Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner · 1936
Many critics rank it above The Sound and the Fury. Competing, contradictory narrators try to reconstruct the story of Thomas Sutpen, and the impossibility of knowing history becomes the subject itself. The style is nearly impenetrable and absolutely necessary. It contains Faulkner's most famous line about the South: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
The case against
Sentences run past a thousand words; one held the Guinness record. The same Sutpen story gets told five times by narrators who admit they're inventing half of it, so you finish unsure what happened, which is the point and also the price. Without The Sound and the Fury behind you, Quentin's stake in it barely registers.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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