Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The Reivers

I had read The Reivers in high school and only remembered I liked it and that for Faulkner it was totally accessible.  Not the baffling experience of The Sound and the Fury. Upon re-reading it as an Audible listen on a long car trip, I found it pretty funny.

Plot summary: In 1906, the narrator, then 11 years old, and two family business employees steal his grandfather's automobile and drive it to Memphis. Hijinks ensue.  Boy grows up.

I hadn't realized it was Faulkner's last novel until there was a line about someone being a Republican and "not the new kind of Goldwater Republican."  What?  When was this written?  Wikipedia soon informed me it was 1962 and that Faulkner won a Pulitzer for the book posthumously.  I had the notion he had finished writing by the late 1940s.  I would not have known what the reference connoted in high school.  Nor would I have understood Faulkner's relatively modern treatment of women. Positively third wave feminist compared to his contemporaries.  Of course, the first wave had barely hit when I was in high school.


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