tangomi

This book grew on me, first like a tumor, then like pleasantly cartilaginous fingernails (which I've never been able to really grow). What I mean by that is my approach was sullied by two notions: one, that Faulker's one of the canonical American Bad Boys (and by that I am suggesting the odious term Master, Great American *Southern* Novel or mandatory highschoolcollegelitclassreading), and two, it's divided into bite-sized sections which initially as a poetry/shortstory person I found unsatisfying. But the book, or plot, is built like lattice layers, the overlaying of the consciousness, or the perspective, or the voice of each character becomes one breathing organism or, as Sartre would have it, a breathing hell which they are all contributing to and struggling in. I appreciated, strangely for me, the environmental details. It's the South, they're rural, it is fucking hot, they are dealing with forces (floods, rot) outside of their control. What is their attitude towards it? How will they adapt? as they try to bring a dead matriach back to a plot to be buried by "her people".

2023-02-06 18:59