ABSTRACT
It needs to be said every time a new book ofhis appears: Mr. William Faulkner is an exasperating writer. Sometimes, as on the present occasion, it needs to be said quite firmly. His peculiar talent is not in question. He has a sombre force of imagination, a smouldering and smoky pictorial power, a harsh striving intensity of nervous passion. Nothing that he writes, whatever the effort of reading him, can be lightly turned down as sound and fury. Yet the effort, it must be confessed, grows more grudging rather than less, the impression ofsound and fury grows more insistent. It becomes increasingly difficult, in fact, even while conceding Mr. Faulkner's individual virtues, to avoid being preoccupied with his glaring and rather enervating faults. To those who have still to discover Mr. Faulkner, then, this new volume of his may be recommended for a degree ofseriousness, an integrity of sentiment and a power of visual concentration that between them project what is obviously a high creative purpose. For others the principal interest of the volume may lie in the doubtful pleasures of critical analysis.
