Light in August by William FaulknerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is the first William Faulkner book I’ve ever read. It won’t bet the last. This man was a genius. He creates word pictures that depict a time and a place and a people with excruciating and artistic realness and paints pictures with his words that will long resonate after the book is finished.
Set in a rural Mississippi town in the early 1930s and peopled with a variety of characters who will live in my memory forever, the story follows a young and pregnant teenager who is looking for her lover with the hope of marriage. Instead, she meets a hardworking and unattractive man who falls in love with her helps her to find a place to stay. In the meantime, her actual lover and father of her unborn child are selling bootleg whisky and sharing a cabin with a man named Christmas who is part negro and is bedding a wealthy woman who dies when her house is set on fire. There’s also a defrocked pastor with problems of his own and the pathetic grandparents of the man named Christmas who is in danger of being lynched.
The book, however, is more than the sum of its parts. It is the worldview that typifies William Faulkner at his finest and even though there are parts of the book that a bit overwrote and confusing, I still give it my highest recommendation and advise readers to not miss the experience of reading this fine author.
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