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Rating: The pen of William Faulkner has the same shape as my spaceship. I sat inside it and from the little hole I stopped to see a new world. Still, I waited. Then it clicked, the tip came out and I was catapulted out, darting like a spit I immersed myself among the lines of a strange world, where some people still smell of trees.
It's Yoknapatawpha County, tonight maybe there's a fair, at the first stroke the negro drops everything and goes... if only he could find his quarter dollar. He lost it, it fell out of his torn pocket. He searched for it at the river, but nothing. He only found a golf ball. He tried to sell the ball, but, you know, you can't deal with whites. They just took it. No money. He goes away. I stopped on the porch of this house that time has filled with misfortunes, staring at the trees that silently lead to the road and Benjy was still in the kitchen climbing up the flame that spread from the stove to the walls, while Dilsey was fixing the cake bought at the shop. But what is time if not the flea market where misfortunes are bought and sold? Quentin knows, he realized. Quentin took the hands off his watch and threw them away, but it took hours before the ticking became imperceptible and even when it seemed far away, lost among the corridors of Harvard, far away, gone forever, it surfaced. It surfaced on this tram that didn't even carry a negro. Like when you need them, he thought. Never known a negro who answers present when you need them, he thought, as he ran his thumb over the numbers' reliefs. It surfaced as he fled along the path from the splashes of the three boys, with the girl clutching her loaf of bread to her chest. It surfaced in front of the judge, but what are seven dollars for someone who is no longer afraid of time? No, judge. It's not his fault if dogs and children do nothing but follow him, he said. The judge agreed, but you must pay for time. You who do not perceive time, you will have to pay me... one day or another. Then he died, after taking leave of the world. He thought of Caddy, of Benjy, but he was already dead. I was in the car with Jason, I say. Searching for Quentin, the niece with the same face as Uncle Quentin and her mother, Caddy, damn whore, he says. Mother, will you ever have a negro worth killing? Mother, when you die you will take your negros with you, I no longer want to feed them, he says. My back will work only for my mouth, he says. Caddy was supposed to marry a guy who owned a bank. This guy had promised Jason - the only one of the three children who knew something about the material side of things - a position, a job. Then it went bad, Caddy was kicked out of the house and Jason found his soul poisoned. Years of recriminating, of supposing. Pure poison. I'll show you, Jews of New York, he says, I'll show you. Maybe it will rain, it's time to bet everything on the cotton market, the price will skyrocket. Jason doesn't want to win. He just wants to recover the lost ground. The money that is rightfully his, to hell with the rest.
Four tales, three in the first person: one for Benjy, thirty-three years of mental delay; one for Quentin, poisoned by his own passions; one for Jason, poisoned by resentment. The fourth, with an omniscient narrator, follows step by step - up the stairs - the hasty steps of Dilsey, the black servant who cooks for everyone, who has followed the story of this family, year after year, poison after poison. This dead family, on the threshold of the great crisis.
As if "One Hundred Years of Solitude" consisted only of thoughts, as if Joyce's Ulysses had rewritten "One Hundred Years of Solitude" while listening to Nick Cave's From Here to Eternity. Like a "Fists in the Pocket" made in color. With too many colors. You won't find another example of stream of consciousness so effective and you won't easily find another book so painful, heavy, as if the letters were bas-reliefs carved on reinforced concrete. William Faulkner will sprinkle your brain over time that coils on itself. It will be a nice feeling. Maybe.
The word is the wooden "Y" piece, Faulkner is the elastic, and you are the small and ordinary pebble. A pebble that can go far, very far with a good elastic. I have arrived in Yoknapatawpha, and who would have expected it!?!
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