The Hamlet

By: William Faulkner

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

Length: 14 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's Summary

The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes – wily, energetic, a man of shady origins – quickly comes to dominate the town and its people with his cunning and guile.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of William Faulkner's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews James Lee Burke about the life and work of William Faulkner – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.

©1954, 1976 William Faulkner (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Great narrator, great book, better read than heard

The narrator of this book is excellent. The stories themselves are excellent. The complexity of Faulkner's sentences and story structure, however, often forced me to rewind, because I wasn't certain if I had missed something.

Each story was fascinating, with tales of trickery and veniality mixed in with occasional kindness and hope.

I certainly cannot fault the narrator, who does a wonderful job with accents and differentiating the different speakers. Having read (in print) other books by Faulkner, I knew that he loves a rambling sentence, and always tells a moving tale.

If I had read this book (in print) before, perhaps I would not have been as confused by the sometimes abrupt turns the stories took.

It's book well worth reading, beautifully narrated, but I would recommend that if you haven't encountered Faulkner before, or if you like obvious continuity, you get the print edition.

And We Thought Control Freaks Were a New Phenom

What did you love best about The Hamlet?

I did not "love" The Hamlet. I was fascinated by it, kind of like being fascinated by a snake. These are mostly not nice people Faulkner writes about. He's not mocking them. He's reporting.

The images are vivid and the language is a treasure. I loved listening to the words. But it is not a comfortable book.

Their Only Chance to be Beautiful?

Faulkner's language is absolutely gorgeous, moving in wafts of sense-filled images through the reader/listener's mind and Joe Barrett's reading of it is perfection. I have read most of Faulkner's novels more than once (Absalom, Absalom, being my favorite). But times have changed and I was surprised by my patience being tried by the less-than-desirable characters. Getting older, I also find myself less patient with aspects of stories than seem contrived to shock; after decades of news, movies, and reading I find little actually shocking about "human" behavior so the attempts seem more artifice than art. So, I remind myself that Faulkner wrote in different times.

In Richard Ford's novel, Canada, which I read about the same time as listening to The Hamlet, I was struck by an artist character who explained that she painted ugly, plain, decaying buildings because it was their only chance to be beautiful. I'm thinking this is a way to look at ugly, ignorant and cruel behavior told in beautiful language. So I am still considering spending 2 more credits to complete the Snopes trilogy read so beautifully by Joe Barrett.

Charming

In the past, many people thought The four door tragedies were the only books worthy of study and attention. Times have changed, and now we are beginning to appreciate the rambling and charming lighthearted feel of the trilogy of which the Hamlet is the first. I re-read it many times and each time enjoyed it more.

Well-Read

I like the way the reader does the accents. He's not a southerner but he does well enough that you can tell the character who is speaking by the way he reads - except, of course, when Faulkner himself forgets who is speaking - I still don't completely understand the book and probably never will, which is a good thing, because it's like a gold mine you can go back to over and over again and it never runs dry.

The Long, Hot Summer

This is the first in the Snopes trilogy focusing on the decline of Southern aristocracy in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County with the concurrent rise of capitalism via the squirrely, cold-blooded and crooked Snopes family. The Hamlet explores the Snopes clan's early years as they rise to power while the mainstay families--the Compsons and the Sartorises--decline in wealth and influence.

Abner "Ab" Snopes, the family patriarch, moves his wife and two kids to Frenchman's Bend from parts unknown, and Ab begins life as a tenant farmer on Varner property. Someone learns that Ab might have once been a horse thief and the citizenry learns the hard way that he is also a barn burner. Ab's son Flem, who I guess one could call the anti-hero of the trilogy, begins his ascent in Volume I as a store clerk, up to landowner and entrepreneur trader.

A Faulkner oddity: Ike Snopes, a cousin, is a dim-witted ne'er-do-well who develops carnal attractions--unrequited, thank goodness--for a cow.

This has my interest enough to continue with the trilogy, but with no true sense of anticipation. As all but Light in August, one must be diligent and persevere to gain reward in its reading.


An interesting tidbit: I am fairly certain this is the only Faulkner novel made into a relatively big budget film or to see moderate success, as "The Long, Hot Summer" (1958), starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Angela Lansbury and Orson Welles, the last of whom has the absolute worst Southern accent that's ever made it to the silver screen.

Narrator

This reading is not terrible, but I don’t know how somebody who reads for a living can mispronounce so many words. Faulkner deserves better than most of the people who read his audiobooks, except for Grover Gardner, who is awesome.

Love Faulkner!

Would you listen to The Hamlet again? Why?

Yes, I have listened to parts of it again.

Have you listened to any of Joe Barrett’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Yes, his voice is so smooth and comfortable.

“’What’s a short way to New York from here?’”

What did you like most about The Hamlet?

The ways in which William Faullkner sets his novel in the isolated Frenchman's Bend, a few decades after the American Civil War had ended in 1865, and drops down the social scale from the Compsons, the Sartorises and other aristocratic or fallen families. He fastens upon a poor white family, the Snopes, and their seemingly irresistable rise, in order to tell the story of what happened to the South. The ruins of the ante-bellum plantation, the Old Frenchman Place as it had come to be called in Faulkner's account over many novels of his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, are located not too far from the hamlet and give it its name. Insofar as there is a plot, the ruins figure in it near the end of the novel in one of the many tall-tales that take over from the broad historical narrative of the region.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Jack Houston. However, there is a wide cast of characters – the Varner family, Houston, V.K. Ratliff, as well as many members of the Snopes family – who come and go, sometimes situated with reference to their women and black servants and workers. In this way, a succession of stories and sketches builds up a remarkable picture of Frenchman’s Bend and the wider South, and particularly the Deep South of Mississippi. Locations recur, notably, the balcony of the store, where news is swapped, though in such a laconic and discontinuous way that “news” doesn’t seem to be the right word. Ratcliffe, a sewing-machine salesman, brings the outside world, or at least that of Yoknapatawha, to the hamlet. Mail order catalogues provide images of a wider world, as do characters who travel to the Far West and return. Hence my interest in Houston, who offers another version of Faulkner’s great theme of time and place: “He fled, not from his past but to escape his future. It took him twelve years to learn that you cannot escape either of them.”

Which scene did you most enjoy?

The hunt for buried treasure on the Old Frenchman's Place.

If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

Nothing - he manages brilliantly to convey both Faulkner's high style and the colloquial speech of the characters.

Any additional comments?

Inasmuch as plot resolves itself into the question What has happened? I found myself regularly wondering what was going on, partly because of Faulkner’s Modernist techniques (the use of a personal pronoun with only an occasional, in-passing, use of a name, and his extraordinary, excessive and even gothic style) but also because of the clipped yet drawled way of speaking of his characters that verges on, but never is, inarticulateness. Joe Barrett is a really great reader in the audio version.

As an instance of the high Faulkner, take this:

“He [Houston] grieved for her for four years in black indomitable fidelity and that was all. … vanished (from school) not only from his father's house but from the country too, fleeing even at sixteen the immemorial trap and was gone for thirteen years and then as suddenly returned, knowing and perhaps even cursing himself on the instant he knew he was going to return that she would still be there and unmarried and she was. He was fourteen when he entered the school. …

At fourteen he was already acquainted with whiskey and was the possessor of a mistress, a negro girl two or three years his senior, daughter of his father's renter and so found himself submitting to be taught his ABCs four and five and six years after his coevals. ... Invincibly incorrigible not deliberately intending to learn nothing but convinced that he would not, did not want, and did not believe he needed to.”

Although Faulkner isn’t writing about the leaders of the Old South or their descendants in “The Hamlet”, the high-style works well on different classes, though punctuated by an often-funny colloquialism. In this contrast between the muttered vernacular of the poor or rising classes and the complex and seemingly never-ending sentences in which Faulkner describes the inner life of his characters, an inner life which is the life of part of the post-bellum South, he proves himself to have a wider range than earlier Modernists, Henry James and Virginia Woolf – more like James Joyce in this respect.