Sanctuary: The Corrected Text (ISBN 0679748148)

The Story of Temple Drake:
Sanctuary is a shocking book, especially because of the time period in which it was written. Most modern readers have been desensitized to highly sexual themes, but in the early 30s, this book was a best seller. Here we have the story of a young girl named Temple Drake. She is the daughter of a judge and a tease around town. She dates many men but never loses her morality to them. One day, she meets up with Gowan, a drunk around town. He takes her for a drive, and since he is completely drunk, he smashed up his car. The two take to walking, and they stumble upon a bootlegger's hideout. Gowan proceeds to get drunk there again while Temple fears the nasty stares she gets from the men. The three men Lee, Popeye, and Tommy outnumber the only woman living there. She warns Temple to leave as soon as she can before night falls, but Gowan is uncooperative and Temple too innocent to heed the warning appropriately. She stays, and her life changes forever at the hands of the violent and twisted Popeye. In the meantime, Horace Benbow takes on the murder case against Lee. The whole town is against him succeeding, but Benbow believes in his client's innocence. He even believes in him after discovering Temple's story. I decided to read this book in lieu of seeing the film version starring Miriam Hopkins titled The Story of Temple Drake. It is hard to find, but notoriously scandalous. I imagined that the book would be a good substitute. Unfortunately, the book is significantly slower paced than the average pre-code film, and the descriptions are often slow and erratic. It is sometimes difficult to figure out who is talking and who is doing what. There are also some boring patches due to the writing style. The dismal setting is certainly appropriate, but it brings the mood of the writing down, making it a less exciting read.

Beautiful, Haunting, and then Nothing:
I am by no means an expert in literature. Most of my reading is the current fiction of today with some non-fiction mixed in. So I decided to try my hand/mind at something written by one of the great authors of yesteryear. A couple of quick thoughts: - very difficult to read - extremely difficult to know which characters are talking and which are being talked to. - imperative re-reading of sections to see if something was missed, because the plot changed directions and I wasn't on the same page. Now, those things being said, after 100 pages or so, I couldn't wait to get back at the book. The characters are richer and deeper than anything I've read in years (except maybe "The Main" by Trevanian). The short dialogue segments, the way things are said and not said are not found in today's writings and make the characters stick with you after the book is finished. This writing gives us a very real peek into life it the United States in the late `20s and early `30s; it's a slice of Americana that you can hardly read today. The simple text that tells of complex human interactions was beautifully written and therefore I was excited to get to the climax. And then... There was no climax. The book ended, the story ended and nothing. Emptiness. The conclusion was anticlimactic without the climatic part of the story. So I'm giving it a 3, but I was very close to a 4 just for the beauty of the writing. And it isn't beauty for beauty's sake; it is necessary explanation that tells the story slowly and carefully. You get to pick up things about the characters in this short novel that the fiction novel of today couldn't even come close to. As you forget the books quickly that you read with today's authors, you will likely remember Popeye, Tommy and Temple for long while.

Mississippi Noir:
I have read my fair share of Faulkner although I am hardly a devotee. My main positive reference to him is concerning his role in the screenwriting of one of my favorite films- "To Have or To Have Not" with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I have also, obliquely, run into his work as it relates to who should and who should not be in the modern American literary canon. Usually the criticism centers on his racism and sexism, and occasionally his alcoholism. Of course, if political correctness were the main criterion for good hard writing then we would mainly not be reading anything more provocative or edifying than the daily newspaper, if that. So much for that though. Faulkner is hardly known as a master of the noir or 'potboiler' but here the genius of his sparse, functional writing (a trait that he shares with the Hemingway of "The Killers" and the key crime novelists of the 1930's Hammett, think "The Red Harvest", and Chandler, think "The Big Sleep") gives him entree into that literary genre. And he makes the most of it. The plot revolves around a grotesque cast of characters who are riding out the Jazz Age in the backwaters of Mississippi and its Mecca in Memphis. Take one protected young college student, Temple Drake, looking to get her 'kicks'. Put her with a shabbily gentile frat boy looking for his kicks. Put them on the back roads of Prohibition America and trouble is all you can expect. Add in a bootlegger or two, a stone-crazy killer named Popeye with a little sexual problem and you are on your way. That way is a little bumpy as Faulkner mixed up the plot, the motives of the characters and an unsure idea of what justice, Southern style, should look like in this situation in the eyes of his main positive character, Horace, the lawyer trying to do the right thing in a dead wrong situation which moreover is stacked against him. As always with Faulkner follow the dialogue, that will get you through even if you have to do some re-reading (as I have had to do). Interestingly, for a writer as steeped in Southern mores, Jim Crow and very vivid descriptions of the ways of the South in the post-Civil War era as Faulkner was there is very little of race in this one. The justice meted out here tells us one thing- it is best to be a judge's daughter or a Daughter of the Confederacy if you want a little of that precious commodity. All others watch out. Kudos to Faulkner, whether he wrote this for the cash or not, for taking on some very taboo subjects back in 1931 Mississippi. Does anyone really want to deny him his place in the American literary canon? Based on this effort I think not.

Horrible:
Ok, so everyone has for years told me how great a writer William Faulkner was. So, I read As I Lay Dying- mediocre at best, and no real strengths at characterization are revealed. Instead, a bunch of yokel stereotypes. So, I mark that off as just one of those things. Then I read his Collected Stories. Atrocious! Nothing but stereotypes in every tale. The Southern grotesques are not as noxious as in, say, Flannery O'Connor, but the tales are all wooden, dull, and generally- a mess! So, I read Sanctuary, which comes with the preface that it was Faulkner's `deliberately commercial' novel, and the one that `broke him' to readers. So, I think if the high literature of As I Lay Dying, and his acclaimed short stories, is bad then, perhaps, the real gem lies in his `commercial' novel. O for three! What this book was was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before that film- except for the chainsaw, and not being set in Texas. This has got to be one of the worst books ever penned, and all the more egregious because, despite its being `commercial', it's still the province of a high fictionist! The characters are even more stereotyped than in As I Lay Dying, and the plot revolves around the kidnapping of a judge's daughter and a slew of murders. Now, for those of you wondering which Texas Chainsaw Massacre I was referring to, the 1974 Tobe Hooper original, or the 2003 remake with nymphet Jessica Biel, I can state it does not really matter, but let me choose the latter, since that film was merely a reason to show off the nubile Ms. Biel's fabulous form and healthy wet t shirted bosom....The title's meaning is multifarious, and rather obvious, since it's the one thing none of the cretins within the book get. So what? Mickey Spillane crafted much more interesting scenarios two decades later, and Mike Hammer would have jackbooted Popeye inside of a page of meeting him. In the end, no lessons are learned, Temple perdures, and the last page or so of the book ends very poetically. But, it's simply air spray freshener used on a litter box. The odor underneath still permeates. I will have to read The Sound And The Fury, but I've given up on having any high expectations for it. Perhaps, that's the key, and I will be pleasantly surprised, although I doubt it will change my overall view of Faulkner as one of the most grotesquely overrated writers of all time. He constipates me with his plodding narratives, ridiculously stilted conversations, and outrageously thin plot machinations. I need an enema after all that, but sans that- pass the corn cob!

Faulkner should've stuck with not being a WWI Flying Ace:
Faulkner may be an author with many accolades, and maybe some of his other books are brilliant. Sanctuary is just bad. Let's just start with the title. Why is it called Sanctuary, what is the sanctuary he refers to? Frenchman's Bend, the Memphis brothel, Benbow's house, the jail or the jardin du Luxembourg in Paris? It never comes out; personally I think it's just a ominous, pretentious title, and that Faulkner might have just as well called his book "Ikebana in 30 days". To give you another example, in the first scene two men meet at a fountain in the middle of nowhere, and Faulkner tells us that, after exchanging a few tense words, they just sit there and stare at each other for literally two hours. What? Why? Which drugs are they on? Again, it never comes out. That scene alone is so absurd that it threw me completely out of the book, and Faulkner just packs in scenes like that. I was particularly disappointed by the characters. One of the reasons I read this book is because I had heard that Temple Drake was a legendary character and one of the most intriguing females in literary history, but she was a particular dud. Faulkner describes her as a pretty 17-year-old who has many dates but is still a virgin. He then attributes several extreme behaviours to her -- after being raped she suddenly becomes a languid gangster moll and then transmogrifies back into a daddy's girl. I think Faulkner is just trying to bluff his readers by dishing up the most outlandish, far-out, tallest tales he could think of to shock them into submission. And at the same time he is trying really hard to blame the victim, trying to turn this clearly victimised girl into a men-eating femme fatale, when in fact her behaviour only appears erratic because of the author's complete lack of writing skills. Then the Southrons -- about as subtle as Cletus and Brandine ("Meet my wife and sister!") out of The Simpsons. There's the corrupt senator, the gospel-singing negroes, the fat madam, the local lynchmob and other repulsive stereotypes. The only variation here is that the inbred degenerate suffers from innate syphillis instead of inbreeding this time, and is variously described as a colossal pervert, dreamboat, successful gangster and loving son. I had read that Faulkner was an alcoholic, and there is a lot of drinking going on in the book, so I at least expected him to be good at those scenes. But again, zero credibility. Faulkner never makes any attempt to convey the notion of drinking to excess, and is probably unable to do so even if he had tried. It's all superficial comic-book clichés. Faulkner employs a style of writing which is called "Stream Of Consciousness". What this boils down to is terrible dialogues, drawn-out tedious descriptions and the most ludicrous similes I have come across in a long while. Most of the time it is very difficult to figure out what is going on, often it is impossible, and other times it makes absolutely no sense. Faulkner seems to be getting a kick out of describing tedious minutiae in an almost psychedelic way, and then making the dialogues intentionally dire. It all boils down to a massive disregard for the reader. Faulkner also likes to pepper his writing with an intentionally opaque and cruelly arcane vocabulary, which makes the reading even more of a slog. In fact, Sanctuary is the only example I know for the usage of the word "holocaust" prior to the Nazi genocide of the European Jews, namely -- to also give you a taste of his style -- in this description: "(their) puffy faces (were) washed lightly over as with the paling ultimate stain of a holocaust". In case you wondered, you have just read a description of sleeping train passengers. I'll come to the end. Sanctuary is an awful book without any redeeming virtues. It's a mess. It is so awful that it is difficult to believe, especially coming from someone who is widely regarded as one of the greatest American authors. The best thing I could say about it is that in maybe three or four scenes, Faulkner gets a sort of flow together and the reading becomes fluent for a few pages, but that's it. Thanks for reading my review.