Book seventeen: The Unvanquished by William Faulkner

The editor's note at the end of the book explained that this novel started as a collection of short stories that were originally published sporadically in the Saturday Evening Post throughout the 1930s. Later, Faulkner revised the stories but some changes made by the magazine's editors were retained so it's kind of a hodgepodge of many. That being said, this is a much easier read than, say, The Sound and the Fury so if you're looking for an introduction to Faulkner's work, this would be a good place to start.

Excerpt 1:

They all came in again when we buried Granny, Brother Fortinbride and all of them --the old men and the women and the children, and the niggers--the twelve who used to come in when word would spread that Ab Snopes was back from Memphis, and the hundred more who had returned to the county since, who had followed the Yankees away and then returned, to find their families and owners gone, to scatter into hills and live in caves and hollow trees like animals I suppose, not only with no one to depend on but with no one depending on them, caring whether they returned or not or lived or died or not: and that I suppose is the sum, the sharp serpent's fang, of bereavement and loss--all coming in from the hills in the rain.

Excerpt 2:

Then I began to smell it again, like each time he returned, like the day back in the spring when I rode up the drive standing in one of his stirrups--that odor in his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism that believes that that which is about to happen to us can possibly be the worst which we can suffer.

I very much am jonesing for some Hemingway but that'll require a trip to either the library or Powell's because I've read all of his stuff that we have in the condo already. Perhaps there's some pulp fiction around... 17 down, 9 to go.