The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s acclaimed masterpiece, falls into the category (for me) of books like The Trial or Heart of Darkness. I see what the author is trying to do; I respect the author’s craft as they are doing it; and I find the finished product a misery to read.

There’s a conversation to be had here about “reading for pleasure” versus “reading to exercise the mind” or however you want to put it; it’s a long conversation that many people more accredited and more well-paid than I am have been having for much longer than I’ve been alive. I’ll say just this — while I do think that it’s important to read books (fiction and non-fiction) that push your boundaries and challenge you as a reader, I do not personally have enough free time to want to invest it in reading things that I am not enjoying. I do think that there are books out there that can do both — I read a fantastic and fascinating book last year called Baltasar and Blimunda that was both a challenging read and which I greatly enjoyed, for example — but this one does not, unfortunately, fall into that camp.

The Sound and the Fury is a story about a family in the early 1900s, told in four sections, each from the point of view of a different family member. This is a fascinating way to tell the story of a family, because you get each individual’s take on things, but you also see them from each others’ eyes, and you also see four different takes on members of the family who do not get to tell their own story, all of which introduces a lot of interesting complexity. He also uses this set-up to present different periods of time, so it’s not simply four retellings of the same narrative — the story moves forward in time, mostly, as we change points of view.

Two features of this book make it very difficult to read: the first is that the initial three sections are written in extremely interior narratives, including stream of consciousness, lack of or inconsistent punctuation, abrupt subject changes, and so on. The second is that the text uses vernacular or colloquial speech and spelling, which I suspect was more understandable when it was written in the 1930s. A hundred years later, I think a lot of readers are not going to have an easy time with the phonetic rendition of a deep southern drawl or period-accurate AAVE. (Now, that’s not an argument for him not to have used it, but I think it’s worth pointing out that just as lots of modern readers struggle with Shakespeare or Chaucer, progressively more and more readers are going to struggle with this.)

The sections of the book also begin with the most impenetrable point of view and move to the most clear, which is an interesting choice. The very first section is about eighty pages of interior monologue from the severely mentally disabled brother of the family, Benjy. On the one hand, it’s fascinatingly written — what he notices, what he understands, how disoriented he is in time and space, what he remembers — but on the other, it makes for a very rough entry into the story. I couldn’t figure out where we were supposed to be, or how many characters there were, or what was happening when — I’m not stupid, and I’ve read pretty widely, but this book made me feel legitimately dumb. I went and read the wikipedia synopsis after I finished the first section, and found I had completely misunderstood how many characters were even involved in the story. The second section uses more coherent language, but is just as confusing in terms of what is happening or why. It’s not till we get to the third section that we get something resembling a straight-forward narrative, though this one is in the mind of the most odious of the family members, which makes reading it hard in a different way. The final section of the book is not what you would call joyful by any stretch, but it’s also just such a relief to reach something that feels like standard prose that it doesn’t matter.

Ordering the sections from least-coherent to most definitely adds to the atmosphere of the book, but I wonder what the effect would have been had he done it the other direction, slowly sucking you in through what starts off as a fairly clear story and letting it become less and less coherent as you go along. I definitely got to the end of the book with the feeling that, now that I had read the whole thing (and the Wikipedia page), I could go back and read it and maybe understand what was happening (spoiler: I am not going to do that).

As I read it, I mentioned it to several people, and universally the response was “oh, I’ve read (other Faulkner book) and enjoyed it, but I never tried that one,” to the point that I do wonder if I just picked the wrong Faulkner to read. I had been looking forward to it because I’ve often heard him praised as similar to Hemingway, whose work I enjoy a lot, so maybe at some point I will try to read something else by Faulkner and see if I have a better time of it.

I don’t not recommend it? I would just say, go into it knowing that it will be a difficult and not particularly cheerful read. That said, it’s definitely a fascinating glimpse of a specific kind of family life in the early 20th century.