Adrian's Reviews > Absalom, Absalom!

** spoiler alert ** This book was total garbage ! Lots of unnecessary pages, characters and stories , just for the sake of writing!
Hemingway was right when he said he doesnt need 100 words per sentence (like Faulkner) to write a good story.

Its a huge 600 page book which felt like a total drag.
It feels like you are mining for gold and you find here and there small trinkets of gold which is the main story; these small grains of gold keep you on your toes, keep you going and hunkering down and resist abandoning the file of shit altogether.

The author repeats himself thinking he is emphasizing some key points, but its just useless descriptions which serve no purpose for the reader.

So from 600 pages the first 450 pages are like 10% main plot and 90% useless shit (gibberish that secondary characters say about the main ones or their miserable life , dark descriptions and senzations). Then, right when you are fkin tired of it all, he starts speeding up and unveiling the main plot in the last 100-150 pages.

Its not that i cant accept cliffhangers in a story, but i should feel.that the story shouldnprogress as i read it , not that im stuck in a limbo of repetitions until the very end, until the author decides to just unveil it at max speed .

I felt that the whole story was like a building and you just looked at it from the outside for the first 450 pages and then you entered the building very fast , and it couldve been filled with anything , literally anything , it was totally decoupled from what you have read while being outside the it.

Summary:

What the book is all about in a pharagraph:

White guy Thomas arrives in a village in 1833 Misissippi , builds a farm and marries a high society wife.
He has two kids Henry and Judith. Henry goes to college where he meets Charles. They befriend.
Charles and Henry visit Thomas for christmas. Charles thus meets Judith and starts planning to marry her.
We later find out Charles is Henry's and Judith half brother from Thomas first marriage, when he worked and lived to make money in Haiti.
Thomas repudiated first wife while fidning out she has black ancestry.
Thomas tells Henry that Charles is his brother (hiding the black blood that runs through Charles veins).
Civil war breaks out and Charles and Henry enlist and go fighting for the Confederation.
During the next 4 years Henry contemplates the idea of approving the incestous marriage between his sister and half brother.
He decides he is ok with it , up until Thomas merts him and tells him that Charles is of black ancestry.
The absurdity and WTF moment is when you realise Henry was finally ok with the incestous marriage but will never tolerate a man of black ancestry to marry his sister.
He goes back to Judith with Charles and shoots him right in front of Thomas house.


Trash book, trash author attitude towards the reader , for the first time i felt disrespected as a reader.
You are way better off reading the damn resume , its so much wasted time i can't believe !

PS: maybe my experience would've been a bit different if i would've read it in English and not in Romanian , maybe the translation was a bit bad and i couldn't enjoy all the southern side stories and culture , so factor this in , also.