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    The Sound and the Fury
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    The Sound and the Fury
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    The Sound and the Fury
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Sound and the Fury

    Written by William Faulkner

    Narrated by Grover Gardner

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character's voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner's masterpiece and  one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

    "I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. . . . I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools." -from The Sound and the Fury

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 12, 2005
    ISBN9780739325360
    Unavailable
    The Sound and the Fury
    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 The Sound and the Fury

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    • 2/5
      One of the greatest novels of the 20th-century follows the disintegration of former Southern aristocrats looked at in four different ways. The Sound and the Fury is considered William Faulkner’s greatest novel, following members of the Compson family over roughly 30 years in which the once great aristocratic Southern family breaks down from within and influence socially.The book begins with man-child Benjamin “Benjy” Compson remembering various incidents over the previous 30 years from his first memory of his sister Caddy climbing a tree, his name being changed after his family learned he was mentally handicapped, the marriage and divorce of Caddy, and his castration all while going around his family’s property in April 1928. The second section was of Quentin Compson, skipping classes during a day of his freshman year at Harvard in 1910 and wandering Cambridge, Massachusetts thinking about death and his family’s estrangement from his sister Caddy before committing suicide. The third section followed a day in the life of Jason Compson who must take care of his hypochondriac mother and Benjy along with his niece, Caddy’s daughter Quentin. Working at a hardware store to make ends meet while stealing the money his sister sends to Quentin, Jason has to deal with people who used to lookup to his family and with black people who irritate the very racist head of the Compson family. The four section follows several people on Easter Sunday 1928 as the black servants take care of Benjy and gets for the Compsons while Jason finds out that Quentin as runaway with all the money in the house, which includes the money he stole from her and his life savings. After failing to find Quentin, Jason returns to town to calm down Benjy who is having a fit due to his routine being changed.In constructing this book, Faulkner employed four different narrative styles for each section. Benjy’s section was highly disjointed narrative with numerous time leaps as he goes about his day. Quentin’s section was of an unreliable stream of consciousness narrator with a deteriorating state of mind, which after Benjy’s section makes the reader want to give up the book. Jason’s section is a straightforward first-person narrative style with the fourth and final section being a third person omniscient point-of-view. While one appreciates Faulkner’s amazing work in producing this novel, the first two sections are so all over the place that one wonders why this book was even written and only during the last two sections do readers understand about how the Compson family’s fortunes have fallen collectively and individually.The Sound and the Fury is overall a nice novel, however the first two sections of William Faulkner’s great literally derails interest and only those that stick with the book learn in the later half what is going on with any clarity. I would suggest reading another Faulkner work before this if you are a first-time reader of his work like I was because unless you’re dedicated you might just quit.
    • 4/5
      Now that I've read The Sound and The Fury, it beckons me to read it again, to pick up on all the details I missed. I probably won't be doing that any time soon, however. Faulkner's tale of a decaying family of former plantation dwellers is written in three different, but all difficult, styles (the fourth and final section is relatively straightforward). The first part, narratated by Benjy, the mentally disabled son, isn't that hard once you get used to it. It the second and third parts, narrated by clinically-depressed Harvard student Quentin and crass store clerk Jason that really are challenging. There is much here to discuss. A difficult but rewarding read.
    • 5/5
      Modern Library ranks it as the 6th best novel ever written. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize. What more is there to say?
    • 5/5
      It was January in North London. During the three days I crept through this marvelous novel the rain only paused for a combination of brilliant sun and arctic winds. Most of the conversations around me were in Srpski and somehow Faulkner's viaduct pointed to familiarity: you see avarice, disability and failure are rather common in Indiana.
    • 5/5
      When my father died he left behind a collection of around a hundred Penguin paperbacks from the 1960s and 1970s. Most of them he had ordered directly from the publisher – I found an invoice in one – and included works by DH Lawrence (the writer he admired most), Carson McCullers, JP Donleavy, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm Lowry, Raymond Chandler, Herman Hesse, George Orwell and, among others… William Faulkner. I kept many of the books for myself – and subsequently became a big fan of Lowry’s fiction. (I had already sampled Lawrence’s fiction, and found it excellent, earlier.) There was always the possibility I’d be enormously impressed by another author from his collection, although a read of two of McCullers novels showed it wasn’t going to be her. William Faulkner, on the other hand, what little I knew of him – early twentieth century author, American, wrote mostly about the South, his novels had quite pretentious titles, I couldn’t think of anything by him that been adapted by Hollywood… Well, I’d expected The Sound and the Fury to be a bit of a chore to read, and it was only a complete inability to brain early one weekday morning that resulted in me grabbing it to read next on my commute. So I was very surprised to discover the novel hugely impressive. The casual use of racial epithets – the racism itself, especially in the third section, narrated by Jason Compton, who is racist – is hard to take, although nothing in the prose persuades me that Faulkner held those views, and in fact he develops his black characters as carefully and as well as he develops his white ones. And, of course, this is a book that was written, and set, within living memory (just) of slavery and the American Civil War. US society, especially southern US society, is hugely racist, and if the language in The Sound and the Fury is offensive it is at least a legitimate product of its time. But one of the areas that fascinates me about literature is narrative structure, and there The Sound and the Fury has plenty to recommend it. It is divided into four parts, three dated 1928 and one dated 1910, and each part subsequently sheds more light on the story. The first is told from the point of view of Benjy, who has learning disabilities, and presents his 33 years of life in an achronological almost stream-of-consciousness narrative, with time-jumps signalled by changes from italics and back again, although not with any degree of rigour. The second section is set 18 years earlier and mixes a straightforward narrative with stream of consciousness, and is perhaps the hardest to parse as its narrative is mostly peripheral to the main story. The third section, set in 1928 again, is more straightforward and, as mentioned earlier, is in the POV of the racist brother of the protagonist of the second section. The final section takes place a day later than the third, and is omniscient, but chiefly features the family’s black housekeeper. With each section, the overall story becomes clearer. It is not, it has to be said, the most exciting of stories – Banks followed a similar philosophy with his mainstream novels, albeit without the modernism, but he usually made his central secrets a little too “exciting” and a little too implausible. The Sound and the Fury is pure modernist literature, and the prose is really very very good. Though the milieu doesn’t attract me, the approach to writing strikes me as every bit as interesting as that of Lowry. Albeit in a different way. A third of the way into The Sound and the Fury I decided I needed to read more, if not all, of Faulkner’s fiction. So I’ve ordered another of his novels. From eBay. Because, of course, I want editions that match the ones I have – ie, mid-sixties Penguin paperbacks. Sigh. But Faulkner: excellent. Possibly even a new favourite writer.
    • 5/5
      might be my favorite book of all time
    • 3/5
      I attempted Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury once before, and again just recently before deciding to call it quits short of finishing. The arguments for this novel and its stream-of-consciousness narrative style, which was relatively new at the time, remind me of how classical music transitioned to the music of the romantic era and eventually to what is known as "20th century music." And here I'm not talking about popular genres like ragtime and jazz and what would eventually become rock n' roll. I"m talking about what classical music evolved into. I had a college professor refer to 20th century music as "intellectual exercises" and I think he was being kind. This is what I think of when I try to read books like The Sound and the Fury -- an attempt to push the boundaries of a genre but then it also becomes inaccessible to many in your audience.
    • 4/5
      Finally completed my first Faulkner novel having somehow avoided him during school years. The author's appendix is infinitely helpful but the stream of consciousness style is still difficult. This will be worth more than one reread. Also gave me a chance to try another book club which turned out to be excellent.
    • 2/5
      I just could not get into this book. Faulkner employs his stream of consciousness writing and to me it comes out as jumbled thoughts of all the characters. The book was too hard for me to follow and wasn't interesting enough for me to keep my attention.
    • 4/5
      Only read this novel when you'll have the patience and fortitude to get through its challenging opening chapter. The second chapter is somewhat easier, the 3rd easier than the 2nd, and the fourth most like any other novel you might read. This gradual easing rewards patience, and will tease you into reading the novel again once you've grasped the whole. There is plenty of help to be had: it has been studied to death, which is little wonder since it so clearly invites study by presenting itself as an unravelling puzzle. The technique is intriguing, but I was preparing to dismiss it as a gimmick if I wasn't convinced there's a good story at the heart of it. Having finished it, I think that may be the wrong way to measure it. The Compson's predicament comes slowly into focus, conveying emotions more clearly than the facts. We get three successive narrators who can't clearly perceive or deal with the reality of their lives, all wearing blinders of different fashions. Only in the last chapter do we finally get a more objective image of what all this looks like from the outside. Turning the story inside out demonstrates there's nothing shallow about the inner workings of these characters that we'd otherwise be too quick to judge and summarize in flatter terms - not even poor Benjy, who would scarcely have seemed to warrant attention at all. William Faulkner writes like a James Joyce who is willing to explain himself, and he's worth listening to.
    • 5/5
      The Sound and the Fury is a spectacular piece of literature. The writing style, described as "stream of consciousness" is riveting. I found myself reading it section by section, because it is easy to lose yourself in the constant flow of words. Each character, presented from different viewpoints, exist in a three-dimensional space that is rare in some literature these days. Faulkner allows them to flourish and develop themselves. It provides an honest, unflinching look into their lives, the love, the slow implosion and the resilience. You need patience to read this book, but in my opinion, it's worth it!
    • 5/5
      Beautifully depressing dilapidation.
    • 2/5
      Thank goodness that's over!! I'm sorry, I'm just not a William Faulkner fan. His style of writing just grates against me. I'm not saying I won't read anything else by him, but it's going to be a long time before I try to tackle him again. I read "As I Lay Dying" in 2002, so maybe I'll wait 15 more years before I read another one of his ;)
    • 5/5
      slightly incoherent but worth every word. I don't know how he does it but Faulkner creates such a beautiful and tragic world out of this seeming mess of prose. At a certain point, it all comes together and you realize that you understand exactly what and who he's talking about.
      A wonderful read when it's hot outside.
    • 5/5
      I had to read the first section twice to "get it," but the four narratives in this book chronicling the decay and collapse of a prominent southern family plays with time and structure in a way that creates a confuonding sense of dread. I was overwhelmed from the emotive experience of reading this book and haven't tried any Faulkner since.
    • 4/5
      That Faulkner is challenging to read yet having other people to discuss the book with afterward is a tremendous help in understanding all Faulkner's nuances (written in Faulkner run-on style with no punctuation!)
    • 5/5
      A fascinating and moving examination of a family in the old American South.
    • 4/5
      It's funny, I can't read Joyce or Pynchon, because I find the non-linear nature of the narrative too distracting. But, yet, I really enjoyed this book. I did use the Wikipedia page to keep the characters straight, and read a brief synopsis of each section after I read it, and I think it really helped to keep things straight. I found the novel truly fascinating; the first three sections are all challenging, but rewarding, in their own way. A deeply illuminating look at a disintegrating aristocratic southern family.PS there's two Quentins, and Caddy should not be confused with the caddies! Good luck--it's worth it!
    • 1/5
      This is the first book on the Easton list that I have been unable to finish. I read almost half of the book and had no idea what it was about. From my understanding, the book is divided into four sections. The first three sections are written as stream-of-conscious. I hate this writing style, which is probably why I had difficulty paying attention.
    • 3/5
      Turning the pages, reading between the lines, I could understand any given paragraph at a time. When I tried to read more than one paragraph it got ugly. It was about the same people, members of the Compson family, and sometimes about people with the same name as other people. There was even one character who's name changed at some point in my reading. I read and the characters did things and characters with the same name did things in a different time in history and then the time changed again. And I read. There was the caddie on the golf course and sister Caddy, brother Quentin, niece Miss Quentin, Uncle Maury and Maury who's name was changed to Benjy. The story is told from Benjy's point of view in the first chapter. Benjy who is mentally disabled and does not actually speak throughout the entire book. Then there is Dilsey and Mother who's names stay the same but they show up in memories of the various stages of their life. It is Benjy's 33rd birthday on April Seventh, 1928. Benjy is walking along the Golf Course fence with Dilsey's grandson Luster. Benjy's clothes are snagged on a nail as they go through a broken place in the fence.Caddy uncought Benjy from the nail and the two try to stay hidden as Uncle Maury had instructed. Caddy tells Benjy to put his hands in his pockets so they won't be frozen on Christmas.Dilsey's son, Versh tells Benjy that he shouldn't want to go out doors because it's too cold out. "You Benjamin", Mother said. Uncle Maury tells Mother to let him go. Benjy goes with Versh and they meet Caddy coming home from school. They go back in the house to get warm by the fire but Uncle Maury wanted to talk to Caddy. Versh took off Benjy's overshoes. Then Caddy wanted to take Benjy back out with her so Mother told Versh to put Benjy's overshoes back on. Mother said, "Someday I'll be gone, and you'll have to think for him." Caddy smelled like trees. Luster told Benjy to stop moaning as they passed the carriage house.Dilsey shoved Benjy into the carriage. Mother came out with some flowers. Dilsey's son T.P. was going to drive them to the cemetery. Mother was afraid to leave Quentin. "You, T.P.", Mother said.I forget where the first chapter goes after that but there is talk about changing Maury's name to Benjy. 33 year old Benjy goes to the branch with Luster to look for Luster's quarter so that he can go to the show that night. At one point Maury, Caddy, Jason and Quentin all go to the branch and Caddy gets her drawers wet and muddy. Have you found this review to be confusing? This was the most convoluted story I've ever read! The first three chapters of the novel include both current thoughts and past memories of the three Compson brothers, captured on three different days. As I mentioned, the first chapter is Benjy's story told in April of 1928; Harvard student, Quentin voices his thoughts in June, 1910; and Jason, who works for a farm-supply store in town, writes in April, 1928. The fourth chapter is given by the author's narrative. Once I read through the third chapter, I had an idea who was who and went back to disect the first two chapters. I separated them into different thought processes and then tried to piece them together chronologically in order to understand what I was reading. Once I figured out who the characters were and what was happening in each section, I started to enjoy the book!
    • 5/5
      After having unsuccesfully attempted Faulkner's Light in August in college, I expected this one to be difficult as well. After the first 10 pages, I gave in and referred to Wikipedia for some insight into the cast of characters and the "plot" of Chapter 1. This gave me a whole new perspective on the book, and was ultimately surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
    • 1/5
      Well, I can honestly say that I have met my match. "The Sound and The Fury" is considered a brilliant work by many, but I feel like I moved into an entirely new plane of existence, one for which I am utterly unprepared. Faulkner's exercise in removing the dimension of time, not just chronology, resulted in one of the most unpleasant reading experiences I have had in a very long time. I like to read....I love to think about what I read....in this case I found myself thinking about not wanting to read! The only silver lining to this cloud of a novel was that I read the Norton Critical Edition, which contained fascinating information. Jean-Paul Sartre, of whom I am a lifelong devotee, wrote the most helpful essay about the novel. Not helpful enough, however!
    • 1/5
      I know that this is considered a classic, but I found it nearly unreadable... I think I just need a coach or literary scholar to help out. Just unenjoyable and, for me, unrewarding.
    • 4/5
      The Sound and the Fury (1929) is my favorite of the Faulkner books I've read. It tells of the dissolution of a Southern aristocratic family through points of view that shift from chapter to chapter: first through the eyes of Benjy, who is mentally retarded, next through his older brother Quentin up until the point he commits suicide, the third through a cynical third brother Jason, and lastly from an omniscient narrator's point of view but focusing on one of the family's black servants. As with other Faulker works, it requires effort on the part of the reader to understand when events take place and who is being referred to. Quotes:On the human condition:"...hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reductio absurdum of all human experiences which can fit your individual needs not better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."And:"...the strange thing is that man who is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final main which he knows before hand he has assuredly to face without essaying expedients ranging all the way from violence to petty chicanery that would not deceive a child until someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card..."On accepting people (though with a painful racist point of view at the end):"...I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to them for what they are, then leave them alone. That was when I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among."On nature:"The bird whistled again, invisible, a sound meaningless and profound, inflexionless, ceasing as though cut off with the blow of a knife, and again, and that sense of water swift and peaceful above secret places, felt, not seen not heard."
    • 3/5
      Didn't really grab me. And I thought it might, eventually; As I Lay Dying eventually did, when it got psychedelic halfway in. Thanks, Darl! But Quentin is no Darl; he just gets depressive. And Faulkner may have suggested that Caddy is the real hero, and she should have been, but she is totally elided--that's not ethical storytelling in my book. If it makes her a hero, it's only in the mould of Joan of Arc--a sexualized anti-Joan, but in a weird queasy way; Jeanne de Body--when she could have been Tess of the d'Urbervilles at least.

      And speaking of who gets to control the narrative, I'd like to believe that the fact that Dilsey is the only one who doesn't get her section in first person is really significant comment--agency, heroes of our own stories, race, etc.--but it strikes me more as Significant Comment; hand it over to Jason and pretend you're saying something weighty. And Jason, there and in his own section, is a good shot of unpleasant, proving Faulkner can write when he writes relatively straight; but then we don't start out with Jason, we start out with Benjy, who is just disjointed in this spoony and verisimilitude-free way--I don't know exactly what's supposed to be going wrong in that brain of his, and I don't suspect that Faulkner does either, except that he's supposed to be an idiot, and there are certain conventionalized ways idiots are supposed to think and talk. And I'm not holding him to current levels of differentializability on that--like, I just spent the morning with a bunch of kids with Down Syndrome, and I could tell you they ways they communicate differently from, say, autistic kids, or kids with severe ADD--I'm just asking for it to seem real instead of tired and cliche, OR at least to get the point across.

      Because this doesn't really seem to me to have the magnificence it's so convinced it does. There's this hysterical thing that happens, and especially with American writers, and especially with certain Modernist American writers, and ESPECIALLY with Faulkner--where every reference to him is like "William Faulkner, one of the greatest writers of all time" and "The Sound and the Fury, the greatest masterpiece of the twentieth century" and like, we don't always say that about Shakespeare, say; why is there so much nervy self-defensiveness where Faulkner is concerned? I think it has to do with geopolitics and the building of a canon, but we'll let that rest. The thing is, the book's failure is ultimately so simple and unavoidable: it's in technique. There's a tight modernist novel in the Hemingway mould here on the decline of a Southern family, with lots of clenched fists and moonshine-fuelled ragin'; there might even have been a realist-modernist novel on the same subject, in like the Proust vein, with many impressionist flourishes. There could also be some stream-of-consciousmess parabolism, perhaps, but I don't see Faulkner using stream of consciousness in that way--in the Joyce way, to splash in words and evoke haunts in vapor rainbows. I see him dithering, and thinking he's capturing something cognitive and human and real. It's so arrogant, and so Twenties. People don't hink that way; people don't talk that way; people impose narratives. And so if it's not verisimilitude you're achieving, is it narrative thrust, or social realism? Clearly it's the opposite of those. And is it wild excessive beauty? Well, sometimes:

      Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said. Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs. Outside outside of them always but. Yellow. Feet soles with walking like. Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed. With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up.

      And while that's good, it's hardly Joycean, nor do passages of its ilk come along that frequently.More often it's this kind of mess:

      What did you let him for kiss kissI didn't let him I made him watching me getting mad What do you think of that? Red print of my hand coming up through her face like turning a light on under your hand her eyes going bright

      More Joycean, but in comparison to him, in my mind, pedestrian, non-phantasmagoric, unpracticed in the dance. I mean, I'm not the least sophisticated reader. I'm not making the high-school linearity argument or the "want something that looks like something" anti-nonrepresentative art argument here. I like noh, Harry Partch, Picasso, Beautiful Losers, scotch. (I don't like Beckett, John Cage, Jackson Pollock, snakemeat, or, um ... The Sound and the Fury, apparently.) I'm perfectly willing to consider that this kind of plain, "loadbearing" stream of consciousness, as opposed to e.g. Ulysses's more ornamented, "rococo" type, might be a seriously acquired taste, and that the reason so many more people seem to have acquired it in this particular case is the presence of this book on US high-school curricula. (And let me for sure for sure note that Canadian high-school curricula are terrible too; no snotty Nuckism intended.) Empire needs a cultural backstop--we know this--and what represents American empire better than this combination of high modernism and dusty smalltown yokel shit? This refusal to engage with the progressive political, to say nothing of the prismatic psychological at the same time as the literary avant. Imagine a world where US high-school students were given Gravity's Rainbow instead, and the only question on the final was "How did this make you feeeeeel?"

    • 3/5
      This is the sort of book that would take incredible patience to make sense out of, but just isn't worth it. Next to "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", this is one of the most overrated classics I've read.
    • 3/5
      Faulkner isn't an easy read, but the preface to my copy prepared me for the experience - or so I thought. 'The beauty of it is this,' Richard Hughes promises: 'there is no need to disentangle anything'. The first part, told through the eyes of a mentally disabled man (re)named Benjy by his family, is cleverly executed and just about makes sense, or at least, tempts the reader into reading on to make sense of Benjy's drivellings. The complicated family dynamics of the Compsons from the perpective of an idiot is put across simply but also artfully - rooms cease to exist, for instance, in the dark, and 'come back' when someone turns on a light. Clues are given but not explained, because Benjy doesn't understand what he sees and hears. The second part, told as a stream of consciousness narrative by Quentin Compson (one of them, at least), almost defeated me. It's not a difficult chapter, despite the necessary lack of punctuation and direction, but it does require intense concentration. This part slowed me down to the point of almost giving up.However, in the closing chapters, returning to the events of 1928 as glimpsed in Benjy's narrative, the pace really picks up again. I'm still not sure of the 'Wuthering Heights'-esque generations of Compsons - there are two Quentins ten years apart - but everyone has their own distinct personalities and after twenty years inside 300 pages, the reader finally learns all of their gothic secrets.A tiring but provocative experience, and I may have to follow Hughes' advice and read it all again, from an insider's vantage point - but another time!
    • 5/5
      I can't help but echo Adam's review here. Faulkner--like Joyce or Eliot or coffee / tea / wine / blue cheese / annoying experimental music--is best savored alongside a healthy scoop of learnin' (or at least criticism). That said, his novels can certainly be read and enjoyed on an initial surface-level run-through; just make sure to come back later with a microscope.
    • 3/5
      The story of a family told from the points of view of three disturbed brothers. One is mentally disabled, one is neurotic and depressed, the last is just a dick. There's a sister in there, but she doesn't get a voice of her own, rather her story has to be pieced together out of the first person ramblings of her brothers (a part of me wants to believe that the author did this symbolically, as a way to show how women often didn't have voices in that time period). I wanted to like this book, because the writing is great and there were certainly sections of it that I enjoyed. I listened to it on audio book, which probably was a big reason why I was able to get all the way through it, because the narrator's acting helped me to determine when time periods were being switched at random (which happened a lot, especially in Quentin's section). Even with the excellent audio reading, there were still parts that were very confusing, and in the end there is no real resolution in this book. Normally this is not a problem for me, however, as a whole the book is so bleak that I can't really say it's enjoyable. Though I can see why others might like it on a purely style and literary level.
    • 4/5
      This is probably more difficult than it needs to be, but it's also beautiful and entertaining. I recommend venturing into it forewarned or with notes prepared (easily gained online), and taking your time with it. It's worth the time, but it does take time and effort to work through.