Snopes : The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion (Modern Library (Hardcover))

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Summary: Snopes, the way it was meant to be read
Review: If you love reading Faulkner, then I recommend the Modern Library edition of _Snopes_. Snopes, probably some of the most unjustly underrated Faulkner, is also a fine introduction to his fiction since it contains some of the stories published separately, such as "Spotted Horses." In Snopes Faulkner works the revolving point of view to great effect with primarily four narrators; V.K. Ratliff, the sanguine sewing machine salesman, Gavin Stevens, the sensitive, meddlesome county attorney, Charles mallison, the young boy who grows up with the 2nd and 3rd books, and finally the community of Jefferson itself as a kind of collective 3rd person. Snopes is an inviting, lyrical novel, one that accomodates the reader as a citizen of Jefferson and privileges that new citizen with as much gossip as any other. It's a rich and telling family chronicle as well as a novelistic treatise on time and change in rural Yoknapatawpha County and the town of Jefferson, with real relevance for our own time since as Cleanth Brooks says, Flem Snopes is himself a harbinger of Corporate expansion and agressiveness. Snopes is also a treatment on money, developing more at times a sense of the value of money from the point of view of those with precious little of it than just those with a good deal more of it. These books do get at the human condition, Faulkner wrests even from the innocuous daily affairs a tangible improvement in the catalog of human understading. He approaches his characters, especially the memorable Mink Snopes, with the passion and understanding that they are human and therefore complex and their reasons complex, even if they are simple and criminally minded. It is a pleasing volume that does not disappoint in the end, the satisfying resolution that the reader comes to believe may not happen but does.

Rating:
Summary: a dollar worth
Review: It is incredible how many thing can be done in Jefferson Mississippi at the beginning of the century with one dollar...And it is incredible how many things can be done as well for one dollar. The ever-lasting duel between good and evil are pictured in three novels by Faulkner over a life-span. The first creates the background, the scenario were the characters will play their role, the second pictures the slow and almost unnoticed growing of a pest, while the third is the final break down. The continuos shifting from one character to the other allows you to see the same event under different sight-points, emotions and ways of feeling: slowly the reader becomes a citizen of Jefferson, and share with the others the same struggling for life, the same poverty, the same aspiration and, unhappily, the same fear for the Snopes-pest, everything-sacrifing for money and wealth.

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Summary: Faulkner's true southern odyssey
Review: The three novels that comprise the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, were published over a thirty year span of Faulkner's career. For this reason these books, now published in a single Modern Library volume, provide an incedible insight to Faulkner's evoloution as a writer. At heart, these works are concerned with the rise to power and influence of the Snopes family in Faulkner's mythical town of Jefferson. The Snopes are complete embodiments of evil, and their unique brand of deviousness and complete lack of scruples allows them to overwhelm the inhabitants of the town. The reaction of these people against the tide of corruption, their resistance to this Snopish threat is central to this work. And at the base of all three is a changing attitude toward the Snopish absurdities and evils of the human condition, an attitude that evolves from fierce repudiation to cooperative antagonism. Perhaps these are not the greatest of all the great work that Faulkner produced in his career, but the depth of human understanding and characterizations that are the superlatives applied to Faulkner's work are here in force.

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Summary: The Saga Continues
Review: What Faulkner has done in this trilogy in particular and in his Yoknapatawpha County tales in general, is to create his own world system. What Kant, Hegel, Marx and other great thinkers have done was create their own system and metaphysics on which rests the universe of their ideas. Snopes and co. are the people who live in Faulkner's world of the Deep South which is a prallel universe to the one we live in... it is as always full of intense characters, flowing lyricism, violence and shifting view points which unerringly and uncomfortably resonate in our own world.