Extract

My mother is a fish.

A woman dies on a farm in Yoknapatawpha County, and her family loads her coffin onto a wagon for a journey across flooded rivers and burning barns to bury her in the town of Jefferson, because she asked and because a promise is a promise even when it costs everything. William Faulkner wrote this novel in six weeks in 1930, working the night shift at a power plant, and its fifteen narrators cycle through voices that range from the biblically cadenced to the barely coherent. Darl sees too much. Jewel says almost nothing but acts with a fury that is its own eloquence. Cash builds the coffin with a carpenter's devotion that is also grief. The book smells of Mississippi mud and reads like a hallucination rooted in the earth.