If I had to recommend a good book for the summer and the upcoming vacations to anyone asking for my opinion, one that combines excellent literature with intrinsic narrative depth and an emotional search for the hidden meanings of existence, I would have little doubt and I would confidently go with "As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner (1932).

Regarding the writer, I don't intend to say much, noting in passing how he has been little or not at all reviewed and discussed in the site's book section, referring even the most distracted to various wiki pages or more technical sites for a reconstruction of his troubled personality and equally troubled life.

An alcoholic, accustomed to frequenting brothels, perpetually dissatisfied with himself and seeking economic success even by bowing to the logic of Hollywood and selling out his talent for money, let us view Faulkner here in his best light: as the champion of the American from the Middle West and - if I may - of a Middle Age enclosed between the Great Depression of '29 and World War II, whose aftermath, from McCarthyism to the authoritarian paternalism of Ike Eisenhower, would be felt for a couple of decades, with the Kennedy parenthesis aside (and perhaps it is no coincidence that it was a parenthesis, despite all the historical reservations about JFK and his posthumous downsizing, for which I refer you directly to James Ellroy).

The profile that most distinguishes Faulkner from other writers of his time, and apparently similar ones, from Steinbeck to Hemingway, perhaps passing through Fitzgerald and that Miller so loved on this site - lies entirely in the experimentalism of Faulkner's narrative language and in the attitude of creating a comprehensive epic that encompasses his works and revolves around the events in an imaginary region of the Middle West - Yoknapatawpha - where almost all his novels are set.

It seems that Faulkner essentially views old America with the eyes of the native, but with the sensitivity of a European intellectual and with a dichotomy between the narrator - creator of plots - and the writer - creator of languages - that multiplies the reading layers of his works, surpassing many of his contemporaries and some of his apocryphal successors, among whom I dare to mention Kerouac and, through indirect filiation, the same Bukowski much loved on this site.

Coming closer to the examination of "As I Lay Dying," accepting the suggestions of Kosmogabri and other readers, I won't dwell too much on the plot, which is somewhat sparse and easy to summarize, concerning the funeral procession intended to carry the remains of a woman - Addie Bundren - from the family home to her birthplace, accompanied by her husband Anse and their five children, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman.

The book covers over two hundred pages of this, and little else, reprising - and here we have proof of what Faulkner's epic is - the classical model of Xenophon's Anabasis: where the return home (motherland, land where one is buried) is not that of an army defeated by war, but more prosaically, daily yet no less dramatically, that of a group of people variously defeated by life and faced with the death of a family member, but also with their impotence in the face of the unfolding events, both physical and spiritual, and, still prosaically, with their finiteness against the grindstone of that great mill that are time and nature itself.

The other aspect that makes this book recommended is, as I previously mentioned, the narrative style of Faulkner, which, on the contrary, travels in the opposite direction to the epic that forms the model of the story: an epic story, even if in certain aspects imbued with everyday misery like this one, is usually narrated by an omniscient subject, by a writer who controls and knows everything before his reader, directing characters almost as if they were puppets towards one direction or another.

The omniscient narrator, in a sense, is like the god of literature, playing God - in relation to his characters - almost as the true God (for those who believe) would know in advance the destinies of man and every individual. A classic example is Homer, a modern example Manzoni: in all cases, we face a narrator who replicates Creation, in a Space and Time enclosed - or rather: contained within the paper and characters of the text - that are replicas of infinite spaces and times. It's curious - I would point out - that both were religious subjects or linked to tradition, yet paradoxically apostates and blasphemers in their attempt to replicate God!

All this is absent in Faulkner, who fragments the story into sub-narrations by the various characters of the book, structurally definable as a set of monologues related to the same life experience.

To a distracted observer and reader, this might be indifferent, not being new, even in certain genre literature and cinema (take "The Usual Suspects" if your palate is not too refined and you don't know Kurosawa), the narrative device of describing the same thing from different points of view, relativizing the perception of reality and, in some ways, the truth itself, the individual's ability to decipher and describe the real objectively, separating it from the presumed.

But this is not Faulkner's intent, who, in my opinion, plays his game on a higher and more elevated level, and for this very reason fascinating: Faulkner does not relativize, he simply dilates and amplifies; he doesn't deny reality and the finitude of things, he doesn't deny the death and ruin to which this journey tends; he multiplies and redunds its sense, its meaning, showing us how, no matter how one intends to read the story or see the actions of the characters, it describes the same thing, the same circumstance, the same determinism, the same drama.

The story is one, and one only. This implies that, although the voices are different, the narrating character, the first-person narrator, is a single one even if it has multiple voices and ways of expressing its pain.

Please then reconsider the book's title as a counterproof of what has been observed: "As I Lay Dying," in the first-person singular and the imperfect tense typical of ongoing action, refers to both the narrating self and the reading self, sunk into the reality of death and decay, in a journey towards ruin and nothingness, of which all human nature is a participant, at least in Faulkner's view.

Those who have begun to know me and read my reviews have understood that my point of view - and the formative journey I would like to gradually attempt even on Debaser, in addition to what I do in my real life - is antithetical to that of Faulkner, fundamentally nihilistic.

But I believe it is by engaging, at its highest literary levels, with the nihilistic thought and the relativism of values that our society then replicates at a low level in the everyday - just think of certain things I've read after my comments on Miller! But I've already forgiven - one can begin to reason about the need to base our lives on something different and better than the void so skillfully described in this book.

I wish you good reading, and, if I don't get back to you in the coming days, a good and peaceful summer! Throw away your Bukowsky, Miller, and other trash, turning to Faulkner who will not disappoint you and will change your perception of the world. Trust me.

A serene hug from Fabia!

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