There are some books that are described as "difficult but worth it." In other words, it's a struggle to get through the book, but once you do, you're glad you stuck to it. Moby Dick is one of the books I almost read — I skipped at least twenty percent of the book. There's only so much information about whaling I can handle, and so Moby Dick is one of those books that, had I finished it, I would have put it in the "Finished — Not Sure It Was Worth It" category.

Absalom, Absalom! was a book that clearly falls into the "Finished — A Struggle But Will Definitely Read Again" category. It took me two tries to get through the entire book.

The reasons for the abortive attempt are simple:

• Long run-on sentences that can literally stretch to more than a page;
• Vocabulary that constantly sends you looking for the OED;
• A stream-of-conscious style that piles digression on digression and plants parenthesis within parenthesis within parenthesis;
• A spotty, here-a-little, there-a-little narrative that feels no need even to acknowledge the idea of "chronological order."

These are the things that make people moan when the read Faulkner. "No one talks like that!" was my initial reaction when I first read the fifteen-page monologues that supposedly make up one side of a terribly lopsided conversation.

So why read the book? It's simple: no other book provides a clearer portrayal of what it's like to be "human" in ever sense of the word than Absalom. Reading it is participating it in, for like the characters themselves, we never know all the details. We're left wondering who deceived whom, who forgot willfully and who from human frailty, who twisted what fact to support his particular interpretation of events, and who lied by accident and who on purpose. This is not to say that this is a jumbled mess with no clear narrative. There is a narrative, and we get a pretty good idea of the actual history of Thomas Sutpen and his sons by the end of the book, but we're still not sure — eerily similar to how it is "in real life."

But its being just a "cool way to tell a story" is not the only draw to Absalom. Faulker simply has a way of using language that leaves you shaking your head. Such dense writing seems impossible to sustain for more than a few paragraphs, but Faulkner kept it up for over two hundred.

And that is not to say, "This book is great because it's an intellectual workout." While it does seem a bit unrealistic and even pompous at times, Faulkner's language is simply beautiful, as the interspersed quotes show. Faulkner shows, he doesn't tell, and a passage, like the one at right, acts as a double metaphor, sheading light on the Sutpen history and the referant of the metaphor, in this case, the crucifixion.

It is, in other words, a difficult book to read, but not difficult in the same way Moby Dick was. Moby Dick simply bored me to tears with all the information about whales and whaling; Absalom drove me to distraction with its long-winded, unnatural tone.

Ironically, Faulkner said that if he could choose any book to have written, he would choose Moby Dick.