he writes in, but overall, a very boring book.

 

 

 

 

 

 A "terrible" book, but "a great novel".

 

 

 

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 on, however, it's an unlikely page-turner.

Faulkner presents his tale not simply as a mystery but as a puzzle of characters who can barely figure out their own roles and who challenge the reader to sort out their stories

The central plot revolves around Temple Drake, a well-off, fast-living college student who gets wowed by Gowan Stevens, a handsome young alcoholic who takes her to the inaccessible estate of a backwoods bootlegger.

Gowan soon passes out, and the traumatized Temple suddenly understands she is stuck in a situation from which she can't easily extract herself--and her circumstances worsen when Gowan abandons her to the gangsters and drunks bumming around the house.

 

Even though it was published after "As I Lay Dying," which he completed at the end of 1929, "Sanctuary" could be considered Faulkner's fifth novel rather than his sixth.

Earlier that year, he sent the manuscript for "Sanctuary" to his publisher.

It seems likely he had been toying with it in some form for quite a while, since at least one passage has been found in his papers with a date of 1925.

 

There are a number of colorful tales surrounding the history of this book's publication--some of them possibly apocryphal and probably invented by Faulkner himself.

A fuller accounting can be found in Joseph Blotner's invaluable biography of Faulkner.

Faulkner later wrote that he "invented the most horrific tale I could imagine," and he claimed that his publisher told him after reading it, "Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail."

Whatever the reason for the delay, the publisher changed his mind and--to Faulkner's surprise--ultimately set the book into galleys.

The interval of nearly two years convinced Faulkner that the book couldn't be published in its current form, so he heavily revised and rearranged the book in proof.

 

Faulkner also claimed that he "began to think of books in terms of possible money."

Although the book did indeed sell well--better than any of his books until "The Wild Palms"--some scholars contend that Faulkner is being somewhat coy about his motives for writing this particular book.

Reading his correspondence, one gets the impression that that he was always writing with an eye towards his financial situation.

 

So how is it?

The easy answer is that "Sanctuary" is not "Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying," or "Light in August." But judged as a piece of noir, I think it's as good as the best Depression-era crime novels.

As in many of Faulkner's other books, the story leaps back and forth across time, and often the same scene is described from the perspective of different characters.

Although the use of jump cuts, flashbacks, and misdirection can be a challenge, I thought the technique heightened the suspense and made the characters more intriguing.

Faulkner probably could not have published this book if he had described its scenes more straightforwardly.

Even the end requires close reading to figure out exactly what happened to Temple at the bootlegger's homestead (in part because it's so horrific).

If you like the type of book that makes you turn back through the pages digging up the clues you missed along the way, I'd recommend this one.

 

 

Misguided Attempt

 

 

 

If you're willing to work at it, there is the usual gorgeous Faulkner syntax, but to mine that you must wade through a confused and boring storyline, and characters I can almost see Old Bill gleefully cutting out of the most grotesque sort of colored paper and pasting on the page.

Far too often you are required to reread and piece together clues to see who is talking and what is happening.

There is no flow, no rhythm, which is fine if you have moments of reward along the way, or the big reward at the end. This doesn't happen and the work survives, as well as it does, simply by a genius pulling occasional tricks out of his bag to keep it going. It reads like the first draft of a bad idea, written by a great writer. Shame on you, Bill! Flannery O'Connor is much better at this sort of thing and doesn't confuse you too much in the process.

This work screams for a tough editor.

 On the second page there is this sentence:

"They squatted so, facing one another across the spring, for two hours."

Faulkner neglects to say where these two gentlemen received their superhuman powers, but details like these (and the work is full of them) diminish the overall effect.

All the ingredients are here for a great tale, but the necessary design never happened, and the result is a mildly interesting mess.

 

Far more entertaining are the usual five-star cudos of those throwing themselves on the Faulkner alter, their minds wretching out of shape to bring dignity and order to all this. I kept wondering--where did they get their version of the book? There has to be accountibility, even from a master.

 

 

 

Another Great Faulkner Tale

 

 

 

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 a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine. . ."

This novel was the biggest seller of all Faulkner's works during his lifetime.

 

We are introduced to a whole slew of unforgettable characters:

Temple Drake, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a local judge;

the monster Popeye;

Gowan, the frat-boy drunk who "learned" to handle his alcohol while a student in Virginia;

the tragic Ruby;

Miss Reba, the Memphis madam;

the obnoxious Senator Snopes;

 Horace Benbow, et al.

In the hands of a lesser writer, some of these people would have become stereotypes.

Instead we have a remarkable and tragic story of small town justice where a man is convicted for who is is, rather than what he is accused of doing.

Horace Benbow, an attorney who reads books, is the moral center of the novel who believes that sometimes a man "might do something just because he knew it was right, necessary to the harmony of things that it be done."

 

Unlike many of Faulkner's more difficult works, SANCTUARY is a very straight-forward novel-- an easy but fascinating read.

As always, Faulkner's language can be beautifully descriptive: "When he waked a narrow rosy pencil of sunlight fell level through the window." And "Within the black-and-silver tunnel of cedars fireflies drifted in fatuous pinpricks."

He is also razor-sharp with his use of colloquial language.

At one point Virgil Snopes says,

"Look and see if they taken anything of yourn."

Virgil and his brother Fonzo provide some much-needed humor in this rather horrific tale.

They, young hick barber students, check into a house of ill repute in Memphis, thinking it is an ordinary hotel and then go to another "whorehouse" for their own earthly delights.

 

While SANCTUARY is certainly not THE SOUND AND THE FURY, it is a necessary read for Faulkner lovers.

 

 

Not his best

 

 

William Faulkner is one of my favorite authors.

He might just be my favorite. I want to get that out of the way first off. After reading The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August, I truly believed that he could do no wrong. Those are three spectacular masterpieces, while Sanctuary is not. It begins with a promising start and then just comes unglued and unhinged in the end. Much of the material is still very fascinating and original, but if you really want to see what Faulkner is all about, this would not be the book to start with.

 

The novel opens beautifully along the banks of a river on a sunny day.

A lawyer named Horace Benbow has just left his wife and is taking a walk in the woods.

A strong black man named Pop-Eye watches him carefully as he drinks water from the stream.

Benbow is tired and Popeye offers to take him back and get him a drink at their cabin.

In the cabin, we are introduced to some of the characters we will get to know in the course of the novel.

Ruby, the outspoken and abused wife of a man named Goodwin.

Goodwin owns the cabin and runs an illegal bootlegging business.

We also meet Tommy, a compassionate and somewhat slow thinking man.

The lawyer, Horace, thanks them for the drink and travels back to his sister's house in town.

 

The next scene involves a wild, promiscuous girl named Temple Drake.

She is waiting at the train station for her alcoholic "boyfriend" to show up.

Temple seems to be attracted to the scummy men.

She is a daughter of a prominent judge and has just been kicked out of school for curfew violations and plans to run off with her somewhat boyfriend named Gowan.

On their way out of town together, Gowan drinks too much and crashes into a tree.

Popeye, the black man from the beginning of the story, sees it all happen.

He takes them up to the cabin again.

Once there, everything goes wrong.

Ruby warns her to leave.

Gowan ends up drinking himself to a stupor and eventually blacks out after being beaten by Goodwin and his friend Van.

Temple takes shelter in an old barn room during the whole incident and is scared to leave.

Goodwin and Van end up dragging a passed out Gowan into the barn room with her.

Gowan wakes up early in the morning, and in shame, abandons Temple at the cabin.

 

Temple tells Tommy (the slow thinking, compassionate man), to keep an eye out for anyone that comes near the barn room.

Popeye, however, doesn't take heed and ends up shooting Tommy in the back of the head and kidnaps the teenager Temple.

He takes her to a whorehouse on the other side of town.

 

Goodwin, meanwhile, discovers that Tommy is dead and calls for the sheriff.

The sheriff, ironically, throws Goodwin in jail for the murder of Tommy since Popeye has fled the scene.

Goodwin enlists the services of the lawyer Benbow which we met at the beginning of the story.

Benbow then starts an investigation as the whereabouts of Temple, how to find a place for Goodwin's wife to stay, and how to clear his client of murder.

 

After that, everything gets really fuzzy after such a promising and interesting start.

The last 60 pages of the story just seem to fall apart.

It isn't really like Faulkner to do something like that.

We do find out where Temple is being hidden, but there seems to be some contradictions in her character.

When she first got kidnapped, she seemed like a frightened young women.

Later on when we meet her, she is just a drunk and does not seem to care whether or not she was kidnapped.

I thought this was a major character flaw.

 

Also, near the end of a novel a key sequence of tragic events that occur (at least I think they do), are muffled and unfocused by Faulkner's hazy description.

These passages left me confused at they did not mesh well with what had been told previously.

Up until this point, this was a fairly straight forward and easy to understand tale.

At the end, everything became so overwrought with unnecessary symbolism and description that I couldn't get a firm grasp as to what was really going on.

The moments that should have been the most powerful were kind of like duds. If Faulkner would have just stayed consistent, this could have been another one of his masterpieces.

 

Now all of this sounds like I am tearing the novel apart. I'm not.

The set up is spectacular. Once again, Faulkner throws in his patented jaw dropping description, which blazes with originality and style. The story itself is very interesting and entertaining. It is also fairly easy to grasp, (until the end that is).

 

I guess what I am getting at is that this is a very well written, but extremely uneven novel.

It doesn't have the same depth and power of his previous works I have read. It can be dark, disturbing, at brilliant one moment, and the next moment be flawed with contradictions and inconsistency. Overall, I would recommend Sanctuary, but a huge disappointment compared with some of his other works.. If you want to see the real, genius Faulkner at work, you might just skip this one. Hopefully, it was just a one time small misstep by a real literary master.

 

Grade: B

 

 

 

 

 

 My Southern reading list

 

There are too many Southern book to name them all, and even so, not all of them are worth mentioning. But of the many I've come across over the years, a few stand out as absolutely remarkable achievements.

They are:

Sanctuary
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Bark of the Dogwood
Flannery O'Connor collected stories
To Kill a Mockingbird

I realize others may have a different opinion, but for me, these were the best.

Of course, my idea of "the best" changes from year to year, but for now, this is it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Very Good

 

 

Excellent book. I had a little difficulty following the characters at first but I couldn't put the book down. Unlike a lot of todays authors he doesn't take sides but presents life in the raw.

 

 

 

 Not Faulkner at his best, but it's still Faulkner

 

SANCTUARY is, by all standards, an odd book.

A minor work by a major talent, it blends elements of Greek tragedy and tawdry potboiler to create an unusual amalgam.

Faulkner himself was quite up front about it being his great attempt to write a bestseller, lathing the book with a bevy of cheap effects, yet still to imbuing page after page with one striking phrase after another.

Although not major Faulkner, it is still Faulkner, and is definitely worth reading.

It is set in Yoknapatawpha county, and features many characters who either appear in other books or whose relatives appear in other books.

Furthermore, the key female character in the book, Temple Drake, reappears as the major character in REQUIEM FOR A NUN, written twenty years after this one.

While I do not rate this anywhere nearly as highly as many of his other books, being something of an oddity, it is nonetheless absolutely not a waste of time.

While there are many sensationalist elements, there are still many magnificent sentences that read more like poetry than prose, and many of the characters are memorable.

If one is wanting to read only one or two books by Faulkner, I would not recommend this one. I would recommend instead AS I LAY DYING or, if one is feeling more ambitious, ABSALOM, ABSALOM. But if one is planning on reading all of the major works of Faulkner, then this is a book one should not skip. Minor Faulkner is better than the major works of many other writers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

She sells Sanctuary

 

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 an explosion, shaking the sensibilities of readers everywhere, daring booksellers to put it on their shelves.

SANCTUARY is not an easy book.

You'll find yourself, if you're like me, rereading passages to understand exactly what's going on. The characters, though precisely described, can be difficult to picture in your mind, especially as we move further away from the Jazz Age, with its unusual expressions, costume, and mores.

Imagine Tennessee and Mississippi when cars were relatively new to the roads, when the various social strata -- some wearing suits, some overalls -- began mixing together more easily.

Imagine being a teenage girl acting as a woman trapped in a moonshiner's shack, far away from the protection of her home, encountering men like creatures in a horrific play who drink liquor and watch her lie under the covers, her only protector passed out beside her.

Faulkner's reintroduced introduction is a godsend that will help you decipher the book somewhat. The editor's notes at the end of the book will help you understand much of the jargon and the motivation of the characters.
A good read in any age.

 

 

 

Sleaze with panache

 

Even when Faulkner is writing to sell books, as he admits he is doing with "Sanctuary," the master of impressionistic Southern fiction can be quite sublime.

The novel's racy subject matter and lightning-strike narrative have the feel of pulp fiction, but the rich descriptions and illustrious prose reveal that Faulkner never strays far from the top of his form.

As expected, its base locale is Mississippi's Yoknapatawpha County, that endless wellspring of Faulkner's imagination.

It's prohibition, and business is good for moonshiners like Lee Goodwin, living in a large but decrepit antebellum house with his "wife" Ruby and baby son, who is kept in a box hidden behind the stove to protect him from rats.

Goodwin, while not a bad man himself, associates with a number of hoodlums, including a sympathetic young man named Tommy and a cruel cretin called Popeye who harbors a nasty secret about his past and his libido.

One night, a drunk named Gowan Stevens and his girlfriend Temple Drake, the privileged daughter of a judge in Jackson and a college girl with a wild side, get into a car accident and end up spending the night at Goodwin's house, where Gowan had been planning to buy some whiskey.

Temple, warned by Ruby that the house is no place for a girl like her, and abandoned by Gowan the next day, finds herself in a nightmarish predicament when Popeye brutally robs her of whatever innocence she had, drives her to Memphis, and puts her up at a cathouse fronting as a respectable hotel, run by a careworn but charitable madam named Miss Reba.

But Popeye and Temple have to answer for the murder of Tommy, who was shot around the time they left.

Goodwin gets arrested, and a friendly lawyer named Horace Benbow, himself on vacation from his nagging wife, decides to defend him at the trial.

This leads to some detective work to find Temple, who is being held prisoner by Popeye in that Memphis hotel and would provide valuable witness testimony.

The manner in which Benbow manages to do this proves Faulkner's skill in characterization, as he employs two members of the infamous Snopes family to comic as well as narrative effect.

"Sanctuary" has two very memorable morbid, but poetic, images: the first involving Flaubert's doomed Madame Bovary, of all people; and the second describing a funeral for a small-time hoodlum that is transformed into a bacchanalian celebration by the fatalistic sensibilities of the Memphis underworld.

This is a scene which could be conjured only by a William Faulkner (or a Nathanael West).

This novel is an odd brew. It feels messy yet still exhibits an unquestionable professionalism; its characters are grotesque but all the more interesting because of it. Faulkner's writing is never explicit; you must be attentive to clues and details because you'll be expected to piece together the puzzle later. This is the main challenge confronting his readers, but understanding Faulkner means being willing to accept this challenge.

 

 

 

Tough read but worth it.

 

 

I read this book because I had never read any Faulkner before. I guess I thought I was missing something in my library or maybe it was time to lay off the nonfiction I mostly read.
I found Faulkner's style and word choices difficult at first. He assumes the reader is not lazy and will keep up with him and his stream of consciousness approach. I must admit I read half the book, became disinterested and put it down for several weeks. I then made up my mind to give it a second chance and really enjoyed it.

The story is dark and slightly twisted.

There are very few admirable characters but I found myself sympathizing with most of the characters.

Everyone except maybe Temple Drake has reasons for their misdeeds.

I felt Faulkner was trying to convey the injustice of the time and just plain bad luck as reasons for the poor behavior or lack of optimism of the characters.

I highly recommend this book. It is gripping and real. The story got to me.

 

 

 

Twisted A++++++

 

 

 

Sanctuary is another brilliant tale that reveals exactly how amazing Faulkner is as an author.

This story, by far, is one of the most "twisted" tales; the unexpected occurs throughout.

All through the book, I was in complete awe and in disbelief. By the end of this book, I was in complete shock. What occurred in the last 50 or 100 pages left me in surprise and in utter astonishment. I had never suspected any of what had occurred. How Faulkner was able to conjure up such an original story is beyond me!
In short, the story is about the kidnapping of a rich girl of 18 and the trial of a man accused of murder. However, the plots are not nearly this simplistic. Faulkner ventures into life and its evils, revealing that it does not matter how a person is raised, the choice of evil is his own; sometimes those of low class are more true and kind than those of high society. This is a book that, I believe, breaks the shell between class stereotypes.
This book is a definite must read. Not only is it unbelievably entertaining, but it also leaves you thinking. It's a fairly easy read despite the various numbers of characters involved (if you are anything like me, you might want to take notes on who's who). In addition, I would also recommend reading this book closely; don't just give it a skim. You might miss something important!

 

 

 

The reviews are much better than the book.

 

 

This was my second shot at trying to appreciate William Faulkner. I read Light in August a few years back and gave it 3 stars. I'm a big fan of Steinbeck, a contemporary of Faulkner's, who is often compared to Faulkner. Some reviews have said if you like Steinbeck you will like Faulkner. I disagree. Steinbeck writes clear and concise stories that are carried by his creativity and a reflection of the life he led. To describe Faulkner's style in Sanctuary, I will borrow from another review that said it was "oblique and distracting". I finished the story with a half-hearted understanding of what I had just read. By reading all of the other reviews on this site I now understand so much more about the book. That's a problem, I don't connect with Faulkner....

 

 

 

 

 A Novel Master

 

 

 

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 college girl who likes to secretly sneak out of her college dorm to attend dances. One of her rides back from one of these dances is a boy named Gowan Stevens. He decides to stop off at an illegal moonshine operation and promptly sets about getting drunk. Temple is trapped at the house surrounded by all sorts of shady characters you would associate with such an operation.

One of these is named Popeye, and trust me he is not a hero, he rapes Temple.

One of the things I found slightly disturbing was the sense that Temple is a flirt and you get the sense that Faulkner felt that eventually some sex crime was going to be committed against her.

She could get away with things around college boys but she fails to realize that with criminals, it's a very bad move.

It's the beginning of her great moral slide that was always just waiting to happen. There are other subplots going on around it.

The owner of the moonshine operation is a convict and his wife supported herself through prostitution while he was in the joint, which is a source of tension between them.

Horace Benbow is a lawyer who has left his wife simply because he recognizes the hollowness of his marriage.

These characters are connected by the crime against Temple.

The depressing thing about this novel is that noone really gets a sanctuary.

The ending is not pretty. That's what makes it so powerful and so real. This book is right up there with Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in sheer power of vision.

 

 

 "a logical pattern to evil",

 

 

This novel was written in perhaps Faulkner's most creative period. Simultaneously, he was writing, re-writing, or revising The Sound and the Fury, Flags in the Dust (Sartoris), As I Lay Dying, and several major short stories.

It is not surprising that elements of these other works find their way into Sanctuary. Although Faulkner maligned the original text and the published novel quickly gained a reputation for senationalism and a certain lasciviousness, it is an important work which probably ranks right behind the author's masterpieces.


When Faulkner began to revise the galleys of the original text, he was supposed to have been upset at the poor quality of the novel and concerned about possible legal suits from a puritanical reading public. His revision was to remedy both deficiencies. However, if a comparison between the original and revised text is made it becomes clear that Faulkner left all the lasciviousness in but worked hard to change the way in which the narrative was told. In the original version, flashback was the main instrument of narration (indeed, in many cases flashback within flashbacks) and bore an uncanny similarity to the style of Flags in the Dust (the original text of Sartoris).

The revised version attains something of the feel of a detective novel: straightforward prose with concrete nouns and strong verbs, action, stock characters and sex.

However, when Faulkner re-worked his galleys and centered the action around Temple Drake, the character of Horace Benbow is relegated to a supporting role and I think that in the end, this change in emphasis robbed the novel of some of its complexity and deprived readers of some of Faulkner's most serpentine prose, prose as thick and profound as the wisteria Faulkner describes growing around the eaves of the Benbow family home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gimme Shelter

 

"Sanctuary" has a double meaning in this novel -- the sanctuary we seek against the cruel events that occur in life and sanctuary against those things in ourselves that are most primitive, volatile and evil. Faulkner's characters here are in search of sanctuary in both meanings, although the theme is not well-developed and the plot is so misshapen that it detracts from the overall impact of the main theme.

"Sanctuary" is Faulkner's stab at writing noir-ish detective fiction.

You'd figure he would take to the genre like a duck to water (at least I did) given its emphasis on mood, place and moral struggle. All of these elements show up in the novel, but haphazardly. I think Faulkner was probably prevented from writing the noir novel he really wanted by the spirit of the times, which weren't supportive of the degree of brutality he intended to display in the novel (We get a glimpse of this when we see the stained corncob that Popeye used to violate Temple Drake). He would later half-heartedly repudiate "Sanctuary" as a failed attempt to make some money, an excuse probably designed to get his neighbors in Oxford, Miss., off his back and to satisfy the sob sisters in the national media who were ready to crucify him for writing a novel containing violence of almost pornographic intensity.

When reading "Sanctuary," think about how each one of the characters -- save for Popeye, Mrs. Goodwin and DA Eustace Graham -- loses himself or herself in some form of self-delusion to avoid dwelling on the worst parts of their own character and existence.

Even Horace Benbow's courageous decision to defend Mr. Graham against charges of murder is little more than an attempt to distract himself from his marital woes and the fact that he is so obviously out of place in his own home town now.

"Sanctuary" could have been Faulkner's masterpiece and some current-day critics suggest that perhaps it is. It's not. Faulkner should have re-written the book, smoothed the plot, fleshed out the characters far more than they are in the current text and allowed for a more leisurely examination of man's struggle for safe haven, both physically and spiritually. "Sanctuary" is a very powerful examination of the evil that men and women do and, in that sense, it is a very Catholic novel.

I would not recommend its use in high school or lower-level college undergraduate survey courses. It's simply too intricate to be useful for students at those levels. But for an upper-level course in American lit, American culture, religion or philosophy, "Sanctuary" is an appropriate text with quite a bit to say about modern man and the chains that bind his soul.

 

 

 

 

It does not Synerge: on Being Cheated Out of a Good Story

 

 

 

In "Wild Palms" it was a manifest literary technique, but in "Sanctuary" it's a desperate attempt to weave together a story from different plotlines. I am a Faulkner buff, and have always felt tricked by this one: everything that goes on at "the house" prior to the "event" (I'm trying not to give too much away) is some of the master's best. It is a world apart, relating not to "the south", as some wrote, nor to any other referent world; its inherent danger and unexpectedness and possibilities depend on that. Alas, the story then focuses on the character that it ultimately chose for its true protagonist, a well-intentioned yet incompetent lawyer (you'll recognize him from other works -- F really overplayed this character), and an uninteresting one at that. As soon as the narrative moves into the cities it looses its force, revived at times only by such comic giveaways as the provincial youngsters who frequent a brothel in Memphis, never realizing that they reside in another. I can almost imagine Faulkner cutting & pasting that from some draft, soberly thinking, "I got to liven this up a bit". And it goes from bad to worse.

All that befalls Popeye after his last encounter with Red seems artificial.

It recalls Hollywood's standards for treating villains, owing more to comodification of morality than to narrative integrity.

Do we learn something about Popeye that makes him a more interesting character than in the first part? Hardly.

Yet with all of that, the writing itself was rarely surpassed in American prose.

Faulkner has that uncanny ability to get us involved in his nontransparent language all the while keeping it away from the fore, first and foremost using it to tell his story (as opposed to Joyce or Dickens). For that alone this book is a joy; but on the narrative scale one feels, ultimately, cheated out of a good story.

 

 

Darkness, American Stlye

 

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 "shadow of the branch" approach to the narrative keeping the reader guessing as to what actually takes place at the "Frenchman's Place"; and when the reader finally "gets it" -- or, more accurately -- when this reader "got it," the experience was as shocking as anything to be seen in Doestoyevsky, Conrad or Bauldelaire.

I wrote my thesis on this work five years ago and its effect on me, as I flippantly spew these remarks are as vivid as the first time I encountered Popeye with his face like "tin," and Temple Drake.
Highly recommended for those not afraid of impingement, because _Sanctuary_ will impinge on whatever the reader's threshold for true darkness and horror may be.

 

 

On the long blonde legs of Temple Drake

I love it.

The venality and corruption portrayed in this book are shivery and endlessly thought-provoking, with the character of Temple Drake as its fascinating focus. Faulkner outdid himself with Temple, a spoiled, capricious and ultimately abused young woman who becomes fed like a baby vampire on the seedy whorehouse where she is captive.

The best thing about Sanctuary is, though, we never really know who she was before this pass.

Virgin or whore?

 

 

 

Find "Sanctuary' in Faulkner!

 

I read "As I Lay Dying" and I loved it!
 I read "The Sound an the Fury" and thought it was briliant!
 I finished reading "Sanctuary" today and thought--like the previous two--it was a literary classic!
 Anyone who has ever read a Faulkner book knows that, by the end of his works, there is at least one character that is loathed--In "Sanctury" there is a plethora!
 You will love the book but hate the characters--their actions that is. . .
 Find out for yourselves what I mean. . ..

 

 

 

  Brilliant Language, Poor Plot

 

While Faulkner admitted that this book, alone among the myriad of his writings, was written for money purposes only (and thus has some of his most lurid, sensationalistic, and reactionary prose), it has a very powerful attracting factor: its language. While the convoluted and unclear plotline (which Faulkner himself detested enough to heavily reconstruct, revise at a personal cost of $270 in a time when that was a small fortune) is an obvious detriment, the gorgeous word choice, word placement, and sentence construction nearly make up for it.

For a short example, I will submit the final sentence:

"She closed the compact and from beneath her smart new hat she seemed to follow with her eyes the waves of music, to dissolve into the dying brasses, across the pool and the opposite semicircle of trees where at sombre intervals the dead tranquil queens in stained marble mused, and on into the sky lying prone and vanquished in the embrace of the season of rain and death.&q! uot; Simply gorgeous; but the unconvincing story of rape, murder, lynching, a bumbling lawyer, a dangerous bootlegger from Memphis whose entire past history and motivation is described in 4 or 5 of the final pages, and many others can seem at times very outlandish and hard to follow, not from intrinsic, Faulknerian difficulty to read, but because of poor detail and a shallow style of writing.

Characters have very little depth, and are afforded very short monologues when given one at all; Many characters, uncharacteristically, seem to simply not exist below the exterior, under the surface.

However, if a reader can bypass this gruff outside layer of paint, Sanctuary has much to offer in way of the English Language.

 

 

 

 

 

William, we hardly knew ye.

 

 

If I told you to read a book by Faulkner you'd probably start imagining crazy old ladies and barn-burnings and usually you'd be right.

Not this time.

There's only one appearance by a member of the Snopes family and that's late in the book.

But you won't miss them.

Inside this book is a world where no one is quite as they seem from debutantes to moonshiners.

This book reads more like a Dashiel Hammett than anything else and with rape, murder, lynching, and corruption there's something for everyone. Except a lot of Snopes.

 

 

 

 Powerhouse novel

 

 

One of Faulkner's fastest moving and most exciting tales, written in lucid and brilliant prose thay will hit you between the eyes.