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As I Lay Dying

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About this listen

 A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.

As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others, the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos.

“I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost where the last period would fall.” —William Faulkner on As I Lay Dying

This edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Noel Polk.

Cover photograph: © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner.(P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc. Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Mississippi

Critic reviews

"For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country."
--Robert Penn Warren
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A Faulkner classic brought to life and made all the more accessible by a brilliant perforane

A must listen

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This is an excellent performance of one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

beautiful

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Far be it from me to judge so unquestionably accomplished and gifted an author but this is a novel characterised by an unrelenting misery that is at times very difficult to endure. Nevertheless, it’s an arresting and highly innovative work rich in quite astonishing imagery.

From a performance perspective, I’m afraid there are too many actors performing the parts. If one actor is sufficient to voice a multitude of characters in a titanic 18th or 19th century novel (see Juliet Stevenson reading Middlemarch or even the audacious early-20th century Mrs Dalloway, with its flowing from one stream or consciousness to another), then just the one should do for a relatively short novel like this. As it is, the jumping between actors interrupts the rhythm, and becomes rather irritating.

I certainly don’t regret having chosen this novel but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it hadn’t brought on my own depression somewhat.

Brilliant but brought on depression in more ways than one

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I struggle with Faulkner. I gave up on The Sound and the Fury and I don't quit easily. I did manage The Unvanquished but that's not counted among his major works. I read As I Lay Dying because I really enjoyed Graham Swift's Last Orders which, I was informed, was "structurally similar" to As I Lay Dying. And so it is. Except that Swift uses comedy to alleviate the dark secrets and resentments that are gradually revealed, Faulkner allows no such relief. We follow the Bundrens on their trail of tears like the buzzards that circle their derelict wagon. Anse's joyless Stoicism-cum-Masochism, Jewel's adolescent angst, Darl's descent into insanity, Vardaman who, in any other book would have been the most irritating character and poor, poor, Dewey Dell - this is surely the most hopeless cast of characters ever assembled. But it feels true, and that's why I gave it 4 stars.

Surely the most hopeless cast of characters ever.

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The key to this book is the disparate voices of the same family that find their way to us across the divide of time, location, culture and context. A book that is a struggle from the start - 15 different narrators in 59 chapters - but a journey that becomes easier as we are helped with the burden of unfamiliar language and strange circumstances by a great narration team. The Stream of consciousness technique was refined from its European source by Faulkner and we see its full glory here - on the trail to Jefferson, Mississippi. Not Agamemnon to Odysseus as the title suggests, but a dirt poor family in the throes of their own sad Odyssey.
Great stuff ? a really difficult book well delivered ? it?s what makes Audible so valuable.

A stream of voices in the dry wilderness?.

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