Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

It's a long life; I like trilogies. Nestling down into a world I know will sustain me for hours. This is the first of Faulkner's famous Snopes trilogy, about a family, the Snopes, who takes over a small Mississippi town called Frenchman's Bend. Faulkner is a master of characterization. Flem Snopes, the wily, ambitious son (whose father burns barns to intimidate his landlords), his wife Eula Snopes, the lazy, beautiful daughter of the rich, landed Will Varner, and Ratliff, the traveling sewing-machine salesman: all unforgettable human beings. Faulkner's style is nonpareil: his patience, his circumnavigation, his scope and precision. While this is not his best � he wrote it in parts over many years, and it lacks the narrative drive of his masterpieces � it is a fine read.

One reads Faulkner to get lost in his famously labyrinthine sentences. Look how much he accomplishes below, in a scene where two brothers play checkers. One mad brother has just murdered a man; the other, Flem, wants to know where the body is so that he may pilfer the cash on it. The first brother stalls, challenges Flem to a game of checkers.

"'Move,' the other said. They began to play � the one with a cold and deadly deliberation and economy of moves. The other with a sort of clumsy speed and dash. It was that amateurish, that almost childlike, lack of premeditation and plan or even foresight of one who, depending on manipulation and not intellect in games of chance, finds himself involved in one where dexterity cannot avail, yet nevertheless attempting to cheat even at bald and simple draughts with an incredible optimism, an incorrigible dishonesty, long since become pure reflex and probably now beyond his control, making his dashing and clumsy moves then withdrawing his closed fist to sit watching with his little intent unwinking eyes the still, wasted, down-looking face opposite, talking steadily about almost everything except money and death, the fist resting on the table-edge still closed about the pawn or king's crown which it had palmed. The trouble with checkers is, he thought, it ain't nothing but checkers."

Our modern attention spans don't have time for Faulkner's graceful rambles. Though that long sentence in there is brilliant, a contemporary creative writing class would make Faulkner choose between "the pawn" or "the king's crown". Stylistically, of the masters, we still prefer Hemingway's brutality and Fitzgerald's elegance. But I like a writer who boldly unleashes the floodgates and makes his readers swim.

Lastly, the modern reader who skips The Hamlet misses a thirty page long, unroarious satire of a romance: Ike Snopes and his bovine love affair: a masterpiece of bestiality.