Book: Light in August by William Faulkner

I have been reading this book for about a year. I kept getting it from public libraries and then would move before I finished it, but I finally did.

Many of Faulkner's novels are of the deep South and the mingling between black and white...the way people lived down there after slavery was abolished, the decades after the Civil War. The characters are memorable, universal and unique, good and evil.

This story is of Lena, a young pregnant girl who travels from Alabama to Jefferson, Mississippi, mostly walking, occasionally hitching a ride on a passing wagon, intending to find Lucas Burch, the man she believes is waiting for her, the father of her soon to be born babe. As she settles in and keeps asking about Lucas, a shy and gentle man named Byron helps her. But during this time, a reclusive white woman is brutally murdered and her house set afire. Lucas knows Christmas, the murderer, and is desperate to get the $1000 reward. And a strange old couple show up and are also involved.

"Byron leads them into the study--a dumpy woman in a purple dress and a plume and carrying an umbrella, with a perfectly immobile face, and a man incredibly dirty and apparently incredibly old, with a tobaccostained goat's beard and mad eyes. They enter not with diffidence, but with something puppetlike about them,as if they were operated by clumsy spring work."

I don't think most of Faulkner is difficult to read, but his writing seems tedious at times with long sentences and flights of imagination and explication and history about plot and characters and one has to pay attention, increasingly difficult in our Internet age. I wonder who, outside of those required to do so in college, reads Faulkner nowadays? But one can come to know the South through the stories and characters in his novels. One absorbs the history, the land and heat and verdancy and sometimes gothic spookiness of the backwaters of Mississippi.

"That this white man who very nearly depended on the bounty and charity of negroes for sustenance was going single-handed into remote negro churches and interrupting the service to enter the pulpit and in his harsh, dead voice and at times with violent obscenity preach to them humility before all skins lighter than theirs, preaching the superiority of the white race, himself his own exhibit A, in fanatic and unconscious paradox. The negroes believed that he was crazy, touched by God, or having once touched Him. They probably did not listen to, could not understand much of, what he said. Perhaps they took him to be God Himself, since God to them was a white man too and His doings also a little inexplicable."