In the Library
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner, 1930
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 4 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 59
- Length
- Length 57k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
My mother is a fish.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read As I Lay Dying
A book whose reputation for being impossibly fractured hides the plainest, funniest, most heartbreaking thing Faulkner ever wrote, a single family hauling a coffin across a flooded county.
The reputation that reaches you about As I Lay Dying is that it is the hard Faulkner, a puzzle box of fifteen unmarked voices with no narrator to tell you what is going on, the kind of thing you need a seminar and a wall chart to survive. That reputation is built on the first dozen pages, where the names of the speakers come at you faster than you can place them, and it is badly unfair to everything that follows. The truth is that the story underneath could not be simpler, the prose is often laugh-out-loud funny, and once you understand the one trick of how it is told, you will move through it faster than almost any serious novel you have read.
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About the book
My mother is a fish, the youngest boy decides, having no other shape to hold his loss in. Addie Bundren has died, and her family loads the pine coffin her eldest son built beneath her window onto a wagon, then hauls it across forty miles of flooded river and scorched road to bury her in Jefferson, buzzards wheeling above the July heat. Faulkner splinters the telling among fifteen voices, fifty-nine short chapters, each Bundren and bystander speaking in turn, so you assemble the grief and the family's separate, secret hungers yourself. Addie gets a single chapter too, spoken from the far side of death, and it overturns everything you believed about why these people are on the road. The wonder is how he makes a mind audible: the broken syntax of a frightened child, a son's pride as he sets his own shattered leg, a father who longs for new teeth more than he mourns his wife. Grief has rarely been this funny, or this true.