The Hamlet, by William Faulkner. rating = 5

I could go on, maybe I shouldn't. really, the man did not win a Nobel prize for nothing. I'm sure you already know why I liked it :)

but I've got to share with you some of this absolutely magnificent description! wow, what descriptions!

41. The horse made one swirl, it looked round as a ball, without no more front or back end than a Irish potato.

105. It was a forensic face, the face of invincible conviction in the power of words as a principle worth dying for if necessary. A thousand years ago it would have been a monk's, a militant fanatic who would have turned his uncompromising back on the world with actual joy and gone to a desert and passed the rest of his days and nights calmly and without an instant's self-doubt battling, not to save humanity about which he would have cared nothing, for whose sufferings he would have had nothing but contempt, but with his own fierce and unappeasable natural appetites.

205. He was not wild, he was merely unbitted yet; not high-spirited so much as possessed fo that strong lust, not for life, not even for movement, but for that fetterless immobility called freedom.

211. Geography: that paucity of invention, that fatuous faith in the distance of man, who can invent no better means than geography for escaping; himself o fall, to whom, so he believed he believed, geography had never been merely something to walk upon but was the very medium which the fetterless to-and fro-going required to breathe in.
(I wonder what the atevi would make of that remark...)

231. For an instant he saw it, spinning slowly. Then it splashed, not sinking but disintegrating amoung that shattered scurring of broken stars.

277. The pear tree across the road opposite was now in full and frosty bloom, the twigs and branches springing not outward from the limbs but standing motionless and perpendicular above the horizontal boughs like the separate and upstreaming hair of a drowned woman sleeping upon the uttermost floor of the windless and tideless seas.

Ah, the South. the story? the story is of a small little crook in the road really, in Mississippi, right at about the time of the beginning of the Great Depression. not that anyone there knew it was the Great Depression; they were too poor to tell. When your entire worldly belongings consist of one set of clothes to a person, one set of mismatched shoes for five people to share, a pot, a brush with no handle, and a hammer head with no claw tails set upon a stick of firewood... yeah, well, Wallstreet is nothing but a name to you. literally ;)

there is not really a main main character, but ostensibly one could claim this is the chronicle of the origins of Flem Snopes, a crusty frog-like individual who raises himself from an incredibly impoverished and common enough beginning to the highest possible level in that society, by way of his own bootstraps and heartless, almost soulless, manipulation of other people and their expectations. since the trilogy is called the Snopes trilogy, and since the last scene of the book includes Flem and his new wife and child leaving to set up in Jefferson, I'm pretty sure I'm justified in saying so.

oh, and yes I did pick up the accent again just by reading the books. I found myself saying "Sholy" several times in the past week or so. although this is not as noticeable as when, after a long stint of Bronte, I was cut off in traffic and shouted, "dog in the manger". /embarrassed to death...

70. "Here. Bring me a piece of pie while I'm waiting."
"What kind of pie, Mr. Bookwright?" the counterman said.
"Eating pie," Bookwright said.