Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

That feeling when you close a book, and it is like you can't breathe, because all the breath of life seems to be stuck in that story, and you just finished it, and there is a vacuum inside.

That feeling when you try to describe a book, and all the adjectives you come up with are negative, and yet the story has such power, and you loved it, like life.

That feeling when you are not sure what to read next, because whatever you pick will carry some of the flavour of the sorrow and the hopelessness and the sadness and the excruciatingly unfair black comedy of uneducated, poor, religious life.

That feeling when the novel spills over into real life and makes you hear your heart beat for people that may not exist, but that are more real than many of your neighbours.

That feeling you share with a main character that you aren't sure where the thin line between sanity and insanity is drawn, and whether it is in the eye of the beholder to make a final decision:

"Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it."

That is reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's beautiful poem on madness:

Much Madness is divinest Sense-
To a discerning Eye-
Much Sense-the starkest Madness-
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail-
Assent- and you are sane-
Demur- you’re straightway dangerous-
And handled with a Chain-

I LOVED this novel, and it made my stomach turn. I don't know what the majority of readers would make of this polyphonic Job's journey or Greek tragic odyssey through a fictional Southern landscape, but I figure I am mad in the Dickinson or Faulkner way. There is so much truth in the choir of the voices in the Bundren family, even though each voice alone seems random and mad and disoriented.

The underlying social issues, stemming from the hopeless choicelessness of the poor and uneducated people in the rural South, are not explicitly made a topic as in Steinbeck's novels, but rather hinted at in the confused unawareness of those living that life themselves, unable to raise their voices coherently to demand change.

Religion hovers above their heads as a stick and a carrot. "If you do this, you will face eternal punishment...", "if you suffer through that, God will praise you in heaven"... Most of the time, the Christian doctrines remain mysterious to the characters, and they can't see why an omniscient and omnipotent god would choose to do what he does to them. Has he chosen to let the Devil act to make a 17-year-old girl pregnant and to let her be left alone with ten dollars to try to get an abortion? And what divine sense of humour makes her fail at that and become a renewed victim of sexual exploitation, while her father takes the ten dollars she kept to get himself new teeth and another woman?

Getting their mother buried in her hometown exposes the siblings to extreme situations from which they won't all recover. Some of them will be marked forever by the strain that forced them to balance on the thin line between madness and sanity. I will hear their voices and remember that I walk on that line too.

To the cast of the play, a huge thank you for letting me join you on the stormy ride:

Vardaman - There's no shame in having a fish for a mother!
Cash - You are a mighty fine man, and a voice of care and reason, and when luck means breaking the same leg twice, you certainly know how to cherish your good star!
Darl - I understand you, that line is mighty thin, especially in times of hardship!
Dewey Dell - You have the future on your side, your daughters and granddaughters will have more rights and less vulnerability!
Jewel - There is power underneath your confusion if you can get it sorted!
Anse - Being headless amounts to child abuse!
Addie - Your story is universal!
Christians and gods - the usual cast!