Working my way into Faulkner, wanting to like him, learning I must learn to like him. Flipping a few pages ahead searching desperately for a chapter break so I can figure out WTF is going on.
The good: Character revelation through dialogue.
The bad: Knowing which of many characters is speaking, despite the number of "said’s".
The ugly: Looking beyond the italics and regular fonts to find the third and fourth dimensions.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Please, please stick with it. It is a marvelous, heartbreaking, *brilliant* book!
It may help you to not stress so much re. having to know exactly who is speaking from the get-go. Just read it. Then read it again (you can do this section by section). You’ll pick up on the speech patterns pretty quickly.
Oh I shall! My mind lately has been clouded by personal problems so Faulkner’s opening is that much harder for me to deal with right now. But I hated McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for the first few pages then fell in love with him.
What you say about the speech patterns is very true, and I was already reminded of a situation that I came into decades ago. Moving into a new apartment, I met the downstairs neighbor and was a bit nervous when he started talking to me. He looked a bit raggy-hippy and I couldn’t understand what he was saying in a strange gutteral voice, unrecognizable language, and all the while he wildly gesticulated. Then I realized he was deaf. Within a few weeks I understood him perfectly.