Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936)

Tell about the South. What's it like there. A Canadian roommate puts the question to Quentin Compson in a freezing Harvard dormitory, and what comes back is less an answer than a haunting: the story of Thomas Sutpen, who rode into Jefferson, Mississippi out of nowhere, tore a plantation from the wilderness with Haitian labor and pure will, and set himself to found a dynasty. Four narrators tell it and none of them agree. Quentin already knows the worst of it, that Henry Sutpen shot his friend Charles Bon dead at the gate rather than let him marry their sister, but not why; the truth reaches him warped through decades of others' grief, and Faulkner hands it to you the same way, in sentences that loop and qualify and double back, each clause harboring another inside it, each withholding the thing you ache to know. It is the hardest book Faulkner wrote and the most alive. By the end the horror is not only what Sutpen did but that the South cannot stop telling it, and Quentin cannot stop listening.