A Fable

by William Faulkner

First edition.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, War, Historical Fiction, Literature, American, 20th Century

437 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. During World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). He went back to Oxford and wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The following year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Later that decade, he wrote Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and The Wild Palms. He also worked as a screenwriter, contributing to Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, adapted from Raymond Chandler's novel. The former film, adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel, is the only film with contributions by two Nobel laureates.
Faulkner's reputation grew following publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner, and he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his powerful and unique contribution to the modern American novel." He is the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Faulkner died from a heart attack on July 6, 1962, following a fall from his horse the month before. Ralph Ellison called him "the greatest artist the South has produced".

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although A Fable is unreasonably opaque, being pitifully unconvincing is a real trouble with the novel so, despite the immeasurable messianic ambitiousness, it didn’t suit to become the Newest Testament.
The war is raging around and four apocalyptic horsemen are galloping all over the planet…

‘It wasn’t we who invented war,’ the group commander said. ‘It was war which created us. From the loins of man’s furious ineradicable greed sprang the captains and the colonels to his necessity. We are his responsibility; he shall not shirk it.’

Generals didn’t invent war but war became their vocation… They are sculptors of war… To exist they need war…
But unexpectedly the messiah appears and he orders to stop war and in spite of all febrility, fury and ferocity of war Herods the fighting came to a dead halt…

‘War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war. We’ve known that for six thousand years. The trouble was, it took us six thousand years to learn how to do it. For six thousand years we labored under the delusion that the only way to stop a war was to get together more regiments and battalions than the enemy could, or vice versa, and hurl them upon each other until one lot was destroyed and, the one having nothing left to fight with, the other could stop fighting. We were wrong, because yesterday morning, by simply declining to make an attack, one single French regiment stopped us all.’

However, the world isn’t saved… Messiahs are only capable to get themselves crucified and to make others suffer.

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Man is man, enduring and immortal; enduring not because he is immortal but immortal because he endures.’

A Fable, or as I like to call it, World War Jesus, is William Faulkner’s re-telling of the Passion of Christ set in the trenches of the first World War. Winner of both the 1955 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, this book is rather opaque and obfuscating, even for Faulkner, while written in his signature, robust style of lengthy sentences constructed with dense prose and frequent use of the word ‘irascible’. Yet it is a worthwhile journey that examines humans as flawed yet enduring beings capable of war and horrors but also love and grace. This anti-war novel, inspired in part by the false armistice of 1918, delivers a testament to humanity as a reimagined Jesus demonstrates the power of one’s voice against the mechanism of power and war and how immortality as a myth or fable allows our message to live on.

‘All you can kill is man's meat. You can't kill his voice.’

Faulkner’s anti-war parable reconstructs the bones of the Easter story from the Bible and reconfigures it with a French corporal named Stefan as he and his twelve followers orders 3,000 troops to refuse to participate in a charge from the trenches. The German army, realizing it takes two sides to fight a war, also cease firing and the war grinds to a halt. While Faulkner shows the human spirit in an act of peace, he also looks at those who profit and retain power through violence, and a side-story threaded through the novel follows a young pilot escorting a German general behind Allied lines in order to meet about getting the war up and running again.

This is not Faulkner’s first foray into an Easter novel, with The Sound and the Fury full of Easter influences, but here it is much more overt and intended as a re-telling. We have Polchek, who betrays the soldier Jesus and commits suicide from guilt, two different Marys, Marthe and Marya, who figure into the story along with the pretty blatant 12 apostles in the trenches. There is an interesting angle with the General being the God figure of the novel, allowing war to occur because it is his duty. ‘It wasn’t we who invented war…It was war which created us,’ Faulkner writes, showing how the act of soldiering and having war as a vocation perpetuates war. Since war must go on we see Stefan become the martyr, with an execution between two criminals and a mysterious disappearance from his burial. In a late scene involving a tomb of the Unknown Soldier after the death of the General, we are treated to another layer of the Jesus, Son of God idea.

The General argues that humans will endure because and in spite of folly and pride, that people will make war, survive and carry on to make another. That it is the way of things. This parallels Faulkner’s own Nobel Prize speech in 1949, though in it Faulkner reveals his true beliefs that people endure because of compassion and sacrifice:

’I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. … The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.’

Several aspects of the Prize speech make it into the novel, which is interesting to see Faulkner comment upon it. It is also interesting to read Faulkner set outside the usual stomping grounds of Yoknapatawpha, though we do find descendants of familiar family names appear as American soldiers in the final scene of the novel.

‘War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy. ’

While not his strongest (though highly awarded), and arguably one of his more difficult to follow with the intentionally obfuscating plot, A Fable is still a fantastic read from good ole Bill Faulkner.

3.75/5

‘War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.’

[Maziyar Yf · Rating 1 out of 5]

یک افسانه ، کتابی ایست از ویلیام فاکنر ، نویسنده سرشناس آمریکایی . این کتاب به تازگی توسط نشر معین به فارسی منتشرشده . ترجمه بسیار گنگ و نامفهوم کتاب به همراه ادبیات پیچیده ، زبان پر تمثیل و جمله های طولانی ( که از مشخصات نگارش فاکنر هست ) هر گونه نوشتن از این اثر و یا فهم حتی قسمتی از آن را برای خواننده فارسی زبان سخت و شاید ناممکن کرده است .

[Viacheslav · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1889, Chekhov acquired a set of Dostoevsky's works at his agent's (Suvorin) book store. Having perused the works, Chekhov assessed Dostoevsky's writing as tediously lengthy and lacking humility.

It seems to me that what he meant was that his texts weren't just full of meticulous lengthy descriptions, Dostoevsky didn't just share his conjectures about life with the reader, but, rather, conveyed the author's perceptions of things to them. The artist shows off his ability to perceive life in a very slow motion, so the reader wouldn't mistake that Dostoevsky's gift as a source of his precise observation with anything else. As Chekhov said, the artist's vanity is ill tempered, inexorable, and unforgiving.

What does Faulkner have to do with it? Well, that's been my first Faulkner's novel, and judging by it, I'd say that Faulkner was an American Dostoevsky. Boastful and loquacious, beautiful and frank. It feels as you need to read it really fast, to grasp the atmosphere and animate the author's narrative in your mind, so it would look to you just like it was intended by the artist to be seen.

It was amazing!

[Pradnya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took a long time to turn the last page. I feel relieved, not coz I ended it but happy to have read it. Quite a writer Faulkner is.
I'd call it a challenging read as the story would never come across easily. The developments are far too measly compared to the detailed description. If it's a story you want, don't bother to read this. 

Set amidst the world war background where one unit of army goes for mutiny under the leader 'corporal' who is center point of mass fury as he brings war to the end. To resurrect the  messiah of peace in fiction was a theme for this story which kept writer bound for almost a decade.
Faulkner braids the wisps of words entwined with explicit details and then spins it, hurls around and fling in a delivery one catch the action in last moment, almost missing it. 
Since the plot is unhappening its natural it takes time. The vocabulary is expansive for my tastes, the tone becomes monotonous a lot. Also if you tend to read books half way you might tempt to live it in between. The story tangles a lot, formation on different planes and different time blurs previous one, the paragraph long sentences makes you re-read some long sentences and yet you go on. You see he's genius. Handling such story in so unlikely fashion, sandwiching it in between his detailed observations and nuances of characters actions and tightly woven background. If its your idea of good book, go for it. I feel Pulitzer award was justified to have this book. I think the tough, serious language and slow pace kept it reaching to masses like Faulkner's other creations. For me, I will read it after some years, again.

[Lyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

“man is man, enduring and immortal; enduring not because he is immortal but immortal because he endures”

I endured this book.

It’s Faulkner and he’s brilliant, and I’m going to be completely honest and admit that I read this on the tale end of a long Faulkner reading frenzy and so may have been Faulknered out by the time I got to this one, for which he won both the Pulitzer and National Book Award in 1955.

Written AFTER he won the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature (and how weird must that have been for him, receiving such a great honor and then just kept writing) this is NOT set in his iconic Yoknapatawpha County but rather in France, during the First World War, the Great War, the War to end all wars.

Except it didn’t.

Faulkner poses the existential question, what if the soldiers, and sergeants and junior officers, the ones who actually fight and die in wars, ignored the orders of the generals and politicians and just stopped fighting?

Written as an anti-war Christian allegory it has Faulkner’s signature style of wonderfully complex and deeply layered writing. Faulkner was a master of metaphor and simile and wrote obliquely, with symbolism and allusion never far from the surface.

I may try again at a later time, this is not easy, light reading, but Faulkner after all and so he requires much from his reader.

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Faulkner testou-me até ao limite.
Deitou por terra toda e qualquer veleidade que eu pudesse ter de que esta seria uma leitura típica.
Arremessou-me à parede, à lama. Atirou-me ao céu.
Fez-me girar sobre mim própria. Caí, claro, atordoada.
Aterrei em arco-íris submersos nas valas inundadas pela água da chuva.
Quando me tentava levantar, fincava as mãos nos meus ombros com força sobre-humana.

Por fim, penso que se apiedou de mim, permitindo que eu penetrasse no doce/terrífico cativeiro por ele efabulado.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps when a man takes on the entire scope of war and inserts it into an allegorical account of the passion of Christ, the reader should expect that there will be moments of confusion and that the effort will fall short in many ways. Oh, but what an effort it is! It might not be Faulkner at his best, but it is certainly Faulkner at his most ambitious.

I have pondered this book for two days before sitting down to write this review, and I still cannot quite grasp what I want, or need, to say. I have a hard and fast rule that what I find in a book is of much more importance than what the author meant to embed in his words. So, I cannot say that what I came away with bears any true resemblance to what Faulkner wished to convey. Faulkner’s work, at any level, invites multiple interpretations and countless nuanced themes.

This story of mutinous French soldiers, led by a Christ-like figure, is a study in the most ridiculous and ungodly aspects of warfare. That it is set in WWI, a war full of cruelty and needless loss and one without any clear meaning or gain, is totally appropriate. It begs the question of what makes thousands of men lay down their lives because they are ordered to do so by a handful of officers and generals. What would happen if the thousands simply laid down their weapons and walked away? And, could they, being men who are more in tune with being sheep than being shepherds?

Don’t you see yet? It’s because they can’t afford to let it stop like this. I mean it, let us stop it. They don't dare. If they ever let us find out that we can stop a war as simply as men tired of digging a ditch decide calmly and quietly to stop digging the ditch–”

This realization of one of the characters, the runner, is the premise in a nutshell. The war must go on, the men must die, until the brass decide to stop it; otherwise control goes to the masses and no small enclave of men can ever wield power over them again. Anyone who illustrates it could be otherwise must be eliminated immediately.

The book is strangely non-Faulknerian in many ways. It does not have the easy immersion of place that his Southern books possess; and, despite having worked on it for ten years, it lacks cohesion in many sections. It moves back and forth between the days of the events, making a timeline almost impossible to follow, but this does seem Faulknerian to me. It leaves you with the same odd discomfort that his stream-of-consciousness books, like The Sound and the Fury, invoke. And, like those books, it does not seem to complete itself in your mind until after you have finished reading and begun seriously looking backward.

At approximately the center of the book there is an almost independent tale that is set not in the battlefields of France but in the swamps and small towns of Mississippi. The tale is brought by a black man who is seeking a specific English soldier. It is the story of a three-legged horse, and it is so beautifully written and complete that it smacks you right between the eyes what is missing from the rest of the book. This is Faulkner on home ground. There is passion and compassion for each of these characters, even, or perhaps especially, the horse. The purpose of the tale is made clear later in relation to the battlefield story, but I could not help feeling the impact of the inserted narrative was as strong as that of the story that surrounds it.

I’m not sure Faulkner ever resolves his moral issues for either himself or his reader. He makes contradictory cases that ring with equal timber. He seems to know that sometimes the only sacrifice that matters is a life–giving all–but an individual, personal sacrifice of life, not a mass extermination of the living. And, then there is this:

”Take life. You are young even after four years of war. The young can still believe in their own invulnerability: that all else may die, but not they. So they don't need to treasure life too highly since they cannot conceive, accept, the possible end of it. But in time you become old, you see death then. Then you realize that nothing–nothing–nothing–not power nor glory nor wealth nor pleasure nor even freedom from pain, is as valuable as simple breathing, simply being alive even with all the regret of having to remember and anguish of an irreparable worn-out body…”

There is truth there as well.

I give this book the 5-stars it deserves, not because I enjoyed it or even because it made me think deeply on important issues, but because I could not deny the sweat and blood that Faulkner poured into it over a long period of his life. One full star is a salute to the man.

[Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the only novel that ever appeared EXACTLY the way Faulkner wanted it to appear, and it was the only one whose tepid reception really bothered him. In fact, despite its Pulitzer, the book's relative lack of success (in my opinion) is what caused him to retreat into the relatively childish stories of his later career. The down side to Faulkner's insistence on placing each word meticulously though, is that it generates a VERY difficult book to read. At times, it is almost like reading Cicero or some other Latin master because the sentences are so sprawling and each word means something.

After Go Down, Moses; Faulkner's "major period" is behind him. He will never again explore his fictional county in Mississippi with the same depth as "Absalom" and "Sound and the Fury", turning instead to events far beyond those borders. This novel is the product of a nearly ten year obsession, unlike the Mississippi masterpieces which were often dashed off and printed before they could be properly edited. It is the only work of his that left a physical impression on his house, where he took to inscribing exhaustive notes on the woodwork of Rowan Oak that are still visible. So, to

At the end of the day, like If I Forget Thee Jerusalem, this is the *style* of Faulkner at its most mature, even if the material is not his most familiar. The biblical parallels can't be missed, but rather than reading it that way, it might be more useful to consider it an act of exhaustion. The last truly "High Modern" book written by that one of that period's grand exemplars, who were soon to abandon it and never return. It is richly informed by the life events of William Faulkner and his generation, one which was essentially "at war" from 1914-1945, whether or not they ever got to the trenches.

It must be read slowly, and savouringly. Near the beginning, General Gragnon has his driver pause underneath a resting battery and listen to the sound of a lark whose song is like "four metal coins dropping into a cup of soft silver," and flashes back to the General's childhood in the Pyrenees listening to birds, and then flashes forward again back to the war. These are the images that make Faulkner's most mature style breathtaking. He so richly imagines his characters and their thoughts and their desperation, that at the novel's conclusion the reader has a vested interest in the brutal outcome. Five Stars, and bravo Mr. Faulkner.

[Albert · Rating 1 out of 5]

By the time I graduated from college I had read most of Faulkner’s novels. I had a few left to tackle, the most formidable of which was A Fable. On a car trip across the country to my first career-type job, I stopped at Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home in Oxford, Mississippi and took the tour. The host that day was a graduate student from the University of Mississippi. We chatted about what I had read of Faulkner’s and what I had left. When I commented that I had waited to read A Fable, a Pulitzer and National Book Award winner, with the intention of saving the best for last, he suggested I might be disappointed. I believe the gist of his comment was that “the novel is a mess”.

It took me almost 30 years from that visit to Rowan Oak before I read A Fable; I clearly gave some consideration to that graduate student’s opinion. In fairness, those 30 years were focused on work and the stresses thereof, not a great time to be reading Faulkner. When I did get around to reading A Fable, it was a letdown from even my significantly reduced expectations. It was a slough; it was tedious. It was all I could do to finish it. I did keep promising myself it would get better; it didn’t. I know there was symbolism and imagery that I failed to understand, but a story must grab me enough to make me want to try to get to those other levels of understanding.

I read in one review that Faulkner thought A Fable was his greatest novel. I have not come across the source of that comment. I have seen elsewhere that he thought The Sound and The Fury was his greatest achievement: that I can believe and strongly concur.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

"All you can kill is man's meat. You can't kill his voice."

It's bemusing how this, probably the pinnacle of Faulkner's testing the limits of his own style, can be seen as such a flawed work. On the one hand, it is one of his most difficult works, up there with "The Sound and the Fury". On the other hand, it's dense, closely-packed poetics take his dizzying run-on madness to a whole new level, largely because of its main idea: Christ returned as a WWI frontline corporal who, with 12 other soldiers, leads a mutiny in the trenches and refuse to fight.
The idea is so bafflingly, batshit insane to our current flatulent and impotent sense of propriety and self-imposed and self-defined precociousness that I can see why some might blanch. But, if anything, Faulkner constantly tests the reader, weaving in and out of wonderful, lengthy, almost dream-like cacoffinies and then bluntly smashing you in the face with something unbewildering and beautiful.

[Paulla Ferreira Pinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continuo sem perceber a razão dos estudiosos considerem as obras mais tardias do Faulkner um pouco menos lustrosas do que aquela catadupa produtiva inicial de romances escritos de forma sinuosa, indirecta e enviesada, em que quase nada é dito com frontalidade, em que tudo está implícito mas ainda assim é extraordinariamente belo.

Este é sem duvida, na minha opinião, um dos melhores dele, sendo ainda mais relevante na medida em aqui Faulkner saiu da zona de conforto que Yoknapatwapha, Mississipi, por esta altura já constituía para o autor.

Um retrato da I GG na qual, contrariamente ao que o próprio deu a entender, nunca combateu, jamais tendo saído do continente americano até ao seu final.
Não deixa contudo de ser um relato vívido dos horrores das trincheiras, dos defeitos da humanidade, do heroísmo de anónimos e da ironia com que a vida muitas vezes encerra ciclos da história (dizer mais seria “spoilar”. Jamais faria isso a um fã do Faulkner que, por qualquer casualidade, ainda não tenha lido este).

E apesar de se passar a milhares de quilómetros de Yoknapatawpha County, lá aparece um Beauchamp em determinado episódio e o Mississipi tem direito a protagonizar um pequeno relato sobre o apego à vida e o canto das cotovias.

O que há para não adorar neste?!

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

I plan to reread this one in a month or so as I read my way thru Faulkner’s books chronologically. I recall being unimpressed with this one, maybe because it paled in comparison to Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I Lay Dying etc and because it lies outside the Yokanapatawpha canon. It won a Pulitzer probably less on its own quality than on a “whoopsie” from the committee because Faulkner had been recognized outside his own country as an epic writer by the Nobel in 1947 and they realized how ridiculous they looked. Surprisingly, he also won the National Book Award for this one, but not for The Town or an earlier masterpiece.

I’ll write a proper review once I reread this one.

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've been reading through Faulkner's books with a friend for the past few years, and my ratings and reviews reflect that I like his writing a lot. I did not like this book, though, even though Faulkner thought it his best and it received both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Like many before me, I found it a slog, without a payoff worth the effort.

[Joe Davoust · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated this book. It is a rambling run-on chapter, page, paragraph, and sentence of a book so full of side notes and parenthetical comments to make it nearly unintelligible. I had to read it to complete my "reading all the Pulitzers" goal but this by far has been the most challenging read.
This book was hard to find and after reading it I know why. The story is akin to that of Jesus and the 12 disciples but is not subtle enough to be interesting especially as tedious a read that it is.
I would wager that if you put a hundred high school english teachers or college writing professessors to the task of grading the writing style in this book, the vast majority of them would mark it as a failure.
I would recommend this only to Pulitzer winner or Faulkner completists.

[Joy D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1954, A Fable is not your typical Faulkner novel. It is set during the Great War in France and follows a Corporal who starts a mutiny by convincing his regiment to refuse to attack the enemy. This act of defiance spreads to other units, creating a ceasefire along the Western Front. The book is historical fiction, an allegorical retelling of the story of Christ's passion, and an anti-war narrative. The Corporal, accompanied by twelve followers, is arrested and brought before military authorities. One of the dramatic scenes involves a dialogue between the Corporal and the top military officer, who offers him a chance to escape execution if he renounces his pacifist stance.

Faulkner employs his usual complex narrative style filled with dense prose and lengthy sentences. The novel shifts between different viewpoints and moves backward and forward in time. It explores whether personal acts of moral courage can serve as effective challenges to systems of oppression. The work also examines faith and doubt. I found it a rather demanding mental task. For me, it seems overly complex, overly long, and overly repetitive. The novel won Faulkner his second Pulitzer Prize, but I did not enjoy it as much as many of his other books. My favorites are Light in August and As I Lay Dying.

“For six thousand years we labored under the delusion that the only way to stop a war was to get together more regiments and battalions than the enemy could, or vice versa, and hurl them upon each other until one lot was destroyed and, the one having nothing left to fight with, the other could stop fighting. We were wrong, because yesterday morning, by simply declining to make an attack, one single French regiment stopped us all.”

[Ezekia]

რა უცნაურია. ვკითხულობ და თითქოს იცის, ახლა რა მანერვიულებს და მადარდებს, იმაზე მპასუხობს მთელი აბზაცებით. არადა მაშინდელ ომებს საერთოდ არ ეხება ჩემი პირადი პრობლემები )) არ ვიცი, დამთხვევაა თუ ეს ზოგადად კარგი წიგნის თვისებაა - ნებისმიერის საფიქრალთან იპოვოს თავისი გზა, მაგრამ მგონია, რომ ფოლკნერი ამ იგავს მე მიყვება და ამით ცდილობს ჩემი პრობლემების სხვა კუთხით ჩვენებას. და ეს ძალიან სასიამოვნო განცდაა)

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Faulkner virgins about to break the seal with a copy of "A Fable" should be forced to reconsider — at gunpoint, if necessary.

Yes, "A Fable" is a cantankerous beast, a Pulitzer Prize winner often reviled as impenetrable and as Faulkner at his most difficult. Reading it for the first time (my 11th Faulkner novel) I find it both a little hard to figure out how it won the award and hard to understand why more readers don't seem to see its merits. Faulkner's worst, most frustrating habits are on display in this tale of World War I whose plot often mirrors the Passion of Christ. The worst offenders are two lengthy backstory scenes that shed light on the later main story that takes place during a week at and near the front. In these scenes, there appear with gusto Faulkner's tendency to be willfully cryptic and hard on his readers, and his jones for compound, page-long (or more) sentences that crawl sideways like crabs and confound the brain. And yet ... the story is a good one, and there's more than enough of Faulkner's brilliant wordplay to justify a solid recommendation for the hardy.

In "A Fable," in the fourth year of a grinding World War I, a French regiment ordered to attack refuses to do so. Likewise, the Germans opposing them have called a halt to the violence. A mysterious corporal and his 12 followers, it turns out, are the instigators of this outrageous peace. The story chronicles the elaborate efforts of the French, British and American powers-that-be to investigate and cover up this absurdity, and to punish those responsible for daring to stop a war. The division commander wants all 3,000 soldiers in his regiment executed. The overall commanding general has his own remedy for the corporal, who turns out to have very close ties to the general.

The two aforementioned scenes from the past do help the story a bit, but the cost might be some people's sanity. Still, Faulkner is in top form during the final quarter of this, his second-longest novel, bringing home the tale with panache and a minimum of wordy foolishness. The conclusion and the run-up to it are very good, if readers can stick with it.

The story of the corporal, whose story mirrors Christ but who is not really Christlike, falls a little short, I must say. I wanted to learn more of his motivation and get to know him, and frankly I wanted a more immediate sense of the refusal to fight; I think Faulkner could have done wonders getting inside a few characters' heads in the action that is the basis for the whole novel.

As for Faulkner making a rare venture outside Mississippi for the novel, which seems to irk some, I didn't mind it at all. Much as I love all those Southern tales, this is a nice departure that adds a little versatility to Faulkner's resume.

"A Fable" often is quite good. When it is difficult, it's as difficult as Faulkner gets, which is pretty goddamned difficult. I was able to shrug off the slow spots and enjoy the novel quite a lot. No, don't make it your first Faulkner, for heaven's sake. But its impenetrability is a bit overstated. Read this in a short span of days, a lot at a time, turn off the TV, keep your focus.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say? It's Faulkner. Even when he's not at his best (which I think applies to 'A Fable'), he's still a magnificent writer and a literary genius. I started this one a long time ago, and then got sidetracked by other things at about one-third of the way in. Because of the time lapse since when I put it down and because it's Faulkner, I just started all over again. And it's a hard slog in the beginning. The farther along you muddle through, though, the clearer everything gets. That's the beauty of Faulkner: you might not think you are absorbing what he is writing, but trust the process: it's in the brain and its meaning will reveal itself as you go along. I could clearly see the religious parallels creatively imbued in this story of the "unknown soldier" who, in this case, paused the Great War (WWI). Don't want to comment much on that aspect of the story, as it's well-trodden ground. I'll just say that this novel constitutes an indictment on the horror of war, the dangers of nationalism and militaristic patriotism, and the inevitable nature of humanity's embrace of violent conflict to resolve disputes. I'm still absorbing a lot of the meandering that Faulkner did in the beginning sections of the novel (and I think, to be honest, that some of that meandering was as much a bit of Faulkner being careless and resting on his reputation for this kind of writing as it was some profound plumbing of the psychological and philosophical depths). Some of the meandering was, I think, not as intentionally meaningful as one might impute to it. In fact, I do think some of it is just intellectual psychobabble. But also probably not as much as some who tire of Faulkner's style might also think. I love Faulkner, and I think all of his novels should have won Pulitzers. This one is deserving, though I know that others of his novels that didn't win are better and more deserving. There are very few writers in the same league as Faulkner. And I am kinda glad that I have now, this moment, completed my goal of reading every single Pulitzer fiction winner with a Faulkner novel.

[KeithTalent · Rating 5 out of 5]

At nine o'clock one morning in the spring of 1918, a regiment of the French army - every man below the rank of sergeant - refuses to take part in a futile assault on the German position. Strangely, the German line opposite fails to take advantage of the situation with a counter-attack, and by noon that day no guns are fired along the entire French line. By three o'clock in the afternoon, the entire western front has fallen silent. It emerges that a saintly French corporal, together with his twelve apostles, has been making the rounds of the Allied forces (and apparently the German forces too) spreading by word and deed a gospel of non-violence and universal brotherhood. The troops, it seems, have understood that they can stop the killing simply by laying down their arms. Naturally, this is anathema to the military hierarchies on both sides, who (tipped off by the Judas among the disciples) are already making covert plans to resume hostilities. The generals, after all, have a living to make and a war to run.

"A Fable" is an allegorical novel about the conflicting impulses that exist within each one of us. The French corporal represents man's inextinguishable impulse towards unconditional love and brotherhood; or, to put it another way, he's the "champion of an esoteric realm of man's baseless hopes and his infinite capacity - no: passion - for unfact". Like Jesus, the corporal holds out the light of selfless love to humanity, but he's doomed to suffer the consequences. For within every man, too, lives the desire to get on in the world, an egotism which produces conflict, wars and armies. This impulse - represented in the novel by supreme Allied general, who is the corporal's father and the author of the quote above - will always conquer in the world of brute facts, will always prevail, but the example that Christ and Faulkner's corporal offer to humanity can never be extinguished. "I'm not going to die," says one of the corporal's disciples at the end of the book. "Never."

"A Fable" is a difficult, audacious and profound book. If complex meditations on the human condition are your idea of a good time, give this one a try.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although William Faulkner was one of my favorite writers in college and graduate school, I haven’t read any of his books since then. Until now. According to a note I made inside the cover, I bought my hardcover copy of this book in March 1970 (for 80 cents!), which means it sat unread on my bookshelf for more than 50 years. I decided several months ago to try to read all the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, so I finally pulled A Fable off the shelf.

I’m not going to attempt a long or detailed review. I feel that I put in enough work just to get through it. I still believe that Faulkner was a brilliant writer, but in this case, I’m afraid that, for me at least, his complex and baroque writing style got in the way of the story. Some sections of the book are great, mostly the few in which the narrative is relatively straightforward. But more often the convoluted sentences unfortunately and unnecessarily obscure the story.

Faulkner’s genius certainly could have enabled him to produce a powerful antiwar book. But despite what I’m sure were his best intentions, A Fable is not that book.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the best novel by William Faulkner, A Fable is bedeviled by the author's unfamiliarity with the French character and idiom. Only in the middle, where there is a set piece about a three-legged race horse does the book come alive, because Faulkner for once was on familiar ground.

There are passages which are equal to the best that Faulkner ever wrote, but for the most part, reading this book is a chore; and the pieces do not fit together particularly well. There are also odd echoes of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech about man not only enduring, but prevailing. It leads me to think that "endurance" was a quality very much on the author's mind.

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't mind dense and rambling novels, but when combined with 'repetitive' and 'opaque', the results are a far more challenging read than seems necessary. Faulkner was no doubt a brilliant writer, but by the time he wrote this, his fifteenth novel, he was less in need of talent than of an editor.

The plot itself is actually pretty straightforward: a French battalion in WWI lay down their arms and refuse to fight at the behest of a Christ-like corporal. Chaos ensues as the military powers-that-be realize that if all the soldiers realize peace is as simple as everybody agreeing to stop fighting, then what's the point of being a power-that-be's.

The characters and situations are thinly veiled allusions to the story of Christ, down to the details: Mary Magdalene, the twelve disciples, the betraying Judas, Pontius Pilate, a crown of thorns, and so on. The nuance of the parallels are part of what make Faulkner such an amazing author. Some might call the biblical callbacks heavy-handed, but the manner in which he logically summons all of these elements in such a staggeringly different context is remarkable. And he uses the context of the trenches of WWI to make some original points about the nature of power and honor and responsibility.

Faulkner also has an uncanny knack for turning seemingly tangential characters into men and women loaded with deep dark undercurrents of emotion and baggage. There are several key passages where a seemingly unrelated side-story turns into vivid character study, flavoring later events with hints of turbulence that would otherwise be missed.

Evidence of William Faulkner's genius is abundant. There is a 5-star novel buried in these pages. The problem is that its hidden amidst pages and pages and pages and pages rambling paragraphs and speeches and descriptions that are circular and repetitive and overly-flowery to the point of being masterbatory. I'm a bull-headed reader and will never skip over a chapter or a page or a paragraph or even a sentence just because I think its boring or unnecessary. 99 times out of 100, they may be unnecessary, but at least they serve the purpose of being baroque flourishes that add to the literary ambience.

Huge passages in "A Fable" don't serve a purpose, but also don't really add anything to the proceeding aside from lots and lots of extra words to pour through. I'm sure the author would disagree (Faulkner viewed "A Fable" as his masterpiece), but good lord its tough to get through some of this.

It becomes so unnecessarily dense, there are minor plot points that get lost or distorted in the minds of the readers. In one GoodReads review I read, a reader noted that the Christ figure of the story had the initials "J.C.", a further link to Jesus. The Wikipedia summary lists his name as Corporal Zsettslani. Actually, they're both wrong; his name is Stephan. The confusion is understandable though, as most of the characters are seldom referred to by name (Stephan is named once, toward the end), and there is a liberal use of pronouns with ambiguous antecedents, so its easy to lose track of who is who is what they're doing at any given moment. This is the kind of confusion that is borne from trying to maintain focus while mucking through some of the endlessly labyrinthine rhetoric clogging up vast swathes of this book.

All you have to do is look at my list of favorite books, and you'll see that I do not shy away from long, dense, meandering novels. But "A Fable" tests one's patience such that what otherwise I would have viewed as an accomplished 5-star work, I can only hesitantly recommend as a frustrating 3-star work.

If you want dense, nearly opaque Faulkner that pops instead of trudges, read "Absalom, Absalom".

[Grace · Rating 1 out of 5]

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1955
===
DNF ~25%

I just can't do it... This is actually the last Pulitzer Prize Winner on my list before I will have read (or attempted to read) them all, and I really wanted to finish it just for that reason, but goddamn that 25% was like pulling teeth. I honestly barely know what has even happened so far, as the writing is so dense and opaque and boring as all hell. I've honestly not been wildly impressed with any of Faulkner's work but this one was said to be quite a departure for him so I was hopeful, but alas, it was not meant to be.

[Ben · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pulitzer 1955 - I finished this two days ago and have been thinking about this review since. When I started the Pulitzer reading I figured there would be some books I didn't like. Fortunately on average it seems to be about 10% - I've ready about 45 and there had been three I didn't like so I was due. And boy was I due. A Fable was Faulkner's 15th book and his first of 2 Pulitzer winners. The other, The Reivers, was for his last book 10 years later - I enjoyed the Reivers...it was readable.
A Fable is a book that Faulkner considered his opus and is a retelling of the last days of Christ set in WW I. I had to look that up as I didn't necessarily get it out the book and even knowing this I had a hard time seeing it except in some obvious places. I ended up reading this in 3 parts - I read the first quarter of the book and was getting discouraged so I read the next book in line, went back and read the next quarter, then another book and then powered through the second half just to be done with it.
I've read dense novels with tough language and liked them but I felt that Faulkner was just showing off here. If he didn't have a thesaurus next to him during the writing then I applaud his use and knowledge of vocabulary, although not of grammar. The guy didn't like periods, at all. His sentences rambled on for sometime a full page through the use of semi-colons, colons, hyphens, etc. He could have easily broken these into several sentences.
However these things in and of themselves were not what made this nearly unreadable to me. It was more that he would describe things over 3 different ways in the same sentence, the same action, the same item, etc. And doing this repeatedly in the same "sentence" I lost track of what he was trying to say and got bogged down in the minutia. After reading this book I felt like Faulkner was just beating me over the head. I'm not sure which Faulkner is the real Faulkner style but I don't think I'm going to read any more to find out.
On the 1 star I had started out with 2 - thinking 1 for readability and 1 for language. However after looking through my other reviews and seeing a couple I gave 2 and 3 stars to I dropped this back to just the 1 star.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised by this long novel. Faulkner was a pilot during World War I, and while that experience is represented in several small incidents in his earlier novels, this novel's central focus is World War I (and while aircraft still figure in only one of the subplots, Faulkner's experience in the subject is clear). This book had its origins in a conversation Faulkner had with some Hollywood producers during World War II, asking the question, "What if the unknown soldier in 1919 France was actually Jesus returned to Earth to give us one more chance to wage peace instead of war?" While nothing cinematic came of those conversations, Faulkner uses that premise as the springboard for this very dense, very deep meditation on war, imperialism, greed, and human nature. While I enjoyed seeing how the various portions of the Christ myth served as analogies for incidents and characters in the novel, it was the damning indictment of the powers behind the war that I found most interesting. At times the novel (published in 1954) read like it might have been ripped from the pages of Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_: the cynicism about governments and possible secret conspiracies and agreements to keep the war going, if only to show the troops (who desperately want peace) that they do not have the power to simply throw down their arms and stop fighting; the portraits of individual soldiers caught up in schemes for self-preservation and monetary gain; the nature of the relationships between the major allied powers to cover up one regiments mutiny (by having three American soldiers execute a French general and make it look like he was shot leading his troops into the fight). While the prose and style don't have the vigor nor inspire the awe that Faulkner's earlier works do, this is a fine and undeservedly ignored later novel.

[K.M. Weiland · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an insanely difficult book that buries its flashes of brilliance in a welter of incomprehensibility.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If I were evil, I would hate and fear him. If I were a saint, I would weep. If I were wise, and both or either, I would despair."

[Vítor Leal · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Aqui está um lugar que será para sempre Inglaterra...”

[Mat · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the most difficult Faulkner books i have read so far. As difficult and confusing to follow as Absalom, Absalom!, with the exception that the latter novel is an eloquently written tour de fource whereas A Fable is meandering, rambling, and even at times a rather opaque recounting of a story set in France during World War I. As another reviewer has already pointed out, the novel finishes very strongly in the final 1/4 but the first 3/4 of the novel are certainly not for the fainthearted. If you are new to Faulkner, definitely do NOT start here. It will put you off Faulkner for life probably.

Having said that, A Fable certainly does have its moments - the confrontation between the French woman and the officer who turns out to be the father of the man he now has to execute for example. Faulkner is able to invent these complex situations in which the human heart is truly challenged.

The main story is about a French regiment which has 'mutineed' but not the typical mutiny. They have refused to fight, causing the Germans to (temporarily) lay down their arms too. Well, as you can probably imagine, the warmongers said, "we will have none of that!"

This 'fable' mirrors the so-called greatest story ever told of Christ and there are so many references throughout. References range from, for example, the 12 soldiers (i.e. the 12 apostles) plus the 1 'judas' soldier, right through to barb wire which pithily reminds us of the Crown of Thorns. I will not give anymore away. All I'll say is give this a go if you are a serious Faulkner fan like myself but if you are new to Faulkner, try reading Flags in the Dust, which is to my mind his real masterpiece or if you are feeling like a bit more of a challenge then Absalom, Absalom!