Requiem for a Nun (Vintage International)

Part of me doesn't know what to think about what is basically two books here. There's a play and there is a narrative history of the county (the town and the state) and maybe I need some help here (haven't read any commentary) to explain to me where the twain shall meet.Still, I liked it, couldn't stop reading either, absorbed by both. The narrative filling in a lot of the gaps of the history of the county left out or merely alluded to in other works; the prose dense and often just too much but I couldn't stop reading it.. The play: There is Temple getting of that train and not turning around from a drunk Gowan Stevens and getting back on it, and eight years later the circumstances of that decision create the mess that is the subject of the play. It's like she can't help it. There's a determinism here, something Faulkner deals with a lot in his writing. But there's also the hint (more than that) of redemption and faith in the mouth of Nancy. And Nancy, the fallen woman who could somehow redeem herself out of all disadvantage while Temple - in all advantage - didn't just fall but dove and is can't seem to stop herself any more than she can resit gravity.Likely not the most accessible nor a good starting point. It's a sequel to another book, Sanctuary, so I wouldn't recommend beginning here, but rather with The Unvanguished. But after reading several of his other novels, including all of his major novels, put me in a good place to enjoy Nun..Not quite 4 stars but better than 3.

Stunning. Faulkner, in a note to his editor wrote: "...it's a bit on the esoteric side." A bit. If you've not read him, first off, what's wrong with you? More important, this is perhaps not the most advisable, accessible intro to Faulkner's metier (you may find yourself wondering whether there has been some ghastly printing / publishing error, and they got several books all jumbled up), and yet in some ways no better introduction is possible. Novel and stage-play and what felt like a newsreel all wrapped into one. Race, historical memory, cognitive dissonance, and a black woman on trial for a murder she could not and yet could not NOT have committed.A note to pedants and other martinets of nonnormative punctuation: avoid.

The book is in ok shape for being printed in 1951. It just looks nothing like the book advertised in the picture.Binding is in good shape, but cover is faded and totally different than advertised. Not what I thought I was buying. Buyer beware with this book seller, their pictures do not necessarily match the book they are sending you.

On time, as described.

There was no Nun.

William Faulkner may be the most maddening of American A list authors. After a string of masterpieces and near masterpieces capped by the greatest of all American novels, Absalom Absalom, in 1936, Faulkner floundered. Much of his subsequent work consists either of episodic jobs (The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, Wild Palms, etc.) cobbled together from previously written/published works or misfires like Intruder in the Dust, a comedy aspiring to tragedy that ends up as neither. Requiem for a Nun is a seeming desperation move that mines Faulkner's first commercial success, Sanctuary, from 20 years earlier for inspiration, and deploys it in an experimental novel/play hybrid format apparently copied from John Steinbeck's recently published Burning Bright.Both Burning Bright and Requiem for a Nun are stage plays with dialogue and stage directions fleshed out with novelistic narrative. I haven't read Burning Bright but I can say that the hybrid approach doesn't work very well in Requiem. For one thing, Faulkner's style is extremely ill-suited to the stage play format under the best of circumstances, given the requirement for extended dialogue. Dialogue is not a Faulkner strength as his characters all tend to talk in exactly the same way, that is, like William Faulkner, which can be jarring when you have hillbillies firing off ten-dollar words like academic pedants and mythological allusions like classics professors.Requiem takes the story of Sanctuary's Temple Drake and fast-forwards about ten years. Temple in Sanctuary was a teenaged college freshman who wound up imprisoned in a Memphis whorehouse with a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome. In Requiem, she has been liberated and has married the drunken jackass who got her in the Sanctuary situation in the first place. They have two kids, one of whom is murdered by their black housekeeper/nanny, Nancy.The stage play part of Requiem follows the efforts of Temple and Nancy's defense attorney Gavin Stevens to secure a pardon for her from the governor (why Temple, the mother of the murdered child, should want to do this is of course one of the major points of interest). The early scenes are okay but as Faulkner gets further in, the dialogue devolves into extended monologues. Furthermore, the character of Nancy is utterly unbelievable, a flatline creation who is much more symbol than real person.As for the inter-scene narrative passages, they are interesting in that they fill in the back story of Yoknapatawpha County, Faukner's fictional Mississippi setting for many of his stories and novels, but they do little else. And of course it's all deployed in that why-have-one-adjective/adverb-when-I-can-think-of-five style Faulkner had perfected by this point. Still, Faulkner-heads will especially appreciate this backstory service, replete as it is with familiar names like Sutpen, Sartoris and McCaslin from earlier works.If you want to read Faulkner at his best, start chronologically with The Sound and the Fury and work you way up to Absalom Absalom, then decide if you want to go on. Requiem for a Nun would be near the bottom of the list, frankly.

My dad told me I was named after a character in this book so it's fun reading it. It was made into a movie but I can't find it on tape or dvd.

Open the "Look Inside" feature. You'll see wildcards and odd characters rather than letters on the first page. This continues throughout the Kindle version.Very disappointing.

I bought this because of the intriguing quote used by Barack Obama. Disappointingly the plot did not hinge on the quote in any way, in fact I hardly noticed it passing. I have never read a Faulkner before and I was surprised how incredibly verbose it was. It actually reads like a very verbose history of America starting from the geological formation of the continent ending in about 1900, interwoven with a quite conventional courtroom drama with much social comment therein.

Not the best of Faulkner. The book can be regarded as a sequel to Sanctuar but also as a history,often amusing and wry, of the Jefferson court-house. The theatrical sub-plot does not really work except in as it confirms Faulner's view of race in Yoknapatapha County. An interesting read nevertheless.