“I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink … I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up.”
—William Faulkner had hoped to use different colors of ink to mark the sometimes-confusing chronological shifts in The Sound and the Fury. Now his dream will come true, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the author’s death.
(Source: The Guardian)
I think I’d still want to read it first in standard print, but I love this, and I suspect I’d read—or dissect—it in the way Alice Munro (in the intro to her Selected Stories) says she reads, starting in the middle and reading around rather than straight through. It also seems made for the iPad (remember ‘hypertext novels’ in the ’90s? Maybe they didn’t need hrefs, just CSS).
It befits Faulkner and Hemingway’s rivalry that 14 Colors of Sound and the Fury is announced the same week as 37 Endings of A Farewell to Arms—the order behind what seems bewildering, the complications behind what seems lucid.
!
incidentally I learned that he wanted this before I read the book and it made me a lot more amenable to reading it because I think it shows that he wasn’t just being confusing and weird to fuck with you, like, he ultimately did want people to understand the story he was telling even as he knew the best way he could think to tell it would inevitably be confusing.
