35   United States – William Faulkner – Light in August – May 2016 (Score 3.5)

According to “The Oxford Companion to Literature in English” the term “Light in August” is a country expression for pregnancy.

Lena, a young pregnant woman, was walking from Doane’s Mill in Alabama looking for Lucas Burch, the father of her unborn child. She had reached Mississippi by the time the story opened, walking and hitching lifts on wagons.

Armstid and Winterbottom saw her as she passed and, later, Armstid and his wagon caught up with her and gave her a lift. He took her to Jefferson where she had been told she would find Lucas, working in a mill. She then, strangely, plays little part in the story until near the end.

The story moves backward and forward in time, dramatically, and rather confusingly. Chapter 6 tells the story of Joe Christmas when he was a boy of five in a children’s home. The style of writing in this section is quite different from the earlier pages – “In the rife pinkwoman’s meddling obscurity he squatted pinkfoamed”, and “thwartface curled” cigarettes.

On page 219, at the end of the top paragraph the last two lines reminded me of an experience I had in 1975. The company I worked for was hosting a four yearly international conference. I had become friendly with a delegate from Ghana, and we spent a good bit of time together on the bus trips.

One day at a meeting associated with the conference I went to speak to some South African delegates. One of them looked at me as if I had crawled from under a stone, said something similar to, but even more vicious than the text in the book, and all four turned their backs on me. That was when I experienced real racism for the only time in my life.

Going back to Mississippi, there was a hunt for a suspected murderer, using bloodhounds, unsuccessfully. It was a comedy, not at all like the similar events which we have seen in prison break and similar films set in the southern states of the USA.

The fugitive played a major role in the book, being caught after only a week, forty miles from Jefferson. The confusing thing is that the description of his flight reads as if his flight had been many years long.

All in all, I found this a difficult read almost, in places, a stream of consciousness like Ulysses. I know that the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed the read. I can only score it at four out of ten.