Town (eBook)

William Faulkner (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2011 | 1. Auflage
384 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-79198-6 (ISBN)

Infos

This is the second volume of Faulkner's trilogy about the Snopes family, his symbol for the grasping, destructive element in the post-bellum South.

Like its predecessor The Hamlet and its successor The Mansion, The Town is completely self-contained, but it gains resonance from being read with the other two. The story of Flem Snopes' ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, the book is rich in typically Faulknerian episodes of humor and of profundity.

From the Paperback edition.

Textauszug

Charles Mallison

I wasn't born yet so it was Cousin Gowan who was there and big enough to see and remember and tell me afterward when I was big enough for it to make sense. That is, it was Cousin Gowan plus Uncle Gavin or maybe Uncle Gavin rather plus Cousin Gowan. He-Cousin Gowan-was thirteen. His grandfather was Grandfather's brother so by the time it got down to us, he and I didn't know what cousin to each other we were. So he just called all of us except Grandfather 'cousin' and all of us except Grandfather called him 'cousin' and let it go at that.

They lived in Washington, where his father worked for the State Department, and all of a sudden the State Department sent his father to China or India or some far place, to be gone two years, and his mother was going too so they sent Gowan down to stay with us and go to school in Jefferson until they got back. 'Us' was Grandfather and Mother and Father and Uncle Gavin then. So this is what Gowan knew about it until I got born and big enough to know about it too. So when I say 'we' and 'we thought' what I mean is Jefferson and what Jefferson thought.

At first we thought that the water tank was only Flem Snopes's monument. We didn't know any better then. It wasn't until afterward that we realised that that object low on the sky above Jefferson, Mississippi, wasn't a monument at all. It was a footprint.

One day one summer he drove up the southeast road into town in a two- mule wagon containing his wife and baby and a small assortment of house-furnishings. The next day he was behind the counter of a small back-alley restaurant which belonged to V. K. Ratliff. That is, Ratliff owned it with a partner, since he-Ratliff-had to spend most of his time in his buckboard (this was before he owned the Model T Ford) about the county with his demonstrator sewing machine for which he was the agent. That is, we thought Ratliff was still the other partner until we saw the stranger in the other greasy apron behind the counter- a squat uncommunicative man with a neat minute bow tie and opaque eyes and a sudden little hooked nose like the beak of a small hawk, a week after that, Snopes had set up a canvas tent behind the restaurant and he and his wife and baby were living in it. And that was when Ratliff told Uncle Gavin:

'Just give him time. Give him six months and he'll have Grover Cleveland' (Grover Cleveland Winbush was the partner) 'out of that caf too.'

That was the first summer, the first Summer of the Snopes, Uncle Gavin called it. He was in Harvard now, working for his M.A. After that he was going to the University of Mississippi law school to get ready to be Grandfather's partner. But already he was spending the vacations helping Grandfather be City Attorney, he had barely seen Mrs Snopes yet so he not only didn't know he would ever go to Germany to enter Heidelberg University, he didn't even know yet that he would ever want to: only to talk about going there someday as a nice idea to keep in mind or to talk about.

He and Ratliff talked together a lot. Because although Ratliff had never been to school anywhere much and spent his time travelling about our county selling sewing machines (or selling or swapping or trading anything else for that matter), he and Uncle Gavin were both interested in people-or so Uncle Gavin said. Because what I always thought they were mainly interested in was curiosity. Until this time, that is. Because this time it had already gone a good deal further than just curiosity. This time it was alarm.

Ratliff was how we first began to learn about Snopes. Or rather, Snopeses. No, that's wrong: there had been a Snopes in Colonel Sartoris's cavalry...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.5.2011
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Historische Romane
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Klassiker / Moderne Klassiker
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Märchen / Sagen
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-307-79198-X / 030779198X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-79198-6 / 9780307791986