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As I Lay Dying
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As I Lay Dying
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As I Lay Dying
Audiobook6 hours

As I Lay Dying

Written by William Faulkner

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

From the Modern Library's new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner-also available are Snopes, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Selected Short Stories


One of William Faulkner's finest novels, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren's family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through multiple voices, As I Lay Dying vividly brings to life Faulkner's imaginary South, one of literature's great invented landscapes, and is replete with the poignant, impoverished, violent, and hypnotically fascinating characters that were his trademark. Along with a new Foreword by E. L. Doctorow, this edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Faulkner expert Noel Polk.


From the Hardcover edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 16, 2005
ISBN9780739325377
Author

William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all American novelists and short-story writers.  His other works include the novels The Sound and the Fury, The Reivers, and Sanctuary.  He twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and in 1949 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Reviews for As I Lay Dying

Rating: 3.886955135518756 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Easy to see how this was a revolutionary piece - - but the dialect dragged for me, and the seriously strong story and character elements took a lot of wading and digging to get to. It took a viewing of the faithful (and highly worthwhile) 2013 James Franco movie to show me a few things I missed in the accented quagmire.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Although Faulkner was a name known to me, I’d read none of his books and knew nothing about him or his works. But my father had two novels by him, which I took, and I read one, The Sound and the Fury, last year and was hugely impressed. So I picked up a couple more on eBay. And I brought them with me to Sweden. The first of these was As I Lay Dying, arguably Faulkner’s best-known and most highly-regarded novel. There’s even a commercially successful metal band named after it. The story is told from several viewpoints, each in their own voice, and it concerns the death of Addie Bundren, and her husband’s attempt, with family and friends, to take her body to a neighbouring town to bury her among her kin. But all that is either incidental, or merely the trigger, for what happens in each narrative. It all takes place in Faulkner’s native American South – Mississippi, I think, for the most part – and the language reflects the setting. Despite As I Lay Dying‘s reputation, I didn’t find it as impressive a work of literature as The Sound and the Fury, possibly because the latter had the more adventurous structure, and I’m big on novels that experiment with narrative structure. But that’s really damning it with faint praise as this is full-on classic American Literature, and though not all works and writers described as that appeal to me, I do admire Faulkner’s prose a great deal. Definitely worth reading.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I hated As I Lay Dying. Part of me worries about this, since it’s a classic and presumably there must be something great about it. But whatever it is that makes people like Faulkner completely skipped me by.I think I should preface the rest of the review with the acknowledgement that I read this as a school assignment. I would not have picked it up otherwise, and I would certainly not have continued with it.The writing was torturous to get through. Just take a gander at “his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face”. Thank goodness it was only 260 pages. It was hard enough to get through the writing and the tedium of it, and there was no way I could do so for longer.It was also difficult to figure out what was actually happening in the book. If I hadn’t checked SparkNotes, I would never have figured out that a character was pregnant.Also, I didn’t care about any of the characters, not the slightest bit. They were all self obsessed and unlikable.I would not recommend As I Lay Dying.Originally posted on The Illustrated Page.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I found this to primarily be an exploration of grief and the various ways the members of Addie's family dealt with her passing. I didn't think it was a good as [i]The Sound and the Fury[/i], but was definitely typical of Faulkner. I did find the constant changing of point of view more distracting than in [i]The Sound and the Fury[/i] where there was just the four sections. If you are a fan of modernist American literature or Southern literature I would definitely recommend this book, but just be forewarned this employs quite a few unconventional techniques and formal experimentalism. Highly recommended for those interested in study literature but if you are more of a casual reader probably not something to just pick up on the spur of the moment.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A book you have to invest perseverance in to get the reward. But well worth it. Each chapter is written in the first person but from a different characters perspective. So you get a multi character (17 I think) point of view. Sometimes hard going with the style used and being written in the vernacular. Black comedy. Tragedy.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Faulkner is an acquired taste. As with "The Sound and the Fury" I gave the book a good try but just couldn't get through it. Specifically I didn't really care to see where the characters were going. Faulkner may be a literary master of depicting a time/place/human condition, and for that I can see how he's loved among some. But I want a story about characters who I want to know about. These people... I could't care where they wound up.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was never forced to read Faulkner when young. I certainly wouldn't have appreciated him in high school. And yet, forty years later, I guess nothing has changed on that respect. I am utterly at a loss as to how this is "one of the greatest novels of the 20th century". Faulkner said he wrote this over six weeks and didn't change a word. Bully for him and condolences to the readers. This has no redeeming value that I can see, no light shining on a human condition, no entertainment value, no educational component.

    Too bad time has a direction arrow. I'd love to get this time back and read something good. If this is one of his most "accessible" novels, well, I'm not going to be reading any more Faulkner. Kind of knew that from the start.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A difficult read, but one worth the label of classic. Rarely is poverty so atmospheric in a novel, nor do characters' accents emerge in the story's telling. However, the point of view switches frequently among a wide expanse of characters, which made the book more than a little confusing to me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful, wierd, fantastic book. Breaks every rule ever created about writing and still manages to captivate. This is difficult book to review because there's so many twists and suprises, all the way through to the last page, that I'm afraid of saying to much and spoiling it. Should be a required read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Pretty dazzling. Every character's voice is so clearly defined that you'd be able to name each one just from reading a few paragraphs of their thoughts. Like all great books, it hops nimbly from comedy to tragedy. Glad I fished it off the shelf.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    By showing different view points from each character, the story was able to captivate me to the point where I could not put the book down. The use of different archetypes for each character made the plot more interesting. Addie's family and the mishaps that happen to them while they are on their way to bury Addie makes you question what really ties a family together and if this family was stable at all.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Addie Bundren is dying, and has requested to be buried amongst her family 40 miles away. Her impoverished family attempt to fulfil this wish, hampered by conditions and their own stupidity, greed, and distraction with their own problems.A great, great book. A modernist novel where each chapter is told by a member of the family or the people who know them, yet it's still accessible and easy to read (Faulkner is often very tough), as well as a gripping story. All the characters are fascinating and the writing is often out of this world. I'm slightly irritated with myself that I've only read this twice.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Terrifying and wonderful at the same time.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A dirge of mud and waters and a fish.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying presents the account of one family's mission to bury their mother in a distant city. Written shortly after the somber The Sound and the Fury, this short novel presents human existence as an absurd joke. Addie Bundren claims her final resting place should be near her relatives in Jefferson, Mississippi as opposed to at home. Told from the perspectives of 15 characters--including Bundren family members and local residents, the constant change in point of view can make for an uneasy read. Much of the action and relationships must be inferred from this "stream of consciousness". Faulkner uses this technique to his advantage; the reader gets inside the mind of each character. For instance, Vardaman (the youngest Bundren child), rambles near-nonsense after his mother dies; but we see a shift as he calms throughout the journey. Thus this story present death as its subject with the central image of the human corpse. The furious passions and furious activity that result contribute to the intensity of this novel. Building on an accumulation of incongruities this becomes one of Faulkner's greatest works, a small novel that is very powerful.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Might be a classic, but this one left me stone cold. A more awful bunch of people I've never met. A family of half crazy, brutal 'po' whites' who set out on totally misguided journey to get old Granny Addie's corpse into the grave in a distant village. There are multiple narrators (with bizarre names), but their voices are not clearly differentiated - in fact Faulkner text is designed to obscure identification and the stream of consciousness technique added to the confusion.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The 1949 Nobel Prize for literature winner wrote this novel in 6 weeks and it was published in 1930. It's written in "stream of consciousness" style by 15 different narators. Its dark and depressing and emotionally thick, but well worth pulling yourself through. What struck me is Faulkners ability to make you sincerely attached to the characters, even though they aren't so likeable and there are many of them. Sometimes you find yourself thinking "He wouldn't have said that!" But maybe he would, maybe Darl, a poor, young, uneducated country boy, really would use the word soporific and think so philosophically about time and space ("It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between." Other reviewers have hated this, thinking that it is so out of character, that it is the authors uncontrollable urge to write so poetically. But I like to think it's the whole "you can't judge a book by it's cover" thing. I love that there are these wonderful characters who challenge your first judgement of them.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A slow start, but momentum keeps building through the whole book and has you racing towards the end. There's a lot to untangle, but it's one of the most fantastic examples of classic literature that I've read.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This is the second book I've read by William Faulkner. My first, Intruder in the Dust, was assigned me in high school and was my introduction both to Faulkner and to the stream-of-consciouness technique. It wasn't a happy experience in either respect. Now, soon after tackling Joyce's Ulysses, considered the epitome of stream-of-consciousness literature, I finally read As You Lay Dying, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for who knows how long. It's a much easier read than Ulysses, but I'm afraid I found that decades later, I still find myself hating Faulkner with the heat of a thousand suns. And yes, I did understand how this is all about different perceptions yada yada. You can understand this book, you can get the place of its technique in literary history, and still hate it.Published in 1930, this is the story of Addie Bundren's last journey with her family to be buried in Jefferson, Mississippi. One of her sons, Cash, begins to build her coffin where she can hear the sawing of the planks where she lays dying. The novel is told through 15 first person points of view in 59 chapters, a third of which come from one of her sons Darl. Although a bit macabre, it might have worked with a more conventional style, where we could understand Addie and her family and the impact of her death from all those perspectives--one of them told by her even as she lays rotting in her coffin. But I think part of my problem with writers such as Joyce and Faulkner is that their techniques too often seem a gimmick--it's all you can notice and stands between the reader and the story and any immediacy and makes it impossible to care about their characters--not that the bunch in this novel, kindly called "dysfunctional" in some reviews and "white trash" in others is ever lovable. It's not as if the style fits those characters. These are simple country folk. And much of their monologues are rendered with the usual Huckleberry Finn-like misspellings and dialect and the random absence of an apostrophe. But then Faulkner can't resist rolling out these articulate, sophisticated sentences that don't fit the first person point of view. Some of those passages are beautiful. Note this description of the rain:It begins to rain. The first harsh, sparse, swift drops rush through the leaves and across the ground in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable suspense. They are big as buckshot, warm as though fired from a gun; they sweep across the lantern in a vicious hissing.Lovely, but doesn't fit backwoods farmers who seemingly can't spell or punctuate grammatically, does it? Then there are the times we go to that irritating stream of words that is supposed to represent a wandering, meandering mind with its run-on sentences and non sequiturs:We picked on down the row, the woods getting closer and closer and the secret shade, picking on into the secret shade with my sack and Lafe's sack. Because I said will I or won't I when the sack was half full because I said if the sack is full when we get to the woods it won't be me. I said if it dont mean for me to do it the sack will not be full and I will turn up the next row but if the sack is full, I cannot help it. It will be that I had to do it all the time and I cannot help it. And we picked on toward the secret shade and our eyes would drown together touching on his hands and I didnt say anything. I said "What are you doing?" and he said "I am picking into your sack." And so it was full when we came to the end of the row and I could not help it.There are chapters that end with a sentence without a period. There is a chapter of only one line: My mother is a fish. (Admittedly in the context of the book not quite as nonsensical as that sounds.) Cash, the guy eagerly building his mother's coffin at the beginning gives us a chapter of two sentences and another consisting of a short list, both dealing with building the coffin. All sorts of modernist techniques are on display and grinding to dust any hope of enjoying the novel.Goodness knows not all great works are easy to read. Chaucer and Shakespeare are not easy, although mostly because the English language has changed so much since their time, but also admittedly poetry is more difficult to scan than prose. For Dante, Homer, Virgil, I'm happy to make the effort, and I can see how their style and structure works with their content, and once I get used to their styles I'm enthralled. With Faulkner's novel, I didn't feel that strong link. And even though their stories are centuries old, I often felt for the characters in classic works such as Homer's--it's a line in his Odyssey, in fact, which provides the title of Faulkner's novel. So when I find characters from my own country and century far less able to touch me than from a work of epic poetry from 2,700 years ago, I can't help but feel the author is to blame. I will try Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury someday. It's considered one of the most important novels of the last century, and thus I imagine it might have something to teach me about modern literature. I felt I did learn a lot in that regard from reading Joyce's Ulysses, as much as I hated it, and even from this book by Faulkner. I also remember loving his short story, "A Rose for Emily"--but then there are short stories by Joyce I also love. Sometimes less extreme, earlier works by an author we don't usually like can speak to us, or their extreme techniques work better in a more concise form. But I can't imagine reading another of Faulkner's novels beyond The Sound and the Fury unless someone can recommend something by him that ordinary readers who are not doctoral candidates in literature can truly enjoy, with something resembling a plot and characters that don't repel.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I often think about reading Faulkner, usually with much trepidation because of both his rather complicated style and his odd methods of plot advancement. I find that picking up the book and plunging into that boiling sea of prose is much easier than it seems. The reader doesn't drown or burn up, but instead swims easily and steadily, even if that swimming is in circles."As I Lay Dying" is the story of a woman's death and the incredibly inept attempts of her family to bury her in an appropriate place. Told in fifteen different voices, including that of the deceased, the story makes the reader struggle a bit at first, but soon each voice becomes easily distinguished. The characters are clearly etched and each is completely different from all the others. Although this is a true Southern Gothic tale, and at the same time very funny, in the end it's about the futility of human existence. At least that's what I thought: the last sentence (don't by any means read ahead) is a stunner.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    When I first started reading this novel, I was totally lost and confused, so much so that I was tempted to set it aside. Nonetheless, I persevered and read it through to the end, glad that I did so. Faulkner, in this novel, used language, psychology, and literary techniques that I was not familiar with, which at first made it extremely difficult for me to follow the story. As the story progressed, however, I began to understand it more thoroughly. One technique which Faulkner used, was the telling of the story by multiple narrators. This was a very interesting technique in that you are able to see into the thoughts and feelings of the various characters. However, as there was no introduction of these characters at the beginning of the story, I found it difficult to determine what their relationships to one another were. It was only as the story progressed, that I was able to figure this out, and by that time I felt that I had missed some very important details. In addition, I was somewhat disappointed with the ending of the story. After all of the hard work that the family went through to get Addy to Jefferson to bury her, Faulkner did not even bother to describe the actual burial. Anse borrowed tools to dig her grave, and then returned the tools. It felt somewhat like an anticlimax to all that had taken place along the journey. Still, even with its faults, I would recommend reading this book. You will find it's unique style worth the investigation.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Bundren family must take the body of their matriarch, Addy Bundren, to her home town in Jefferson, where she wants to be buried. Along the way, the unlucky family meets obstacle after obstacle. Faulkner jumps points of view, getting into the head of each character, revealing their inner hopes and fears, with precise clarity of voice. Each character is multi-layered and complex, as though they were flesh and blood. I certainly liked this one far better than The Sound and the Fury. As I Lay Dying, despite being innately morbid, is less overtly bleak and the writing is less dense and more readable. Though I came, bit by bit, to hate the father figure, who seemed unconsciously cruel and stubborn, I actually liked many of the characters in this book. Despite their many hardships, I believed many of the characters had enough humanity and goodness in them to find a way to pull out of the spiraling despair of their lives. So if you are interested in reading a Faulkner, I would definitely recommend going with this one over The Sound and the Fury.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved it but it's almost too perfect.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Depressingly accurate. Why one shouldn't ignore God.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    For the first eighty-three pages precisely it was tempting to dismiss this as "tender yokels"--I get that Darl is the psychedelic one and that when literarisms like "the signboard that lifts its fading capitulation" and "turns away its fading and tranquil assertion" come fromhis mouth it's a sort of stream-of-consciousness verfremdungseffekt, but it isn't limited to him by any means, the diction thing, which I take as sloppiness on Faulkner's part at best and at worst the intentional irruption of the patrician patriarch at moments of vertigo, the drawing of a dome over the blackcloud sky and the raising of one blowing white head against the storm. And my constructed Faulkner is unfair, but so are his constructed yokels sometimes--it's amazing how bad the most talented writers are at rendering dialects in a verisimilitudinal way. Linguistics fails us only by not sharing its deep lore.

    Anyway, Addie Bundren is dying and her fucked-up, destitute family are preparing to go down the mountain and bury her in town. Horrible secrets out; the past bubbles to the surface through the dark ichor of psychosis. They don't know yet how to be the new kind of people, owners in a consumption society, and so they are obsessed with exotic bananas and shun refined foods as above them. In each of them there is a deathurge, and a central irony is that it is stronger than the death-curse laid down by Addie the adder-mother. But it's that page 83--first Cash with his meticulous (numbered!) exclamation of why he built her coffin beveled, then Darl again: "My mother is a fish." That first ripe glimpse that this is a book heady with madness. Those moments are fearsome.

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I read As I Lay Dying yesterday as I lay trying to get over viral pneumonia and I must say that I enjoyed my first William Faulkner more.As I Lay Dying is the story of a poor family whose mother/wife is dying & the husband has promised her that he would bury her in her hometown with her kinfolk. It is told in the first person in small chapters by everyone in the story. Mother dies early on and the remainder of the story is principally the telling of how the family struggled to fulfill the father's promise to the her.I didn't have enough time with any one character to really identify with them & thus it made it difficult for me to care about any of them. It was well written as all of Faulkner's works seem to be. I'm glad I read it but I think perhaps I missed quite a bit of his meaning of the words and just read the words of the story. I will have to read this one again one day when my brain is a little less befuddled.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is the first of Faulkner I've read, and to be honest I didn't care for the book all that much. It was hard to follow, and over half the book seemed irrelevant. It is written in a different, original way (which I liked) but was just too boring for me.It was okay.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Addie Bundren lays dying while her oldest son builds her coffin outside her window. After her death, her husband and children set out to bury her in her hometown. They are beset by a variety of obstacles, not the least of which are their own personal difficulties.The first thing I thought (and loved) about As I Lay Dying, was how wonderfully Faulkner captured the feeling of the terminal illness and death of a matriarch/patriarch. How very, very long each day becomes and how extremely important and significant each small daily task becomes. Also moving is the youngest son’s reaction to the dead body: “It was not her. I was there, looking. I saw. I thought it was her, but it was not. It was not my mother.” I found this was my reaction to every funeral I’ve been to and have heard this sentiment given as advice to people attending their first. Another beautiful passage on the difficulty of caring for someone from Jewel, the third son: “I said if you’d just let her alone. Sawing and knocking, and keeping the air always moving so fast on her face that when you’re tired you can’t breathe it, and that goddamn adze going One lick less.”I am always fascinated by stream of consciousness, and Faulkner is a master. One of the biggest complaints I see in reviews of the novel are the difficulty in determining what is happening. However, I think this is one of the stronger points of the novel’s construction. After all, how often does one think factual things about oneself or family.* Also it exposes different viewpoints. Events are not always seen in the same way by each character. The post poignant of these is the chapter from Addie’s perspective. This in itself could be a remarkable and beautiful short story.I found myself fascinated by Darl’s character. For most of the book, I found him to be the more well adjusted, comprehensible one. Here is a lovely passage from early on: “When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set at least six hours, and be drunk from a gourd. Water should never be drunk from metal. At night it is better still.” However, as the book moves on both his actions and thought patterns degenerate significantly. I’m still not sure what to make of his breakdown. Finally, Faulkner again deals with issues of fate, sin, inevitability, etc. The father’s feelings on roads for example: “Durn that road…A-laying there, right up to my door, where every bad luck that comes and goes is bound to find it…But I told her it want no luck in it, because the Lord put roads for travelling: why He laid them down flat on the earth. When He aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it long ways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man.” As difficult as the family’s situation becomes, I could never quite bring myself to feel like their fate is hopeless. I can’t tell if this is me projecting my optimism on the story or Faulkner not believing his own doomed characters. Thoughts? *Possible Spoiler Alert* such as ‘I am pregnant’, ‘he is not my father’, ‘I had an affair’, etc. I found this a really hard novel to address without spoilers.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    **Accidentally put this on the book on tape version earlier**Well, this was such a wildly depressing concept of a book. It almost had elements of black-comedy (as in Coen Brothers movies), but the subject matter was so awful I just couldn't do anything but cringe. This family gave the me a feeling of eminent doom from page 1. Kind of like the Joads from Grapes of Wrath without any whif of optimism at the end of the line. In this book the patriarch seems hell bent on making things as hard as they can be for no good reason whatsoever.Compared to The Sound and the Fury, this was an easy read, but there were still moments I was revisiting previous pages because Mr. Faulkner lost me. I would not suggest reading this if you're having a rough week unless you are looking for the final nudge to get you to jump off a bridge.A superbly well done, horribly depressing book (in my humble opinion).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One of my friends, not highly literarily schooled, brouight me this book just before a heart operation was scheduled. Such a sense of humour, eh? The dialogue is p;ure downhome for the rural people through the Appalachians up through the eastern mountains. In the book is the first usage I remember seeing of an idiomati9c phrase i use in my life, but mostly in my writing, e.g., "to get in a tight." Faulkner used it several times in this story about old man Anze and his family taking the rotting body of Attie the grandmother to a burfial place far away across raging rivers and through dusty, hot days.