Eine Rose Fur Emily: Amerikanische Kurzgeschichten (A Rose for Emily: American Short Stories) Book

If you've never read anything by William Faulkner, read "A Rose for Emily" ... as long as you don't mind if things get a little gruesome.



I first read Faulkner's classic "A Rose for Emily" in college years ago. Initially I just dropped a 4 star rating on it and left it at that. But then something happened. A few friends liked my rating, and this story kept stealing back into my mind like Homer Barron sneaking in through Emily's back door, and making itself at home in my head, an uninvited and a little bit uncomfortable guest.

So I starting doing a little research on the background of this 1930 story, and found it available to read online at (seriously, go read this today if you've never read it before). I read it again, and I'm bumping my rating up to 5 stars.

The story begins and ends on the day of the funeral of Miss Emily Grierson, an institution in her southern town. In between, we find out more about Miss Emily's life and the traditions and expectations that bind both her and the town.People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.Time becomes fluid as stories and events from Emily's life are shared with the reader. The narrator always speaks as "we," as if the entire town--and we ourselves--are complicit in the events of the story. It's a disturbing feeling, and the images of decay that permeate the story further this unrest: the cracked leather furniture, moldy pillows, the dust covering everything in her home, and of course the appearance of the older Emily herself:She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough . . .When I was a college student, it was the ending of the story that was etched indelibly in my brain. It's still a shocker; I can only imagine the sensation it caused when it was published in 1930. But now I have a better appreciation for how skillfully Faulkner wrote this entire story, and the strange but pitiful character he created in Emily, dying alone in "a house filled with dust and shadows."