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    Light in August
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    Light in August
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    Light in August
    Audiobook17 hours

    Light in August

    Written by William Faulkner

    Narrated by Scott Brick

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    "Read, read, read. Read everything-trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window." -William Faulkner

    Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulkner's most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 18, 2006
    ISBN9780739341520
    Author

    William Faulkner

    William Faulkner (1897-1962) is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all American novelists and short-story writers.  His other works include the novels The Sound and the Fury, The Reivers, and Sanctuary.  He twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and in 1949 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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    Reviews for Light in August

    4/5

    1,490 ratings46 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Weergaloos van stijl en opbouw. Lena is de oermoeder, die alles doorgrondt en aanvaardt, en ook zin geeft. Christmas verpersoonlijkt het zuiden dat worstelt met zijn afkomst. Pessimistische ondertoon, getemperd op het einde. Niet gemakkelijk leesbaar, maar toch genietbaar!
    • 4/5
      Of course, very beautifully written, but oh what a heavy tale. The characters range pretty much from mean to pathetic to foolish to shallow or to evil. They are tortured by race, religion, family and sex and the sad reverberations of the Civil War. There is a Harvard-educated DA who makes some intelligent observations, but we get zero sense of the man.k
    • 4/5
      Weergaloos van stijl en opbouw. Lena is de oermoeder, die alles doorgrondt en aanvaardt, en ook zin geeft. Christmas verpersoonlijkt het zuiden dat worstelt met zijn afkomst. Pessimistische ondertoon, getemperd op het einde. Niet gemakkelijk leesbaar, maar toch genietbaar!
    • 3/5
      Some truly stunning phrases and beautiful invented words... against a wonderful backdrop theme of elusive identity. I only ranked it 3 stars despite that glowing praise, though, because it was slow-going and the POV and time-period shifts were jarring. I know I should love and accept the stylistic experimentation because it's Faulkner, who's awesome, but the actual reading experience was more difficult than it needed to be.
    • 5/5
      This is the audio recording of the book, performed by Will Patton. Patton does an outstanding job with this haunting, meditative and beautiful novel about the legacies of slavery and violence in the South.
    • 5/5
      This is the third novel of Faulkner's that I have read and it is absolutely flawless! The prose begs to be read aloud as poetry throughout the book, the story is fascinating in and of itself and also historically intriguing, and the characters are deeply engaging. Faulkner's deeply Southern story is thought-provoking and engaging. Just to tease prospective readers, consider a pregnant girl who walks from Alabama to Mississippi to find her lover, the minister who cannot bring himself to overcome his past, the illegitimate boy named Christmas whose destiny seems written in stone, and the heroic Byron Burch.....and that just names a few of the wonderful characters in this novel.As is true of many great writers, Faulkner's writing can be challenging, but believe me, it is well worth the effort!
    • 5/5
      Light in August begins with pregnant Lena Grove arriving in Jefferson, Mississippi in search of Lucas Burch, the father of her child. As we meet her, she is thinking, 'I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.' The novel ends with Lena thinking, 'My, my. A body does get around. Here we ain't been coming from Alabama but two months and now it's already Tennessee.' As calm, matter of fact, and single-minded as Lena seems to be, explosive events occur all around her as she waits to give birth in Jefferson. By the time she arrives in Jefferson, Joanna Burden's house is on fire, shrouding the town in an ominous veil of smoke. Miss Burden is the descendant of Northern abolitionists, and is shunned by the townspeople of Jefferson. Joe Christmas, the central character, is also an outsider in Jefferson. As an infant, he was abandoned on the steps of an orphanage, and was later adopted by a fundamentalist and physically abusive farmer. Since his arrival in Jefferson three years before Lena, he has lived in an abandoned cabin on Miss Burden's property, and to the townspeople remains brooding, enigmatic and somehow threatening figure. Gail Hightower, another central character, also lives on the outskirts of Jefferson society. He is a former minister who has remained in Jefferson even after the scandal that defrocked him. His only contact with the outside world is Byron Bunch, a worker at the lumber mill. Bunch and Hightower connect the apparently separate plot strands. Bunch is a saintly character who feels compelled to rescue both Lena and Christmas, and Hightower delivers Lena's baby and makes a futile effort to save Christmas. This is one of Faulkner's most accessible novels. It is not linear, and there are long flashbacks, but the story is not hard to follow. We often learn of important details of a character's past or plot from one character relating the story to another. This results in a novel in which there are many stories within stories, narrated by different characters. In fact, we learn the final fate of two of the main characters when an anonymous furniture dealer tells his wife, as they are in bed, of a curious experience he had while on the road. As has been said before, the novel follows in the tradition of Southern oral story-telling. You can almost see a group of elderly men sitting on the dusty front porch of a general store on a town square discussing the story of what happened in Jefferson between the day Lena came to town and the day she left.
    • 5/5
      While the Sound and the Fury is still Faulkner's best, this novel is a close second and it is certainly an easier read. The tale of Joe Christmas, a half black and white man, who is like Camus' Outsider, outside of any culture, accepted by no one, and treated as an outcast, is compared and contrasted with the tale of Lena Grove, a pregnant woman who is accepted and helped by everyone. The story of Reverend Hightower once again presents a kind of impotent southern morality, impotent in the face of racism and ignorance to change anything. The last scene with Joe Christmas seems to me to be the place where Marquez got the idea of the trailing blood in 100 Years of Solitude.
    • 5/5
      Bought this copy mainly as an addition to my Faulkner collection, as the dust jacket was new to me. Probably my favourite novel.
    • 4/5
      ** SLIGHT SPOILERS **This book is loaded with drama - teen pregnancy, murder, suicide, and it had be sucked in early. I did fade on it a bit towards the end as I struggled to get interested in the Rev. Hightower character. Still, a great book in my opinion. Here's a quote I liked coming from a character that is dealing with his mixed race ancestry:"He felt like an eagle: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. But that passed, though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage."
    • 5/5
      I have spent six weeks with the inhabitants of Jefferson, MS in the post-Civil War mentality of racial hatred and injustice. This is a time when even the rumor of having black blood can doom a man to a life of sorrow and persecution. In the case of the orphaned Joe Christmas, the taunts of children in the orphanage rang so loudly through his head that he was never able to escape the condemnation. Although he was white in appearance, he felt predestined to be mistreated, even though he had no proof of his heritage. I found myself constantly wondering if he was a villain or a victim. Perhaps Faulkner intended him to be a little of both. All of the main characters in this book share this isolation from society and predilection to self-destruction in various degrees; however, it is not all doom and gloom. There are moments of humor, beauty, and grace that make this a masterpiece.This is the third Faulkner book I've read, but it is the only one that I have fallen in love with. Timing is important in reading, and I just wasn't ready for him until now. He takes a seemingly simple story of a young pregnant woman searching for her man and turns it into a psychological study of such proportions that I barely touched the surface of the depth of meaning.I could go on and on about the ramifications of bigotry, religious fanatacism, and search for identity, but instead I recommend and encourage other Faulkner neophytes to discover this wonderful Mississippi microcosm on your own. Faulkner has created a mythical place based on southern tradition and struggles in a changing world, which I look forward to exploring in his other works.
    • 5/5
      I won’t summarize what this book is about because I’m not in a high enough intellectual sphere to be able to do that. Instead, I will talk about three things which I kept thinking about while reading – rhythm, quiet, and salvation.First, let’s talk about rhythm. Usually when I start a book, I read about 15-50 pages into it and then restart it. It takes me a little while to get into the rhythm or style or pace or whatever you want to call it, and I like to read through the entire book totally immersed in it. I didn’t have to do that with this novel. It made me wonder if there is something about the tone which is familiar to because I’m from the south. Is it rhythm what makes a piece of writing ‘southern.’ There are plenty of books written by southern authors or set in the south which I wouldn’t call ‘southern.’ Thoughts? Faulkner uses the word ‘quiet’ a lot – particularly in the first half of the book. I think this is used to show something about social norms. The quite members of a society are the good ones, the ones doing all the socially appropriate things. So it is not so much a volume issue as a comment of conspicuousness. I noticed this particularly with regards to Hightower. “The entire affair had been a lot of people performing a play and that now and at last they had all played out the parts which had been allotted them and now they could live quietly with one another.” I get the impression that his sermons were probably not seen as strange until the problems appeared with his wife – like the interviewed neighbors of someone recently arrested always say ‘there was always something strange about him/her.’ There much too much to be said about the role of religion in the novel. First, there is some phenomenal imagery used to evoke the feeling of religion – particularly the use of variations of monotone. Faulkner is a master at dropping one word into a sentence that instantly brings you back to another part of the story or someplace else entirely. Salvation and fate become major elements in the story. It seems that all of the characters are looking for salvation in some way, either through normalcy (Joe’s adopted parents) or the ‘other’ (Joanna). It also seems that there is no way to escape where each character is going and they know this. “The street which ran for thirty years…It had made a circle and he is still inside of it.” “Already he can feel the two instants about to touch: the one which is the sum of his life, which renews itself between each dark and dusk, and the suspended instant out of which the soon will presently begin.” The only characters which seem outside of the cycle of fate are Joe’s grandparents. I kept thinking of them as the Greek chorus. Each one side of the same coin – one wanting forgiveness for all and one wanting punishment for all, neither being able to rationalize the meaning or consequence of their wishes – “monotonous strophe and antistrophe.” In summary, I can’t recommend this highly enough. Reading back over my thoughts, they seem really disjointed, but there were a lot of thoughts to keep track of while reading.
    • 4/5
      The second to the last chapter almost ruined the book. The summary chapter concluding Hightower's character was confusing. Otherwise this book was well crafted, layered, and dense but still mostly readable. An intimate look at common folk in the pre-depression south. This was the first book by Faulkner I ever finished. More dense than Steinbeck and Hemingway but still easy to read.
    • 3/5
      Wow, this book is very, uneventful. Another classic that is dull and lacking excitement. How did this ever become a classic. A tough read hard to get the flow.
    • 5/5
      A deeply religious, fundamentally anti-Christian exploration of the resounding of the words "nigger" and "bitchery" in the Southern soul, Light in August depicts an antediluvian South where each person is born into the original sin of race, and where redemption is unwittingly sought from false prophets, fallen gods, and those damned by their fellow man. We find ourselves inside uncomfortable characters, hating and sympathizing at once, understanding but distancing, struggling all the time to free ourselves and these characters from this inescapable original sin. At the beginning of the book, we've come a "fur piece", but at the end, we're reminded we still have a "fur piece to go".Characters are both iconic and down to earth and we learn about them from both the outside, through others' eyes and through their rolling dialogue, and from the inside, in their own often irrational mental ramblings. A humble, simple woman takes on an odyssey by foot; a proud orphan is forced, or, as Faulkner says, "cast" on his own life long journey; other characters hardly move, staying in one place and letting the travelers come to them, or travel over generations, with all of them coming together in an ever thicker morass. This book reaches inside you and twists as only Faulkner can. It does not let go, and its language seeps into you full of ambiguity and corruption. Known as one of the great indictments of Southern racism, this book is also an angry exploration of gender roles and a peerless work of poetry. I listened to this on on Audiobook, which is an ideal medium and really brings out the melodious, rhythmic prose. The audio format also leaves someone else to sort through the written dialect for the right rendering, taking a bit of the burden and puzzlement of reading Faulkner off the reader. Scott Brick's rendition is sublime. Light in August is not an easy read, but it is a true experience more than a read. There is no way to prepare a reader for the experience through a review: you must just "cast" yourself into it.
    • 4/5
      The book has so many layers. It deals with some big themes such as religion and racism (which is pretty much a requirement for Southern lit.). But it also deals with isolation, identity, relationships and group mentality.There are three basic stories that are interconnected, although somewhat loosely. The story of Lena Grove opens and closes the book. She's young, single, and pregnant. She sets out on foot to find the father of her baby who has deserted her. You'd think she'd be depressed or pessimistic about life in her situation, but she's not. She seems to take everything in life as it comes. She's happy in whatever situation she finds herself. But, she's pretty much the only major character in the book that has found any kind of peace at all.Though there is plenty of misery to go around, for me, the story of Joe Christmas is the saddest. He grows up and lives his entire life without any knowledge of his true identity. The reader finds out as the book progresses that he was taken to an orphanage by his grandfather, who had allowed his only daughter to die in childbirth as punishment for sleeping with someone of a different race. Joe gets his unusual name because he's left at the orphanage on Christmas Eve. He is eventually adopted by a couple, but life doesn't get any better for him. His adopted father beats him on a regular basis. Joe has a problem with relationships with women due to an incident at the orphanage when he was younger. He passes for white for most of his life, but he is ambiguous about his race. He never feels as if he fits in anywhere in the segregated South -- not in white society or black society.The life of Rev. Gail Hightower is the third story in the book. Gail was born to an older couple and like most everyone else has a less than pleasant childhood. He grows up obsessed by the exploits of his grandfather during the Civil War. He eventually loses his wife and his church because of this strange obsession. He is shunned by the people of Jefferson, and he retreats from life. He looks forward to death as a release from the misery of this life. It's through an encounter with Lena Grove that Hightower decides that maybe he can rejoin life.That is a very basic synopsis, and I don't want to say much more because I don't want to give too much away. I highly recommend this book especially, if like me, you're one who has tried Faulkner before with less than stellar results. It is not a quick read. It's not the kind of book that you can read while trying to do something else. In fact, I often found myself rereading sentences several times. The writing is complex but absolutely amazing. Though there are three main stories, he weaves them together in such a way that it works beautifully. I love the imagery that Faulkner evokes. He's the type of writer that has that knack of using the exact word necessary to paint a picture for the reader. In fact, he makes up words when nothing else will do -- and it works. I will definitely be reading more Faulkner.
    • 5/5
      This is my favorite novel of Faulkner's. Joe Christmas is a fascinating character.
    • 4/5
      It seems like I only hear of people who love or hate Faulkner. I thought Light in August was an okay book. It is well written, and I wanted to know about each character. It is one of those books that I wish I could have read when it was published. I'm sure it really pushed the limit on what people accepted. It is dark and some of the characters really disgust me as I'm sure they are meant to. I do like his insight into the South, and I plan to read more of his novels.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed Light in August much more than As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, both of which I read in college. I do not know if that is because Light in August is the more accessible of these three Faulkner novels, or if I am just a better reader than I was 20 years ago.
    • 4/5
      I found this book to be quite good, but at the same time, I was quite ready to be done with it. It seems as if he is somewhat obscure at times making it hard to understand where the point in the story is and what's going on. All that said, though, I thought the way characters were weaved into each other's lives was quite brilliant and I appreciated the different relationships among all the characters involved.
    • 4/5
      I had been dreading this book because I found 'The Sound and the Fury' difficult to read. This book was a page turner for me. The only difficulty I had was dealing with Faulkners tendency to skip around from the viewpoint of one character to the next. This would seem to happen when I was really interested in the first character and I would have to wait patiently through the next section before I got back to the original characters storyline.Faulkner's writing is very unique in that he seems to understand human nature, and to describe each characters motivations, and needs through the writing, while at the same time conveying that the characters themselves don't necessarily understand why they are doing what they do. This shows that the best writers not only have a profound understanding of human nature, but that they can convey that through their writing in a way that makes the reader feel intimately connected.
    • 5/5
      My favourite Faulkner. And I like Faulkner.
    • 4/5
      William Faulkner's Light in August set in the south at times of slavery. What seems to be a tale of an ambitious, determined pregnant woman hitch-hiking out from Alabama to look for the child's father evokes the lives of a skein of interesting characters whose lives readers will not easily forget.Lena Grove was pregnant with Lucas Burch's child. She set out from Alabama for Jefferson, Mississippi to search for the man who promised to send for her as he settled down with a job at the mill. Welled with anticipation and hope, Lena arrived at the plant only to realize that she had mistaken Byron Bunch for Lucas Burch.As soon as the search shed lights Faulkner takes away Lena from his readers and defers her until the end of the book. Joe Christmas, a man with mixed ancestry (part white and part Mexican) somehow befriended with Lucas Burch who carried a fictitious identity "Brown" and colluded in bootlegging whiskey.A substantial coverage of the book recounts Joe Christmas's childhood in an orphanage, his abused adolescence under the McEacherns, his mystifying affair with a slave advocate Miss Burden, and his apprehension after he allegedly burned down the house in which Burden resided in and thus murdered her. Brown sold him out for the thousand-dollar reward.Byron Bunch, if not dredging overtime at the mill, would visit and keep accompany of Reverent Gail Hightower, who had be expelled by the elders in town after his adulterous wife committed suicide in Memphis. The ex-minister inherited a small income, gave arts lessons and handpainted Christmas cards. He was constantly plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen who killed his grandfather.So go back and forth the narratives of the book, over vast intervals of time. Byron Bunch, who was in the know of Lucas Burch's dual identity from the beginning, deftly dodged Lena from the truth but arranged her to settle down at Burch's cabin. Together with Lena, Byron also ascertained the identity of Joe Christmas when the Hines, an old couple from Mottstown, arrived in Jefferson.I don't want to elaborate on the aspects of symbolism (this book has an abundance of them). The names could be symbolic (Christmas, Burden, Bunch, etc). The notion of race and skin color is outrageous in this book. Joe Christmas led a tragic life as a desperate, oppressed, enigmatic drifter who was irreparably consumed by his mixed ancestry. His very own grandfather talked of lynching him because of his copper, parchment-colored skin.Political overtones seep through the book. Miss Burden's father moved back south from California and spent much time cursing slavery and slaveholders. I get the impression that the curse of the black race is God's curse, while the curse of the white race is those whom the white race has suppressed. The chapter on the reverent is so obscurely filled with dissertation on sins (some of the most arduous, tenacious reading of the entire book).The structure of the novel is worth a discussion. With 21 chapters, Lena Grove's search for the father of her child is deferred until the very end. Faulkner barely mentions her in passing in Chapter 14 when she settles down in Jefferson. The third and the second-to-the-last chapters devote to Reverent Gail Hightower. From Byron Bunch seems to be sewing all the pieces together as he recounts all the happenings in town and Lena Grove to the reverent. So everything in between shrouds the story the Joe Christmas. The result is a concentric ring structure Faulkner has astutely and deftly constructed in the novel.Light in August deftly captures the Southern life focusing both on the personal histories of his characters and the moral complexities and uncertainties of an increasingly dissolute, diverse (of which Joe Christmas is an epitome, nobody recognized him as part Mexican) society. The book is a unique combination of a plethora of symbolism and a stream-of-consciousness technique. The characters stay with readers.
    • 1/5
      I'm still entertaining the idea of rereading this one one of these days...it was required reading my senior year, and most required reading that year never got a fighting chance. I decided instead to read Crime & Punishment on my own at the same time this was assigned. Crime & Punishment totally won.
    • 3/5
      4 stars for Will Patton's wonderful narration and for the story itself, but 3 stars for Faulkner's writing style.
    • 4/5
      No one else is Faulkner, or even close. That's all I have to say.
    • 5/5
      Read this book! If you are looking at this review then it is most likely that you are considering reading this book, in which case you should go ahead and do so. I never read Faulkner before and had always known him to be held up as one of the greatest of American writers. So when I encountered a copy of his work for 25 cents on the discount shelf of the local library I felt I was taking an extremely mild risk. Turns out to be among the best quarters I spent in my life. I don’t want to give away the story, so I'll just say that it is very much an American story, one of its day but also one that is reverberates today. Masterfully written. Take up, and read.
    • 4/5
      Christmas at an unusual time of year. Faulkner's my main man. Luminous.
    • 4/5
      I found this to be one of the more enjoyable Faulkner stories. There was more plot and less stream-of-consciousness. The characters are fewer and more fully developed. Lena Grove is a pregnant white woman from Alabama looking for her man in Jefferson, Mississippi. Gail Hightower, a former reverend is forced into retirement and nearly run out of town for his wife's erratic behavior and subsequent suicide. Joe Christmas, one of the strongest main characters, is an orphan who thinks he has "nigger blood" despite his pale skin.There are several elements of repetition to Faulkner's work. Most stories take place in Jefferson, Mississippi. There is usually one character that is mixed race and as a result, struggling with identity. A fire usually breaks out somewhere. Someone usually is pregnant. Probably the most typical reoccurring element is style. Faulkner uses flashbacks to either tell a story or fill in the gaps of one. Light in August was one of the more easier ones to follow.
    • 5/5
      Will Patton deserves an oscar/pulitzer/emmy for his spell-binding/genius/hair-raising performance of Faulkner's tragic/horror/comedy/farce Light in August. Quite simply, this is one of the best audio books I have ever had the pleasure of spending 13 hours with. Patton's reading captures all the nuance of Faulkner's prose without ever striking a false or cliched note. Patton should be the only actor allowed to record Faulkner from here on out.