As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner: A review
Do you ever get the feeling that the universe is trying to tell you something? It's a sense that comes to me not infrequently when I'm in my garden or I'm watching wildlife. Both have much to teach me. And it's an intuition that comes to me often when I am reading books. In the last several months, no less than three books that I have read and that have touched me deeply have made reference to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Clearly the universe was saying to me, "READ THIS BOOK!" I resisted at first because I had, in fact, read this book many years ago and I thought I remembered it fairly well. But after I read Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones in February, I knew I had to read what many consider to be Faulkner's masterpiece once again. As I Lay Dying tells the story of the dirt-poor Bundren family, led by their patriarch Anse, surely one of the most feckless, worthless, good-for-nothing characters in all of fiction. There are five Bun