As I Lay Dying

By: William Faulkner

Narrated by: Marc Cashman, Robertson Dean, Lina Patel, Lorna Raver

Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by William Faulkner—also available are Snopes, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Selected Short Stories

One of William Faulkner’s finest novels, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Told through multiple voices, As I Lay Dying vividly brings to life Faulkner’s imaginary South, one of literature’s great invented landscapes, and is replete with the poignant, impoverished, violent, and hypnotically fascinating characters that were his trademark.

Along with a new Foreword by E. L. Doctorow, this edition reproduces the corrected text of As I Lay Dying as established in 1985 by Faulkner expert Noel Polk.

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(P)2005 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country."--Robert Penn Warren

You Have to "Get" Faulkner

Faulkner is not an easy read. Expect to go back often and really listen to the story. Expect to look up some notes and commentary to grasp what the hell is going on. Expect to struggle with lines like, "My mother is a fish"

Expect to WORK through this book.

And expect the best of literature and performance. Expect to learn. Expect to expand your insight into frustration and futility. Expect to feel pain.

This is a great piece of literature and it's very well delivered.

Worth the effort.

Excelent performance, amazing direction

This is my first audio book from a classic author I listen to. I have mixed feelings about my experience. On the one hand, I went through a work of literature that I wanted to read for a long time.. But with the way information abounds now a days, I doubt that I could have ever read the novel entirely in book form. That makes me happy. On top of that, the performance, adaptation and direction were quite excellent. I mean, really, really enjoyable and as close as what the author might have had in his mind as you can guess. The voices of the performers were well selected and the actors did a wonderful job. I wish that, in the past, I had experienced more books like this. I "reckon" that my imagination would not have given me the richness and variety of voices and accents that this audio work provides.
On the down side, listening to the book, you miss the opportunity to go back to the passages of pure poetry or some kind of feat in language that the author may have written and you could miss it just listening to the audio. What is poetry to the director or the actor may not be so to you and vice versa. I mean it is hard to describe, but I am veteran reader of classic literature and I just know that by not reading the page, I missed the elegant delivery of William Faulkner some how. It is just something about the page on a book that you can mark and comment, and go back even years later that the audio version would not facilitate.
Still I am really happy that I listened to this work, I get it, why they offer a kindle version of the printed book along with the audio; it makes sense. But money wise, it is just more expensive. Besides, my purpose of becoming an audible member was to make better use of my commute time.
I look forward to enjoy other works of this kind of literature here in audible.

Made the narrative and story clearer

with different voice actors it became more clear what people are saying and how they were behaving. Being an audible book help me out a lot with this book while when I read it myself I get struck. Seriously, how is Jewel's mother a horse?!

Listening to a Play

The multiple voices are simply wonderful and, having read this in hard copy many times over the years, I had some trepidations about listening. However the words are as powerful as they are in print and have the added quality of staying as the voices of a "play" in your head. Terrific.

Clarity

I use this "tour de force" novel in my high school English class, and I've found that the audio helps the students follow the story better. I personally enjoy the narrators who with their use of dialects are able to add life to the characters, even Addie, who is dead for most of the novel.

great ensemble performance of an American classic

really enjoyed this reading. all performances are fantastic. very theatrical rendition of this American classic.

awesome!!

this book is so amazing. I read it with my AP English class and it is just such an amazing story with layers of symbolism and character depth. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves American literature. it's not too long and easy to understand!

Beautiful, grim, and hilarious

The multiple narrators of this audiobook bring the story to life: a grim tale of poverty and death with an unexpected dash of hilariously dark humor. A woman is dying and is finally dead, and her husband and children set out with the coffin on a journey to her home town. The language is colorful and concrete and filled with incantatory repetitions of certain phrases. It's the ultimate jinxed road trip, cursed at times with what appear to be all the plagues of Egypt. Without giving away too much, I'll just say, to paraphrase the Bible: where there's a dead body, the vultures will gather. This saying may have originally been intended as a metaphor, but in Faulkner's beautifully poetic prose, you can hear the flapping of wings.

Ain't no end to bad luck when once it starts

What makes this book interesting is not the story. The story is pretty banal. What makes this book interesting is the characters, and the insight into how people feel and think, and the dynamics that develop within a family or any other group of people. Faulkner was a brilliant innovator of stream-of-consciousness and other modern narrative devices. I appreciate him more the more I read of him. A lot of writing presupposes that people think in words, but Faulkner tries to express the non-verbal feelings we have drawing from the words we would use if we had the time and the vocabulary to sort them all out. I think this accounts for some of the poetical imagery we get from characters who would not otherwise think some of the thoughts Faulkner ascribes to them.

The travails of the Bundren family are painful to watch. They all have their secrets from each other. They are all flawed individuals. They have barely held together as a family. Watching them all stumble through the trial of dealing with Addie's death makes you wonder how they can possibly all stay together much longer. But there are counterforces at work too.

One thing I cannot understand is how a 270 page book can be narrated in under 7 hours. I guess I will have to go look at a paper copy and try to figure it out.

The use of 4 readers for this book is extremely helpful in sorting out which of the 15 narrators is speaking at any given time. In general I give them high marks for conveying Faulkner's language and coping with the ambiguities of stream-of-consciousness writing. The one exception I have to comment on is the voice chosen for Dewey Dell. The reader chooses to make Dewey Dell into a kind of wispy, ethereal, dreamy teenager. She fails to capture any of the sullen, angry adolescent that Faulkner constantly hints is at the core of Dewey Dell's character.

However, that minor complaint in no way detracts from the overall quality of this audiobook. It's not about Dewey Dell, any more than it is about Anse, Cash, Darl, Jewel, Vardamon or even Addie. It's ultimately about something else. Something I don't know how to express. Faulkner knew how to express it, but it took him a whole book to do it.

A True Classic

Where does As I Lay Dying rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

It was near the top.

What other book might you compare As I Lay Dying to and why?

Tobacco Road, because they both deal with a poor rural southern family. However in this case the family seems to genuinely care about each other and are not starving.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

Yes, I had insomnia one night and listened to the entire book

Any additional comments?

Faulkner is difficult for me to understand without a study guide. Following it with a study guide it was an enjoyable experience.