Vintage</br></br>Product Description</br></br><p>??I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. . . . I give it to you not that you may remember time?? but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair?? and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.?? ?from <i>The Sound and the Fury</i><br>?<br><i>The Sound and the Fury</i> is the tragedy of the Compson family?? featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful?? rebellious Ca"e manchild Benjy; haunted?? neurotic Quentin; Jason?? the brutal cynic; and Dilsey?? their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy?? the character??s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner??s masterpiece and ?one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.</p></br></br>Amazon.com Review</br></br>The ostensible subject of <I>The Sound and the Fury</I> is the  dissolution of the  Compsons?? one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard  times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner  is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness--the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich?? dark?? scandal-ridden story of  squandered fortune?? incest (in thought if not in deed)?? madness?? congenital brain damage?? theft?? illegitimacy?? and stoic endurance is told in the interior  voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy?? the " who  blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes  of the family's former pasture; next Quentin?? torturing himself brilliantly?? obsessively over Caddy's lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family's honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason?? heartless?? shrewd?? sneaking?? nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family.<p>  If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental?? Jason's is the most  harrowing. "bitch always a bitch?? what I say??"e begins?? lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter?? and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks?? Jews?? his sacred Compson ancestors?? his glamorous?? promiscuous sister?? his  doomed  brother Quentin?? his ailing mother?? and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character.<p>  Notoriously "??"<I>The Sound and the Fury</I> is actually one of  Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt?? unannounced  time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is  here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the  conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation  on time?? consciousness?? and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose  so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here?? for instance?? Quentin recalls an  autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis:   <blockquote> And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow  respiration of our waiting a