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If you are planning to read Faulkner, you must be prepared to take your meat raw. It has been decades since I initially read The Hamlet, and I had forgotten how coarse and unrestrained the writing could be at times. It was as if Faulkner wanted you to never mistake this world for one in which there was any refinement or justice or sanity, as if he meant to reveal how unendurable a life could really be.

The story, or stories if you will, since there are several told here, with only the barest thread to hold them together, is violent and intense, with a broodiness that sometimes makes it difficult to turn the page and continue, but which makes it equally impossible to stop reading.

I’m not sure there is a single character within these pages that is likeable enough to even elicit a sustained feeling of sympathy, let alone affinity. It is a dirty, hot, sticky world, in which the sweat-stained shirts cling to dirty backs, the children run bare-footed, the women are beaten or bartered by their husbands or fathers, and tobacco juice drips from nasty, uncombed beards. There is a cow and an imbecile, and I am not even going there. Life is cheap and entertainment comes in the form of misery and murder.

I hate the south of Faulkner’s novels, and yet I love it as well. It is gritty and blank and a law unto itself. Even the people at the top of this crumbling society seem trapped. They are more survivors than rulers and they must be wary every moment so as not to be usurped or displaced. No villainy is intolerable and, in such a climate, no villainy is unpracticed. Your only chance is to be a Snopes and a have clan at your back, but then be careful, because the man at your back, Snopes are not, might be carrying a knife.

No one would accuse Faulkner of being easy or fun to read, but after you have parsed a sentence and gleaned the meaning, there is so much to admire.