Experimental feature: Order Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion (Modern Library) from the UK, Canada, Germany or France by clicking an appropriate flag below.

               

Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780679600923
ISBN: 0679600922
Label: Modern Library
Manufacturer: Modern Library
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 1088
Publication Date: 1994-03-15
Publisher: Modern Library
Product Release Date: 1994-03-15
Studio: Modern Library

Here, for the first time published in a single volume as Faulkner always hoped they would be, are the three novels that compose the famous Snopes trilogy, a saga that stands as perhaps the greatest feat of Faulkner's imagination. The Hamlet, the first book of the series chronicling the advent and rise of the grasping Snopes family in mythical Yoknapatawpha County, in a work that Cleanth Brooks called "one of the richest novels in the Faulkner canon." It recounts how the wily, cunning Flem Snopes uses an exploiter's mentality to dominate the rural community of Frenchman's Bend--and claim the voluptuous Eula Varner as his bride. The Town, the second novel, records Flem's ruthless struggle to take over the county seat of Jefferson, Mississippi. The book is rich in typically Faulknerian episodes of humor and profundity and explores love, both sacred and profane. Finally, The Mansion tells of Mink Snopes, whose archaic sense of honor brings about the downfall of his cousin Flem. "For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man," noted Ralph Ellison. "Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics." This volume includes a new introduction to the trilogy by acclaimed novelist George Garrett, author of Death of the Fox and The Succession.


"The insidious horror of Snopesism is its lack of any kind of integrity--its pliability, its parasitic vitality as of some low-grade, thoroughly stubborn organism--and its almost selfless ability to keep up pressure as if it were a kind of elemental force. These are Flem's special qualities. The difficulty of fighting Flem and Snopesism in general is that it is like fighting a kind of gangrene or some sort of loathsome mold. The quality of honor--even a mean and rancorous 'honor'--would immediately make it vulnerable.... It is because he lacks honor that Flem is really invulnerable.... It will therefore be only the madman, the outlaw, or the passionate man who can strike him down.... Flem is a kind of monster who has betrayed everyone, first in his lust for pure money-power, and later in what Faulkner regards as a more loathsome lust, a desire for respectability."
--Cleanth Brooks

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Mouth (and Heart) of The South.
Review: Worthwhile reading William Faulkner's tripleheader in sequence (as I did this summer). Start with the short story "Barn Burning" as prologue (even though the events from that story are recounted in "The Hamlet").
The quiet and consuming Flem Snopes is at the center of this enigmatic trilogy. Snopes is a pre-computer Pac Man with his constantly moving yet silent jaws consuming unsuspecting and a few suspecting citizens of "The Hamlet" (Frenchman's Bend) and "The Town" (Jefferson, the fictional moniker of Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi). Flem's dream is realized when he assumes the mansion in "The Mansion." Yet Faulkner shows us this vision is a composite of other people's nightmares, causing readers to reflect on the American Dream.
Names give us clues about the character of the characters and the roles they play in the South's continuing decline. There's Old Will Varner, who represents the will destined to be subsumed in Snopes's paper-pushing rapacity. Varner symbolizes rectitude in his role as justice of the peace and store owner, knowing that strict application of law in some cases (as in the matter of Mink Snopes and Zack Houston) invites disaster. Varner knows the chief purpose of the legal system is to provide a framework for peaceful coexistence, not find ultimate justice at the end ultimate regardless of cost as per the ethos of modern trial lawyers (a fact wisely pointed out by ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich, himself a denizen of "The New South").
Yet Varner's usury (see there's a reason why Jewish and Muslim laws prohibit charging interest on loans) undermines his role as peacemaker, discrediting his brand of localized capitalism and opening the door for the removed financier capitalism of son-in-law Flem.
Zack Houston (he's called "Jack" Houston in "The Hamlet" but "Zack" in the two later books) represents big-city arrogance in a small-town guise. Houston's strict interpretation of law (this is why rabbis sweat when having to render a legal decision) causes two lives to be forfeit over the sum of $1.00.
County lawyer Gavin Stevens is a likable chap whose gabbing mouth gets him into different sorts of trouble. Interaction with a murderer at the end of "The Mansion" leaves us wondering whether Stevens hasn't let out enough rope for him to be disbarred with.
Manfred De Spain symbolizes the older European-linked aristocracy that's replaced due to its lethargy and its failure to biologically reproduce (see Werner Sombart's "The Quintessence of Capitalism" about this tendency of aristocrats). "Barn Burning" relates the first clash between the Snopeses and the De Spains and the reason why Flem would make usurping the De Spains his goal. The fact that Manfred doesn't see it coming is testament to what a fever the playboy lifestyle can have on the brain.
Faulkner throws in a meditation on capitalist economics and how it can reduce a man to seeming smallness and insignificance yet its products can be used by man to carry out stunning lethal violence. Mink Snopes bears a resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald, who would plunge the U.S. into national mourning the year after Faulkner's 1962 death.
"The Watcher" (see "Fantastic Four" comics for this character) and sometimes participant ("The Watcher" does more than just watch after all) is the wise and prophetic V.K. Ratliff. Ratliff brings fresh perspective, representing biblical patriarch Abraham's forgotten descendants - the People of the East. (By the way, "Father Abraham" was a book Faulkner wrote 17,000 words of then abandoned. Scholars report that many of the themes of "Father Abraham" were put into the Snopes trilogy).
The fact that Eula Varner knows Ratliff's ethnicity and full name, revealing them to Stevens, hints at a deep relationship between Eula and Ratliff. Ratliff's work as a traveling sewing machine salesman clues us into his real life's work - trying to stitch together the tattered souls of the old fallen (and still falling) South.
Faulkner gives conservatives food for thought. He shows the economic "conservatism" of Will Varner and Flem Snopes does more to overturn than to conserve. Our author wrote elsewhere that life is about movement and non-movement essentially means death. Thus we're left to wonder - Can there be such a thing as conservatism?
Faulkner's frequent use of Hebrew scriptures in the titles and themes of his books indicate that the answer is likely yes but don't expect it to stand still. Or as Thomas Jefferson (perhaps a clue as to why the fictional Oxford is named after America's third president) wrote "in matters of style swim with the tide but in matters of substance stand like a rock.").
The magnificent prose and poetic heart of Faulkner bring it all before our senses like one of Ratliff's immaculate homemade shirts. His words stand out in American letters like a jagged cypress on a trip down the Mississippi River. Early encounters with these trees growing out of the water jar the brain with "That tree doesn't belong there. They're not supposed to grow like that." But then, a bit closer to journey's end, you reflect and say "No, that's exactly where it belongs."

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Finally- what William Faulkner always wanted
Review: William Faulkner always wanted these three books combined into one. It is thick and somewhat heavy but it is worth any inconvenience. The Hamlet. The Town, and The Mansion are great novels-which can be throughly enjoyed by the masses, not just Faulkner fans. I love this wonderful book.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: If you get through the first, you'll love the rest
Review: I've recently gone on a real Faulkner bender (11 novels), and this is a great trilogy. In terms of readability, it doesn't really reach it's stride until the second two (The Town & The Mansion). 'The Hamlet's difficulties stem from the poor folk southern dialect, which, certainly, is part of Mr. William's charm -- Take the time to reread if you must. The problems in 'The Town", and the "The Mansion" stem from Faulkner's structural intent of having each novel stand by itself as a work. This means, (in both novels), that material in the previous works is regurgitated in complete chapters, that, for a reader of the trilogy, adds nothing but ennuis. Don't get me wrong, I love all three of these books ('The Town" being my favorite), but I just wish there was an edition that edited out the redundancies.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The Mansion
Review: I can't find The Mansion on sale individually, so I'm reviewing that here. If you have plenty of time on your hands, you can check my reviews for The Hamlet and The Town. There are spoilers below if you're worried that Faulkner can be spoiled.

The Mansion concludes the Snopes trilogy, and at the end of it, I think that the story being told is not of the Snopes but of Gavin Stevens. Flem Snopes, the ostensible subject, is really never on the main stage during the whole trilogy and is one of the rare undeveloped characters in all of Faulkner. Flem holds no faults that don't show up in the characters scattered throughout the town, and while manipulative, is no more so than any of the townfolk that are dead set against his success.

Gavin Stevens is the more interesting character and the only one worthy of a starring role in a tragedy. Primarily, Gavin is devoted to a life well lived and tries to bring others on that path. He is an ideal for what a person can become given effort and commitment. Yet he is destroyed by contact with born greatness exemplified in Eula Varner. Eula has done nothing to achieve what she is, she is simply a milepost in humanity. Gavin's brush with greatness renders his commitment to goodness bland and unsatisfying. He never caves to immorality, but neither does he ever surrender to love or commit the great work that he is capable of (retranslating the Bible back into Greek and Hebrew).

The Mansion is the end of the tragedy with Mink Snopes as its vehicle, and there is an interesting suggestion of redemption for him a la Carson McCullers. However, it's unclear why salvation is offered at all unless it is that he like the rest of us are unwitting instruments of the Old Moster. This would be a much more interesting book if it hadn't been blown away earlier in Go Down, Moses.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Perhaps the most confusing writer of all time
Review: Well, I quit. I admit it, I can't do it. I WANT to read William Faulkner, I WANT to like William Faulkner, so many people I know claim they love his writing and it's so deep and profound and beautiful and la la la, and I really wanted to get into it, I really did, but...I can't.

Here's a brief exerpt from The Hamlet: "They were young voices, talking not in shouts or screams but with an unhurried profundity of volume the very apparent absence from which of any discernible human speech or language seemed but natural, as if the sound had been emitted by two enormous birds . . . he had a fleeting vision of them as two cows, heifers, standing knee-deep in air as in a stream, a pond, nuzzling into it, the level of the pond fleeing violently and silently into one inhalation, exposing in astounded momentary amaze the teeming lesser subaerial life about the planted feet."

Now, it's not so much that I don't know what he's talking about, although I kind of don't, but it's more that he seems to be trying NOT to say what he's trying to say. I mean, whatever he's getting at in describing these two people, he is taking the longest possible route to get there, and he just loses me, every time. His word choice and sentence structure make Proust look like Hemingway. Next to Faulkner, reading "Ulysses" is like reading the Little Golden Books you had when you were a kid.

He's not a BAD writer at all, I mean he explodes with some amazing images from time to time, but you just cannot follow him, or I can't at least. I'm giving the book 3 stars because Faulkner clearly had tremendous talent, but...well, you know how John Lennon once commented on his genius by singing "No one, I think, is in my tree"? Well, in Faulkner's case, I think no one is in his whole ORCHARD. Maybe even his county.

---

---