The strange case of the unreadable bestseller

It is 82 years since the publication of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. It was an unlikely commercial success.  

After James Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury might be the most famous unread novel in English. American schoolchildren are forced to plough through it (on the assumption that the Great American Novel must be hiding somewhere). But nine times out of ten, when you see a paperback copy on someone’s bookshelf, the spine is beautifully un-creased.  

This doesn’t surprise me. If you or I told a publisher that we’d written a modernist novel about nothing happening over an Easter weekend, of which the first half was told in the disjointed ramblings of an idiot… well let’s just say we wouldn’t be troubling the local Ferrari dealership with our advance. It’s a good rule of thumb that in general people buy books they enjoy reading.