Southern Gothic Fever Dream part I

Category: dribblings

I’m reading Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (not bragging.) and I’m in the middle of the book. Actually, the moment you start reading it you feel like you’re already in the middle of this book. And when you’ve read for an hour and you think, man, I’m really getting somewhere in this book, but you check and you’ve only read like, 12 pages, and you’re nowhere near the end of a chapter (or PARAGRAPH BREAK), there’s a defeat: “I’ve only read 12 pages? But I’m exhausted.”

One of my coworkers asked me if it was good. I said that I don’t know. I know it’s supposed to be good. The whole thing feels like I have a fever and there’s a mentally ill person trying to tell me a story, and I know that it’s not entirely my fault, cos I can’t help that the mentally ill person can’t seem to talk in normal and/or shorter sentences, but maybe if I didn’t have this fever I could understand better what she’s trying to tell me.

It’s very good.

But sometimes, I can’t help thinking that the men telling the story are a bunch of gossips, and that the woman telling the story, well, she’s just pitiful awful. It’s not her fault. As of the middle of the book, I cannot figure out what the point of it all is, but I expect at the end I’ll be all, “Ohhhh. I get it. DONE.”

Here’s the short version of the book, so far:

“Dad, the ol’ crazy lady up the street has sent for me. What should I do?”

“Welp, go see her.”

“Reckon what she wants?”

“Don’t matter. Just go. Do whatever she tells you.”

“Like what?”

“Like, if she says fix something, fix it. If she says move something, move it. If she says sit here in this dark, stuffy room and listen to me tell you the most sad, crazy-redundant story of your life, then do that.”

“What, sit there while she tells me a long, repetitive story?”

“Yep.”

“What do I say?”

“Nothing. Trust me, you won’t have to say anything.”

“Why am I doing this?”

“It’s the privilege of your youth to do so.”

“Seriously?”

“Yep. But look on the bright side, when it’s over you’ll have a story to tell.”

 

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