Soldier
“The hushèd plaint of wind in stricken trees
Shivers the grass in path and lane
And Grief and Time are tideless golden seas—
Hush, hush! He’s home again”
fetching the rest…
More by William Faulkner Fifteen narrators take turns telling one grim, weirdly funny wagon trip to bury their mother, and you piece it together yourself, including a chapter that's just "My mother is a fish." Disorienting at first, but if you like doing some of the work, it pays off. You need patience for Faulkner’s dense, circling prose, but Joe Christmas’s guarded, tormented presence and Lena Grove’s steady movement through the story stay with you. It’s bleak, strange, and morally unsettling, yet the shifting viewpoints make even small gestures feel charged. Fair warning, the first section drops you into Benjy's mind with no timeline and no hand-holding, and it feels like drowning until it suddenly doesn't. Push through and the Compsons' slow collapse, especially Quentin's day in Cambridge, will sit in your chest for years. —
thank you for reading
Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner. The text is in the US public domain, from the Standard Ebooks edition . Served from our own copy; read on their site for the full edition with images and typography.
Narrated by czandra for LibriVox , also public domain.
First published in 1926 .
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