The Sound and The Fury

Today, I began reading The Sound and the Fury.

Most Americans have read this novel in high school or college, but I can safely say most Dutch have not. Our education on English literature was extremely English, meaning: it focused on writing from Great Britain and Ireland (Steinbeck and Dickinson being the exceptions). Apart from Woolf, Orwell, and Joyce, it also cared little about the 20th century.

Although I was happy to learn Shakespeare sonnets by heart, and could never get enough of Jane Austen, I felt retrospectively sad that I didn’t discover American masters such as Hemingway, Salinger, and Bellow until long after my graduation. 

So today: Faulkner. The dialect is less difficult to understand than I had thought, and the style is far less complicated, too. It’s the perspective that’s troubling and intriguing all the same. I’m sticking with it!