A demon came to Mississippi in 1833, tore a plantation from the swamp with the labour of enslaved men, and built a dynasty the land itself conspired to destroy. William Faulkner's most ambitious novel tells the story of Thomas Sutpen through layers of narration, each teller revising what came before, until the past becomes not a fixed record but a living act of interpretation. Quentin Compson, already doomed in The Sound and the Fury, sits in a freezing Harvard dormitory and tries to explain the South to his Canadian roommate, tries to explain it to himself. The sentences spiral outward like smoke, and the novel becomes an investigation into why we tell stories at all, and whether understanding is ever more than beautiful failure.