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A review by saralynnburnett
The Wild Palms by William Faulkner
4.0
I enjoyed Faulkner’s The Wild Palms more than I thought I would! Between the two narratives in this bifurcated novel I was so there for ‘Old Man’ in which the Great Flood of 1927 is portrayed through an escaped convict in a small boat with a pregnant woman. If you want a shocking/not shocking (because America) rabbit hole of historical information. google a timeline of the flood and then consider the injustices of Hurricane Katrina a near mirror of it. Also: the prison industrial complex / forced free labor by inmates that is still occurring today (who do you think is packing all that hand sanitizer right now and washing hospital gowns?)
Jesmyn Ward once said on reading Faulkner: “I was so awed I wanted to give up. I thought, ‘He’s done it, perfectly. Why the hell am I trying?’ But the failures of some of his black characters—the lack of imaginative vision regarding them, the way they don’t display the full range of human emotion, how they fail to live fully on the page—work against that awe and goad me to write.”
I love that, that literature speaks to each through the ages whether in correction or admiration. Reminds of how Land of Love and Drowning was in part Tiphanie Yanique’s answer to the portray of the Virgin Islands seen in Don’t Stop the Carnival.
Jesmyn Ward once said on reading Faulkner: “I was so awed I wanted to give up. I thought, ‘He’s done it, perfectly. Why the hell am I trying?’ But the failures of some of his black characters—the lack of imaginative vision regarding them, the way they don’t display the full range of human emotion, how they fail to live fully on the page—work against that awe and goad me to write.”
I love that, that literature speaks to each through the ages whether in correction or admiration. Reminds of how Land of Love and Drowning was in part Tiphanie Yanique’s answer to the portray of the Virgin Islands seen in Don’t Stop the Carnival.