img_1292One of my favorite things about William Faulkner‘s Light in August is the language.  His use of repetition is soft and alluring and draws the reader in.   

“He stepped from the dark porch, into the moonlight, and with his bloody head and his empty stomach hot, savage, and courageous with whiskey, he entered the street which was to run for fifteen years.”

“The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on.”

The street running on recurs in the novel–in both language and image.

It should have come as no surprise to me when I recently discovered that Faulkner was also a poet. Apparently he referred to himself as a “failed poet.” Read this and see what you think:

“He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself. But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him. But in none of them could he be quiet. But the street ran on in its moods and phases, always empty…”

And if you’re one of those people (I am) who likes to hear the writer’s speaking voice, you can listen to part of Faulkner’s December 1950 Nobel Prize speech online. In the speech, he says that the only subjects worth writing about are “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

If you’ve never read Faulkner,I recommend starting with Light in August.

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