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The Hamlet
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Manufacturer: Vintage
Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: Vintage
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price: $10.17
You Save: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: Vintage
Average Customer Rating:
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The Hamlet Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780679736530
ISBN: 0679736530
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 432
Publication Date: 1991-10-29
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1991-10-29
Studio: Vintage
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780679736530
ISBN: 0679736530
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 432
Publication Date: 1991-10-29
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1991-10-29
Studio: Vintage
Editorial Review of The Hamlet
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.
Customer Reviews of The Hamlet
Customer Rating: 
Review Summary: Ah, the romance
Review: For all its attempts to elucidate the economic and social structures that led to the decline of the south, this book is best in its portrayal and critique of romance. The section introducing Eula Varner as an object of desire is one of the most compelling before the opening passages of Lolita (forgive me twice):
her entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic times--honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof.
I mean, come on, passages like that just make you feel ashamed of the shallowness of your own emotions, vocuabulary, and existence. Oh, and that intensity goes on for almost 20 pages.
****SPOILER ALERT (Sort of)****
And if that gets you revved up, the book escalates the language and shifts to another starcrossed couple, an idiot ward of Flem, Ike, and a neighbor's wandering cow. Here's Ike trying to soothe the spooked cow:
trying to tell her how this violent viloation of her maiden't delicacy is no shame, since such is the very iron imperishable warp of the fabric of love.
The book is worth reading for those two sections. Much of the rest drags. It's filled with stories that Faulkner finds humorous and they are set to the laugh track of Ratliff who is constantly telling the reader what they should find humorous. It's about as effective as Jim smirking into the camera throughout the 3rd season of The Office to let the audience know what a delightful practical joke he's just played.
In all, this is worthwhile, but this falls in the middle of an incredible period of Faulkner's career, and even when you're reading it you come across huge passages that remind you how disappointed you are in him.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Surreally Stunning
Review: Frenchmen's Bend, Yoknapatawpha County--a land so familiar and yet so distant that it could be some wide-encompassing foreign country; not merely a fictionalized South. Faulkner's cadence, description, and narrative that travels dreamily from one place and character to another I found to be initially off-putting, but as I feel under his spell and the colors, and people of the world he wove out of the rough-hewn broadcloth sack, a sack built of a small town, in a place that exists on the outskirts of reality, normalcy; I found myself ensnared, as the residents of Frenchmen's Bend are caught in the snare of Flem Snopes--a man who would, who does, talk the Devil out of the possession of his immortal soul. To travel into the peculiar and yet seemingly real Frenchmen's Bend is to be lost within a surreally stunning place.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: READ THIS GREAT BOOK
Review: Faulkner assembled much of THE HAMLET from short stories, where his themes were courtship, lust, love, and obsession or where the average person succumbs to greed or foolishness and is victimized in business.
Take the subject of love. In THE HAMLET, Faulkner examines obsessive and unrequited love through his characters Labove (an achiever obsessed with untouchable beauty) and Ike Snopes (a retarded man in love with a cow); ambivalent love through the experience of Mink Snopes (a vicious murder) and Jack Houston (a guilty widower); and loveless marriage through the lives of Eula Varner and Mrs. Armstid, who are at the top and bottom of social hierarchy. Each of these characters is unique and fully realized. Yet each suffers from cruel variations of a single force.
Not to be a pedant: But Robert Penn Warren described THE HAMLET as: "...a sequence of contrasting or paralleling stories" where Faulkner's "...movement was not linear but spiral, passing over the same point again and again, but at different altitudes." This is exactly right.
At the same time, THE HAMLET is about Faulkner's writing. Here's one quick example, with this great author writing about the weather. "It was a gray day, of the color and texture of iron, one of those windless days of a plastic rigidity too dead to make or release snow even, in which even light did not alter but seemed to appear complete out of nothing at dawn and would expire into darkness without gradation." Great isn't it?
Even so, I was surprised by one aspect of THE HAMLET. It is: terrible things happen to all the characters. This even includes Flem Snopes who is a winner in the male world of business but surely locked in a loveless marriage. Yet despite their cruel fates, Faulkner's amazing characters persevere. As he said when accepting his Nobel: "When the last ding-dong of doom has clanged, ...there will still be one more sound: ...a puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this...." READ THIS GREAT BOOK
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Major Faulkner
Review: I'm not sure how exactly to say this without sounding closed-minded and elitist, so I'll apologize right off the bat for that. But I'm not sure the people who disparage this novel on this website quite "get it," and I think part of the reason might be that most of those people aren't from the South. This is an episodic, rambling, distinctly Southern story, told in an episodic, rambling, distinctly Southern way. That's just how things work down here, and I realize it's not that way in Hoboken (which is fine too). It's also a very rural setting, so that may turn some people off or lead to some misunderstanding.
Having said that, this book is a major Faulkner work, meaning it's great, not merely good. It's his most explicit critique of capitalism and his most explicit commentary on love in all its forms, and it's a very funny one at that -- again, it's from a Southern angle, though; if you've lived in an industrial rather than rural society your whole life, it may not appeal to you as much. Like most Faulkner, you have to settle into the prose and the pace.
The characters The Hamlet introduces are among Faulkner's most memorable: the rapacious Flem, the wonderful Ratliff, the oddly moving (trust me) Ike, etc. Faulkner has been accused of exploiting his poor whites in this novel, but I think his surprisingly sympathetic treatment of Mink in the trilogy counters this charge pretty well.
I've read everything Faulkner's ever written at least once (two to four times, for his major works), and this is my favorite. If you think Anse is funny in As I Lay Dying, or Virgil and Fonzio in Sanctuary, you'd probably really enjoy this book. It's the only time you'll ever hear a teenage girl rebuff her schoolteacher's inappropriate sexual advance with the command, "Stop pawing me. You old headless horseman Ichabod Crane." Priceless.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: first and best of the trilogy
Review: The Hamlet is an episodic, sometimes uneven novel of jealosy, avarice , and poverty. Some of Faulkner's best characters including Flem and Eula Snopes (Varner), Ratliff the cagy sewing machine salesman, an Houston, the luckless cow-owner. All in all good stuff not as difficult to read as some of Bill's stuff.
Unfortunately the trilogy goes downhill from here, it was many years before he wrote The Town. The Mansion I thought was a stronger book. Give The Hamlet a try, some vintage Faulkner here.
Review Summary: Ah, the romance
Review: For all its attempts to elucidate the economic and social structures that led to the decline of the south, this book is best in its portrayal and critique of romance. The section introducing Eula Varner as an object of desire is one of the most compelling before the opening passages of Lolita (forgive me twice):
her entire appearance suggested some symbology out of the old Dionysic times--honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof.
I mean, come on, passages like that just make you feel ashamed of the shallowness of your own emotions, vocuabulary, and existence. Oh, and that intensity goes on for almost 20 pages.
****SPOILER ALERT (Sort of)****
And if that gets you revved up, the book escalates the language and shifts to another starcrossed couple, an idiot ward of Flem, Ike, and a neighbor's wandering cow. Here's Ike trying to soothe the spooked cow:
trying to tell her how this violent viloation of her maiden't delicacy is no shame, since such is the very iron imperishable warp of the fabric of love.
The book is worth reading for those two sections. Much of the rest drags. It's filled with stories that Faulkner finds humorous and they are set to the laugh track of Ratliff who is constantly telling the reader what they should find humorous. It's about as effective as Jim smirking into the camera throughout the 3rd season of The Office to let the audience know what a delightful practical joke he's just played.
In all, this is worthwhile, but this falls in the middle of an incredible period of Faulkner's career, and even when you're reading it you come across huge passages that remind you how disappointed you are in him.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Surreally Stunning
Review: Frenchmen's Bend, Yoknapatawpha County--a land so familiar and yet so distant that it could be some wide-encompassing foreign country; not merely a fictionalized South. Faulkner's cadence, description, and narrative that travels dreamily from one place and character to another I found to be initially off-putting, but as I feel under his spell and the colors, and people of the world he wove out of the rough-hewn broadcloth sack, a sack built of a small town, in a place that exists on the outskirts of reality, normalcy; I found myself ensnared, as the residents of Frenchmen's Bend are caught in the snare of Flem Snopes--a man who would, who does, talk the Devil out of the possession of his immortal soul. To travel into the peculiar and yet seemingly real Frenchmen's Bend is to be lost within a surreally stunning place.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: READ THIS GREAT BOOK
Review: Faulkner assembled much of THE HAMLET from short stories, where his themes were courtship, lust, love, and obsession or where the average person succumbs to greed or foolishness and is victimized in business.
Take the subject of love. In THE HAMLET, Faulkner examines obsessive and unrequited love through his characters Labove (an achiever obsessed with untouchable beauty) and Ike Snopes (a retarded man in love with a cow); ambivalent love through the experience of Mink Snopes (a vicious murder) and Jack Houston (a guilty widower); and loveless marriage through the lives of Eula Varner and Mrs. Armstid, who are at the top and bottom of social hierarchy. Each of these characters is unique and fully realized. Yet each suffers from cruel variations of a single force.
Not to be a pedant: But Robert Penn Warren described THE HAMLET as: "...a sequence of contrasting or paralleling stories" where Faulkner's "...movement was not linear but spiral, passing over the same point again and again, but at different altitudes." This is exactly right.
At the same time, THE HAMLET is about Faulkner's writing. Here's one quick example, with this great author writing about the weather. "It was a gray day, of the color and texture of iron, one of those windless days of a plastic rigidity too dead to make or release snow even, in which even light did not alter but seemed to appear complete out of nothing at dawn and would expire into darkness without gradation." Great isn't it?
Even so, I was surprised by one aspect of THE HAMLET. It is: terrible things happen to all the characters. This even includes Flem Snopes who is a winner in the male world of business but surely locked in a loveless marriage. Yet despite their cruel fates, Faulkner's amazing characters persevere. As he said when accepting his Nobel: "When the last ding-dong of doom has clanged, ...there will still be one more sound: ...a puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this...." READ THIS GREAT BOOK
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Major Faulkner
Review: I'm not sure how exactly to say this without sounding closed-minded and elitist, so I'll apologize right off the bat for that. But I'm not sure the people who disparage this novel on this website quite "get it," and I think part of the reason might be that most of those people aren't from the South. This is an episodic, rambling, distinctly Southern story, told in an episodic, rambling, distinctly Southern way. That's just how things work down here, and I realize it's not that way in Hoboken (which is fine too). It's also a very rural setting, so that may turn some people off or lead to some misunderstanding.
Having said that, this book is a major Faulkner work, meaning it's great, not merely good. It's his most explicit critique of capitalism and his most explicit commentary on love in all its forms, and it's a very funny one at that -- again, it's from a Southern angle, though; if you've lived in an industrial rather than rural society your whole life, it may not appeal to you as much. Like most Faulkner, you have to settle into the prose and the pace.
The characters The Hamlet introduces are among Faulkner's most memorable: the rapacious Flem, the wonderful Ratliff, the oddly moving (trust me) Ike, etc. Faulkner has been accused of exploiting his poor whites in this novel, but I think his surprisingly sympathetic treatment of Mink in the trilogy counters this charge pretty well.
I've read everything Faulkner's ever written at least once (two to four times, for his major works), and this is my favorite. If you think Anse is funny in As I Lay Dying, or Virgil and Fonzio in Sanctuary, you'd probably really enjoy this book. It's the only time you'll ever hear a teenage girl rebuff her schoolteacher's inappropriate sexual advance with the command, "Stop pawing me. You old headless horseman Ichabod Crane." Priceless.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: first and best of the trilogy
Review: The Hamlet is an episodic, sometimes uneven novel of jealosy, avarice , and poverty. Some of Faulkner's best characters including Flem and Eula Snopes (Varner), Ratliff the cagy sewing machine salesman, an Houston, the luckless cow-owner. All in all good stuff not as difficult to read as some of Bill's stuff.
Unfortunately the trilogy goes downhill from here, it was many years before he wrote The Town. The Mansion I thought was a stronger book. Give The Hamlet a try, some vintage Faulkner here.