Book Beginnings & The Friday 56 – A Fable by William Faulkner

This week’s Book Beginnings and Friday 56 come from William Faulkner’s A Fable and is part of the Back to Classics in which we had to choose: An award-winning classic. Published in 1954 A Fable, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Fiction 1955. The novel is doing double duty too, as one of my books clubs picked it discuss this month.

 Sooo, I’m not a huge Faulkner fan. Call it scarred from college when I had to read As I Lay Dying.🤕 I get the shivers just thinking about it, but this is novel is supposed to be departure from his others.

Long before the first bugles sounded from the barracks within the city and the cantonments surrounding it, most of the city was already awake.

First Impressions:

Honestly, I don’t have any real first impressions other than I like the visual description and it makes me want to keep reading; which I can’t believe I’m saying about Faulkner, but I’m willing to give it a go.

. . . who declared that no army was better than its anus, since even without feet it could still crawl forward and fight, and so earned his nickname because of his inflexible belief in his doctrine – a nickname spoken at first in contempt  and derision, then in alarm and anger and then rage and then concerned and impotent fury since his inflexible efforts to prove his doctrine soon extended beyond his own platoon, . . .

William Faulkner, A Fable pages 56

Well, I guess I better get cracking on my reading. The discussion is less than a week away and I still have 480 pages to go; which is the whole book.