Word: faulknerisms
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...Reivers, by William Faulkner. In a marvelously comic book, the sage of Yoknapatawpha County matches Mark Twain as a teller of tall stories, laces his narrative with agreeable anecdote...
...Reivers* William Faulkner plays a mellowed Prospero and proves an engaging fellow. Like an old man gossiping on the back stoop, he delights in sentimental recollection, revels in his role as a teller of tall tales, at which only Mark Twain is his equal. Above all, Faulkner carries on the flagrant, 30-year love affair he has had with Yoknapatawpha County and its ornery, enduring and, until now, doom-ridden people...
...Bittersweet Civil War. "There is no such thing as was," Faulkner once said, and in his county-partly because it cannot let go of the nostalgic, bittersweet memory of the Civil War, partly because Faulkner has arranged it-everything that has happened for nearly a hundred years exists in an instantaneous, perpetual, heroic present. Faulkner does not so much invent as he seems to recollect his action and anecdote from an existing, constantly growing body of lore. The Reivers is no exception. The outrageous doings of Boon and Lucius in 1905 are told, in 1962, by Lucius to his grandson...
Mules & Liberty. Readers may not want to live with quite so much of it as Faulkner does. But the continual digression and anecdote that embroider the story are more than decoration. They are part of a way of life, and a way of seeing life, and a system of values that Faulkner has celebrated for years. Mules are among the most intelligent animals, he explains, because intelligence "is the ability to cope with environment: which means to accept environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty...
...Tempest is not King Lear. The Reivers is not The Sound and the Fury. Critics hot for pessimistic reality may find this autumnal story a retreat into anecdotal escapism. More important, readers who know the body of Faulkner's work will miss, as they have in much of his recent writing, the matchless (even when flawed by excess), surging power of his earlier and darker creations. Occasionally the book falls into something close to pure sentimentality. But what the heart holds, Faulkner once wrote, becomes the truth. Faulkner's heart has held Yoknapatawpha County, its gentleness and comedy...