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Title: Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron ISBN: 0-679-73597-6 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 03 March, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (14 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Not for everyone
Comment: William Styron creates some impressively tragic and melancholic situations for his fatally flawed characters. Their lives have a way of permeating your dreams after you enter Styron's world. A fine example of this is Sophie's Choice.
The problem I had with Lie Down in Darkness is that the situation is overly dramatic. While I can understand Sophie, I cannot accept Peyton's insanity. Styron attempts to attribute Peyton's descent into madness to her childhood, and her experiences with her mother, which albeit unhappy, cannot plausibly be used as an explanation for the tragedy that ensues. The style is sophisticated, and the imagery and symbolism of birds as death omens create a forbodding presence throughout the novel.
While the style is sophisticated, I didn't find the journey enjoyable because there were parts that felt tedious and long-winded. Mostly, it is just a depressing novel, with every familial milestone that should be joyous - such as a wedding, or Christmas celebrations - marred by a doomsday feel. You know that Helen will find some way to quarrel with her husband or Peyton and that the repercussions will resound throughout the entire novel, which feels like a lifetime.
Novels about sorrow and lost can be enlightening and enjoyable. However, this novel requires stamina because it is very long. You sink into a stiffling world for the duration of the novel and you won't necessarily come out of it feeling rewarded.
Rating: 5
Summary: Human fallibility, pain, and loss
Comment: Early in William Styron's novel Lie Down in Darkness the reader is introduced to a man, Milton Loftis, at the train station. Milton is a good allusion; whatever paradise this man has hoped for in life, it has been lost. How?
There, I think, is the essential question that drives this novel. How do we bring ourselves to lose things we charish? How does this happen?
It's a deep and heartbreaking question, and it may leave many people unable to read this book. This is understandable, but reading this novel, though the author's first novel and somewhat experimental, allows one to view the depths of human suffering, and perhaps provides ways to avoid it.
Rating: 5
Summary: A sad but affecting book
Comment: William Styron is likely the greatest novelist no one has ever heard of. His name is even less recognizable than Faulkner's, or other great American writers: Steinbeck, Hemingway, etc. And yet, in my opinion, his works are far superior. With only four novels to choose from out of his career he has made it very difficult for himself to be regarded in those terms, but he has still achieved a wide amount of critical acclaim, with a Pulitzer Prize and an American Book Award to his credit.
His novels are not light novels. They are not coffee table books, but a rather serious discussions on moral issues written with an eloquence that is unmatched in modern writing.
Lie Down in Darkness is his first novel, and is much like what I have just said. As a first novel it is necessarily experimental, although the effect of this experimentation is at times hard to tell.
Following through flashback the trials of one Virginia family on the day of their daughter's funeral, Lie Down in Darkness leads up to the present, describing in tragic terms how the family has come apart and where it is now.
This is great writing, some of the best writing I have ever read, as realistic as any Dickens novel, and as engaging as anything by Baldwin.
It is not a happy book, but it is the best book I have read about the American family, far greater and relevant than anything I have read by Morrison.
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Title: Darkness Visible : A Memoir of Madness by William Styron ISBN: 0679736395 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 08 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Sophie's Choice by William Styron ISBN: 0679736379 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 03 March, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron ISBN: 0679736638 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 10 November, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Tidewater Morning by William Styron ISBN: 0679754490 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Set This House on Fire by William Styron ISBN: 0679736743 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 04 January, 1993 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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