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Title: Pylon: The Corrected Text by William Faulkner ISBN: 0-394-74741-0 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 1987 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: The Lovesong of W. C. Faulkner
Comment: The financial success that Faulkner realized with the publication of "Sanctuary" made one thing very clear to the author: sex and violence would sell many books. And when in 1935, as he was at work on his monumental novel, "Absalom, Absalom," and needed a break from the complexities of that novel, he turned to pruriency once again in the hopes of making a few more easy dollars. But while many other authors would have fallen back on a tried and proven type of novel, Faulkner took his art to new areas. The novel is not set in Yoknapatawpha County, but in New Orleans (New Valois in the novel) and does not concern the interwoven family of characters that he had developed over the years, but a group of barnstorming aviators who follow the air race circuit across the country. There is the foolhardy pilot, his wife, a parachute jumper and a child who might be the issue of either man. That this menage a trois is carried out in the open and with the full complicity of all three members fascinates the newspaper reporter who is assigned to cover the air meet.
No doubt this is great stuff for the making of a sensational novel. But once again Faulkner fools his readers. While it is true that the novel has the tone of many of the contemporary crime novels of his day, Faulkner throws in enough Joycean word play, obscure symbolism, and obtuse prose to make it clear that, even when trying to make a buck, the author is playing by his own rules. The influence of T.S. Eliot is everywhere and there are obvious references to Eliot's "The Hollow Men," "The Waste Land" and "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" (one of the novel's chapters bears this title). Balanced against the literary experiments with which Faulkner was playing is a narrative that is full of excitement and sexual tension, including what surely is the first description of a "Mile High Club" encounter in literature.
This is a dark and pessimistic novel, one that looks at the uncertainty of American society created by the dehumanizing effects of the machine age. Character development is kept to a minimum and the reader never gets to know any of the characters very well. They are all, like Eliot's poem, merely hollow men adrift in an indifferent world. To enhance the general tone of malaise that permeates the novel, Faulkner sets the action during the hedonistic celebrations of Mardi Gras and the effect is startling as the reader is submerged in an atmosphere of drunkenness, aimlessness, sexual obsession, and death. But no matter how inventive the narrative style or how powerful some of the passages, the novel does not match up to Faulkner's mature fiction and is more a curiosity piece than anything else - a harrowing respite of sorts before the publication of "Absalom, Absalom."
Rating: 4
Summary: Liked It-Didn't Love It
Comment: Faulkner's humor, even in such lighthearted books as the Reivers, could never be called madcap. Even when Lena hands Byron Bunch down from the truck bed as though he were an infant, the comedy is derived from a sense of startling humiliation and debasement. That or it's as dark as shoe polish. This latter option is the case in Pylon, which, despite its overall gravity, has many funny moments.
The story: An unnamed reporter in New Valois, some forgotten hamlet with the sole distinction of having a regulation airport that hosts diverting but empty and pretentiously-hyped plane races. This reporter discovers a polyganous relationship between one pilot (Roger Schumman) and Laverne, whose shared son is of dubious origin. Then, as always happens in a Faulkner novel, a great, sinuous spate of events kicks in. The reporter is fired from his job (only to be rehired later) for obsessing over his new crew at the expense of his correspondence. Later, the reporter embezzles a considerable sum from his office (this in addition to many times cadging money from his boss) to pay for a dangerous plane for Roger to fly against the owner's wishes. Roger dies, the child falls by mother's indifference to the custody of the paternal grandparents.
Faulkner has, to my knowledge, never written a bad book. This good, but often spotty book comes the closest to out-and-out failure as any work in the Faulkner canon of which I know. I agree with an earlier reviewer, though: I'd sooner read Faulkner or Turgenev than the [stuff] most writers call popular fiction these days.
Rating: 3
Summary: Faulkner at hiw weakest
Comment: This novelabout an aerial stunt tam and the reporter who gets involved with them is lightweight for Faulkner. It is better than anything that hack writers like Grisham King Clancy etc. have ever written with maybe a very few exceptions an there is enough of Faulkner operating at a high level to recommend it but it is at or near the bottom of his ouvre.
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Title: Mosquitoes: A Novel by William Faulkner ISBN: 0871401673 Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 December, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Wild Palms: If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem by William Faulkner ISBN: 0679741933 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner ISBN: 0871401665 Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 01 December, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner ISBN: 0394712390 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 1974 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner ISBN: 0394714121 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 1975 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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