Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Like his earlier The Unvanquished, which introduced Ab, the first Snopes in Yoknapatawpha County, The Hamlet is constructed from about a half dozen short stories. It is the first in a trilogy relating the rise and fall of Ab's son, Flem, but you won't learn much about his thoughts or feelings here.

The first man Flem would tell his business to would be the man that was left after the last man died. Flem don't even tell himself what he is up to. Not if he was laying in bed with himself in a empty house in the dark of the moon.

Nor will you peer into the interior life of Eula, his wife, whose exterior, however, is abundantly and sensuously described.

...her entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic times-honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof.

But the carnival of characters who surround and spark off these two, the men scheming against Flem for money and lusting over Eula's anatomy, the women trying to clean up the ensuing wreckage, provide an embarrassment of entertainment that reminded me of Dickens and Twain.

I've not finished the trilogy yet and I don't know if I'm going to be persuaded by Faulkner that the hardscrabble citizens of Frenchman's Bend were better off being maltreated by the feudal Varner family than the rising, capitalist Snopes clan he abhors, but I found dark humor, pathos, and horror galore in this Southern Gothic masterpiece.

I thought that when you killed a man, that finished it, he told himself. But it don't. It just starts then.