It took Bill half of the 400-page book to adapt to Faulkner's style, trudging
through 50 pages a day, a masochistic record.
The author seemed to loathe the dot and the question or exclamation mark and
fond of replacing them with the parentheses, the semicolon, and the hyphen. Often,
one sentence fills a paragraph, a prowess the writer obviously blissed out in
with no regard to the misery of the reader.
The text, ridden with parentheses, one pair nesting in another, resembles the
source code of a computer program to Bill as he tried, from time to time, to
match a right bracket to its left, sometimes on the previous page. Often, at the
end of a lengthy explanation, he tried to recall the derserving subject. He
started reading on Monday and it was on the following Sunday morning in Starbucks that
Bill leafed through the last few pages of the saga. He could almost say he
enjoyed it, the way one enjoys the last mile of a marathon.
Sutpen came down the Virginia mountains and rolled to the antebellum south with
his poor white family. He vanished the night after being told by a negro slave
to go to the backdoor of the planter's house when he brought his father's
message to the front. With plenty of courage and shrewdness (read ruthlessness),
he made his fortune in a West Indies sugar field, married, and had boy,
Charles. All would've been well if he just sat tight and savored his good luck.
But he did not forget his design or why he came here. Soon, he repudiated his
French-speaking wife, forsook his family, came to Jefferson county in
Mississippi, swindled 100 square miles of land from an Indian, named it the Sutpen
100, bought his own team of negro slaves, built a grand house, married the
daughter of a local grocery store keeper, Ellen, and had a boy, Henry, and a
girl, Judith.
Meanwhile, Charles grew up spoon-fed with hatred toward his absent father, while
his scorned mother and her lawyer watched and devised revenge. The chance came
when Henry entered a local college. Charles was sent there, idolized by his
younger brother, and invited to spend Christmas at Sutpen 100. He was expected,
by Henry and Ellen and, through her, the town, to wed Judith.
All, except Ellen and her father, outlasted the civil war but not the revenge.
Charles was shot by Henry who afterwards went to exile and burried by Judith.
Sutpen came home to find his slaves gone and property taken. 61 years old, he
tried to marry Miss Rosa, the sister 20 years younger than Ellen, and rejected,
turned to Wash Jones's grand daughter. In the end, only one negro boy with
Sutpen's blood through Charles surivived the whole grand multi-generation
homicide drama.
