With an introduction by Richard Hughes. Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, The Sound and the Fury explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart this is a novel about lovelessness - 'only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?'

The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's fourth novel, and was not immediately successful. In 1931, however, when Faulkner's sixth novel, Sanctuary, was published—a sensationalist story which Faulkner later claimed was written only for money—The Sound and the Fury also became commercially successful, and Faulkner began to receive critical attention.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Contents

The Sound and the Fury is set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The novel centers on the Compson family, former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their family and its reputation. Over the course of the thirty years or so related in the novel, the family falls into financial ruin, loses its religious faith and the respect of the town of Jefferson, and many of them die tragically. The novel is separated into four distinct sections. The first, April 7, 1928, is written from the perspective of Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a 33-year-old man with severe mental handicaps. Benjy's section is characterized by a highly disjointed narrative style with frequent chronological leaps. The second section, June 2, 1910, focuses on Quentin Compson, Benjy's older brother, and the events leading up to his suicide. In the third section, April 6, 1928, Faulkner writes from the point of view of Jason, Quentin's cynical younger brother. In the fourth and final section, set a day after the first, on April 8, 1928, Faulkner introduces a third person omniscient point of view. The last section primarily focuses on Dilsey, one of the Compson's black servants. Jason is also a focus in the section, but Faulkner presents glimpses of the thoughts and deeds of everyone in the family.
The reader may also wish to look in The Portable Faulkner for a four-page history of the Compson family. Faulkner said afterwards that he wished he had written the history at the same time he wrote The Sound and the Fury.[1]

William Cuthbert Faulkner (born Falkner, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career. He is primarily known and acclaimed for his novels and short stories, many of which are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life, and Holly Springs/Marshall County.[1]
Faulkner was one of the most important writers in Southern literature in the United States, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[2]
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists.

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner (August 17, 1870 – August 7, 1932) and Maud Butler (November 27, 1871 – October 19, 1960).[3] He had three younger brothers: Murry Charles "Jack" Falkner (June 26, 1899 – December 24, 1975), author John Falkner (September 24, 1901 – March 28, 1963) and Dean Swift Falkner (August 15, 1907 – November 10, 1935).
Faulkner was born and raised in, and heavily influenced by, his home state of Mississippi, as well as by the history and culture of the American South altogether. Soon after Faulkner's first birthday, his family moved to Ripley, Mississippi from New Albany. Here, Murry worked as the treasurer for the family's Gulf & Chicago Railroad Company, a business Murry had been drawn to from an early age. Murry had hoped to inherit the railroad from his father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner. However, John had little confidence in Murry's ability to run a business and sold the railroad for $75,000. Following the sale of the railroad business, Murry became disappointed and planned a new start for his family by moving to Texas and becoming a rancher. Maud, however, disagreed with this proposition, and it was decided that they would move to Oxford, Mississippi, where Murry's father owned several businesses, making it easy for Murry to find work.[4] Thus, only four days prior to William's fifth birthday, the Falkner family settled in Oxford on September 21, 1902,[3][5] where he resided on and off for the remainder of his life.
His family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline Barr (the black woman who raised him from infancy) crucially influenced the development of Faulkner’s artistic imagination. Both his mother and grandmother were great readers and also painters and photographers, educating him in visual language. While Murry enjoyed the outdoors and taught his sons to hunt, track, and fish, Maud valued education and took pleasure in reading and going to church. She taught her sons to read before sending them to public school and exposed them to classics such as Charles Dickens and Grimms' Fairy Tales.[4] Faulkner's lifelong education by Callie Barr is central to his novels' preoccupations with the politics of sexuality and race.[6]
As a schoolchild, Faulkner had much success early on. He excelled in the first grade, skipped the second, and continued doing well through the third and fourth grades. However, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth grades of his schooling, Faulkner became a much more quiet and withdrawn child. He began to play hooky occasionally and became somewhat indifferent to his schoolwork, even though he began to study the history of Mississippi on his own time in the seventh grade. The decline of his performance in school continued and Faulkner wound up repeating the eleventh, and then final grade, and never graduating from high school.[4]
Faulkner also spent much of his boyhood listening to stories told to him by his elders. These included war stories shared by the old men of Oxford and stories told by Mammy Callie of the Civil War, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Falkner family. Faulkner's grandfather would also tell him of the exploits of William's great-grandfather, after whom he was named, William Clark Falkner, who was a successful businessman, writer, and a Civil War hero. Telling stories about William Clark Falkner, whom the family called "Old Colonel," had already become something of a family pastime when Faulkner was a boy.[4] According to one of Faulkner's biographers, by the time William was born, his great-grandfather had "been enshrined long since as a household deity."[7]
In adolescence, Faulkner began writing poetry almost exclusively. He did not write his first novel until 1925. His literary influences are deep and wide. He once stated that he modeled his early writing on the Romantic era in late 18th century and early 19th century England.[3] He attended the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, and was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon social fraternity. He enrolled at Ole Miss in 1919, and attended three semesters before dropping out in November 1920.[8] William was able to attend classes at the university due to his father having a job there as a business manager. He skipped classes often and received a "D" grade in English. However, some of his poems were published in campus journals.[9][10]
When he was seventeen, Faulkner met Philip Stone, who would become an important early influence on his writing. Stone was then four years his senior and came from one of Oxford's older families. He was passionate about literature and had already earned bachelor's degrees from Yale and the University of Mississippi. At the University of Mississippi, Faulkner joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. There he was supported in his dream to become a writer. Stone read and was impressed by some of Faulkner's early poetry and was one of the first to discover Faulkner's talent and artistic potential. Stone became a literary mentor to the young Faulkner, introducing him to writers such as James Joyce, who would come to have an influence on Faulkner's own writing. In his early twenties, Faulkner would give poems and short stories he had written to Stone, in hopes of them being published. Stone would in turn send these to publishers, but they were uniformly rejected.[9]
The younger Faulkner was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of Black and White Americans, his characterization of Southern characters, and his timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people dwelling behind the façades of good old boys and simpletons. Unable to join the United States Army due to his height (he was 5' 5½"), Faulkner enlisted in a reservist unit of the British Armed Forces. Despite his claims to have done so, records now available to the public indicate that Faulkner was never actually a member of the British Royal Flying Corps and never saw service during the First World War.[11]
In 1918, Faulkner himself made the change to his surname from the original "Falkner." However, according to one story, a careless typesetter simply made an error. When the misprint appeared on the title page of his first book, Faulkner was asked whether he wanted a change. He supposedly replied, "Either way suits me."[12] Although Faulkner is heavily identified with Mississippi, he was residing in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay,[3] after being directly influenced by Sherwood Anderson to attempt fiction writing. Anderson also assisted in the publication of Soldier's Pay and of Mosquitoes, Faulkner's second novel, by recommending them both to his own publisher.[13] The miniature house at 624 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans is now the premises of Faulkner House Books, where it also serves as the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society.[14]
During the summer of 1927, Faulkner wrote his first novel set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, entitled Flags in the Dust. This novel drew heavily on the traditions and history of the South, in which Faulkner had been engrossed in his youth. He was very proud of his novel upon its completion and he believed it to be a significant improvement from his previous two novels. However, when submitted for publication, it was rejected by the publishers Boni & Liveright. This came as a huge shock to Faulkner, but he eventually allowed his literary agent, Ben Wasson to significantly edit the text and the novel was finally published in 1928 as Sartoris.[10][13]
In the fall of 1928, when Faulkner was thirty years old, he began working on The Sound and the Fury. He started by writing three short stories about a group of children with the last name Compson, but Faulkner soon began to feel that the characters he had created would be better suited for a full-length novel. Perhaps as a result of his disappointment in the initial rejection of Flags in the Dust, Faulkner had now become indifferent to his publishers and wrote this novel in a much more experimental style. In describing his writing process for this work, Faulkner would later say, "One day I seemed to shut the door between me and all publisher’s addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write."[15] After its completion, Faulkner this time insisted that Ben Wasson not do any editing or add any punctuation for clarity.[10]
In 1929 Faulkner married Estelle Oldham. His best man was Andrew Kuhn. Estelle brought with her two children from her previous marriage to Cornell Franklin and Faulkner intended to support his new family as a writer. Beginning in 1930, Faulkner sent out some of his short stories to various national magazines. Several of his stories were published and this brought him enough income to buy a house in Oxford for his family to live in, which he named "Rowan Oak."[16]




By 1932, however, Faulkner was in a much less secure financial position. He had asked his agent, Ben Wasson to sell the serialization rights for his newly completed novel, Light in August, to a magazine for $5,000, but no magazine accepted the offer. Then, MGM Studios offered Faulkner work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. While Faulkner was not a fan of film, he needed the money, and so he accepted the job offer and arrived in Culver City California in May 1932. There he worked with director Howard Hawks, with whom he got along well, as they both enjoyed drinking and hunting. Howard Hawks' brother William Hawks became Faulkner's Hollywood agent. Faulkner would continue to find work as a screenwriter for years to come throughout the 1930s and 1940s.[13][16]
Faulkner served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville from February to June 1957 and again in 1958.[17] He suffered serious injuries in a horse-riding accident in 1959, and died from a myocardial infarction, aged 64, on July 6, 1962, at Wright's Sanitorium in Byhalia, Mississippi.[3][5] He is buried along with his family in St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford, along with a family friend with the mysterious initials E.T.[18]

As a teenager in Oxford, Faulkner dated Estelle Oldham, the popular daughter of Major Lemuel and Lida Oldham, and believed he would some day marry her.[19] However, Estelle dated other boys during their romance, and one of them, Cornell Franklin, ended up proposing marriage to her before Faulkner did, in 1918. Estelle's parents insisted she marry Cornell, as he was an Ole Miss law graduate, had recently been commissioned as a major in the Hawaiian Territorial Forces, and came from a respectable family with which they were old friends.[20] Estelle's marriage to Franklin fell apart ten years later, and she was divorced in April 1929.[21] Faulkner married Estelle in June 1929 at College Hill Presbyterian Church just outside of Oxford, Mississippi.[22] They honeymooned on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at Pascagoula, then returned to Oxford, first living with relatives while they searched for a home of their own to purchase. In 1930 Faulkner purchased the antebellum home Rowan Oak, known at that time as "The Shegog Place" from Irish planter Robert Shegog.[23] He and his daughter, Jill, lived at Rowan Oak until after her mother's death. The property was sold to the University of Mississippi in 1972. The house and furnishings are maintained much as they were in Faulkner's day. Faulkner's scribblings are still preserved on the wall there, including the day-by-day outline covering an entire week that he wrote out on the walls of his small study to help him keep track of the plot twists in the novel A Fable.
The quality and quantity of Faulkner's literary output were achieved despite a lifelong drinking problem. Since he rarely drank while writing, instead preferring to binge after a project's completion, it is generally agreed that his alcohol use was an escape from the pressures of everyday life and unrelated to his creativity.[24] Whatever the source of his addiction, it undoubtedly weakened his health.
Faulkner died on July 6, 1962, of a heart attack at Wright’s Sanitarium in Byhalia, Miss. The proud but private recluse, despised for a time by his neighbors, neglected by the general public for most of his life, was at his death “widely considered the most important American novelist of his generation and arguably of the entire 20th century,” according to Jay Watson in Mississippi History Now.
Faulkner is known to have had several extramarital affairs. One was with Howard Hawks's secretary and script girl, Meta Carpenter.[25] Another, from 1949–53, was with a young writer, Joan Williams, who made her relationship with Faulkner the subject of her 1971 novel, The Wintering.[26]
When Faulkner visited Stockholm in December 1950 to receive the Nobel Prize, he met Else Jonsson (1912–1996) and they had an affair that lasted until the end of 1953. Else was the widow of journalist Thorsten Jonsson (1910–1950), reporter for Dagens Nyheter in New York 1943–1946, who had interviewed Faulkner in 1946 and introduced his works to Swedish readers. At the banquet in 1950 where they met, publisher Tor Bonnier referred to Else as widow of the man responsible for Faulkner being awarded the prize.[27

Ogata Shingo is growing old, and his memory is failing him. At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and Shingo is caught between love and destruction. Lyrical and precise, "The Sound of the Mountain" explores in immaculately crafted prose the changing roles of love and the truth we face in ageing.
==
The Sound of the Mountain (Yama no Oto) is a novel by Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, serialized between 1949 and 1954. The Sound of the Mountain is unusually long for a Kawabata novel, running to 276 pages in its English translation. Like much of his work, it is written in short, spare prose akin to poetry, which its English-language translator Edward Seidensticker likened to a haiku in the introduction to his translation of Kawabata's best-known novel, Snow Country.
Sound of the Mountain was adapted as a film of the same name (Toho, 1954), directed by Mikio Naruse and starring Setsuko Hara, So Yamamura, Ken Uehara and Yatsuko Tanami.
For the first U.S. edition (1970), Seidensticker won the National Book Award in category Translation.[1]
[edit] Plot

The novel centers upon the Ogata family of Kamakura, and its events are witnessed from the perspective of its aging patriarch, Shingo, a businessman close to retirement who works in Tokyo. Although only sixty-two years old at the beginning of the novel, Shingo has already begun to experience temporary lapses of memory, to recall strange and disturbing dreams upon waking, and occasionally to hear sounds heard by no one else, including the titular noise which awakens him from his sleep one night, "like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth." Shingo takes the sound to be an omen of his impending death, as he had once coughed up blood (a possible sign of tuberculosis) a year before, but had not sought medical consultation and the symptom subsequently went away.
Although he does not outwardly change his daily routine, Shingo begins to observe and question more closely his relations with the other members of his family, who include his wife Yasuko, his philandering son Shuichi (who, in traditional Japanese custom, lives with his wife in his parents' house), his daughter-in-law Kikuko, and his married daughter Fusako, who has left her husband and returned to her family home with her two young daughters. Shingo realizes that he has not truly been an involved and loving husband and father, and perceives the marital difficulties of his adult children to be the fruit of his poor parenting.
To this end, he begins to question his secretary, Tanizaki Eiko, about his son's affair, as she knows Shuichi socially and is friends with his mistress, and he quietly puts pressure upon Shuichi to quit his infidelity. At the same time, he uncomfortably becomes aware that he has begun to experience a fatherly yet erotic attachment to Kikuko, whose quiet suffering in the face of her husband's unfaithfulness, physical attractiveness, and filial devotion contrast strongly with the bitter resentment and homeliness of his own daughter, Fusako. Complicating matters in his own marriage is the infatuation that as a young man he once possessed for Yasuko's older sister, more beautiful than Yasuko herself, who died as a young woman but who has again begun to appear in his dreams, along with images of other dead friends and associates.
The novel may be interpreted as a meditation upon aging and its attendant decline, and the coming to terms with one's mortality that is its hallmark. Even as Shingo regrets not being present for his family and blames himself for his children's failing marriages, the natural world, represented by the mountain itself, the cherry tree in the yard of his house, the flights of birds and insects in the early summer evening, or two pine trees he sees from the window of his commuter train each day, comes alive for him in a whole new way, provoking meditations on life, love, and companionship.

Yasunari Kawabata was born near Osaka in 1899 and was orphaned at the age of two. His first stories were published while he was still in high school and he decided to become a writer. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1924 and a year later made his first impact on Japanese letters with Izu Dancer. He soon became a leading figure the lyrical school that offered the chief challenge to the proletarian literature of the late 1920s. His writings combine the two forms of the novel and the haiku poems, which within restrictions of a rigid metre achieves a startling beauty by its juxtaposition of opposite and incongruous terms. Snow Country (1956) and Thousand Cranes (1959) brought him international recognition. Kawabata died by his own hand, on April 16 1972. The Sound of the Mountain is translated from the Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker (1921-2007), who was a prominent scholar of Japanese literature