Word: flem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hamlet (TIME, April 1, 1940), Faulkner told how Flem Snopes, a repellent specimen of white trash, sidled into Frenchman's Bend. Now, in The Town (the second book in an intended trilogy), Faulkner takes Flem Snopes from his earlier triumphs over the steppingstones of other men's dead selves to higher things in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha's county seat (which closely resembles Oxford, Miss., where Novelist Faulkner has lived for most of his life...
...plot slithers like a water moccasin through the canebrakes among four narrators and unnumbered previous Faulkner books; it more or less turns around the fact that Eula, daughter of the old. failed squire Varner, has become pregnant-though nobody is sure by whom. Varner marries her off to Flem Snopes, who advances from shortest-order cook to bank vice president, then moves up several more rungs of Jefferson's social ladder when he permits "Major" De Spain to cuckold him with Eula. His motives are Snopesean and Faulknerian: through a kind of sexual osmosis, he hopes that the Snopes...
...direct and simple. When he wants to describe Flem Snopes's eyes, he calls them "two gobs of cup grease on a hunk of raw dough...
...impotent aristocrats talking about the code of chivalry but unable to bring it to life. Faulkner is especially adept at portraying the creatures of the decayed South: Gowan Stevens, a gentleman of the old school, who learned to drink in a Virginia college but not to overcome his cowardice; Flem Snopes, who would not hesitate to stamp on every living creature to satisfy his greed; and the famous Popeye, a ghastly symbol of machine-age amorality, with the "vicious depthless quality of stamped tin." Against this background, the violent elements in Faulkner's novels-rape, castration, lynching, bestiality...
...Book Four Flem returns from Texas with a string of insanely wild piebald ponies and sells them to his neighbors. They break loose in horrendous slapstick and pervade the countryside. Mink gets a life sentence; Cousin Flem doesn't lift a finger to help him. Two bourgeois and a desperate peasant invest all they have in a plot of land where Civil War treasure is known to be buried. They find Flem has hoodwinked them as he has everyone else. When last seen, Flem is on his way to larger operations in Jefferson...