The Frenchman's Bend is an area twenty miles southeast of Jefferson, Missouri, divided "into many small farms mortgaged and miserable", with the cotton and maize on the valley floor to higher ground. Dominus of the place is Will Varner, the landlord-moneylender from "hard and shining eyes," owner of the school, church, emporium and thirty houses. And its emanations or branches seem all those around him: his son Jody, healthy thyroid closed in an 'inviolable air of celibacy, "the Dionysian Eula's daughter, who combines beauty and elegance of a "violent and immune perversity," tenants by the schoolmaster, the blacksmith at the sewing machine salesman. But this microcosm of the balance - between sowing and rimondature, baptisms and singing - is nourished by the ruthlessness of elementary drives: sex, money, aggressività.E William Faulkner once again draws us into a narrative flow where the masterly historical representation (no he knows how to return the anthropology of South America in the years following the Depression) is interwoven with the size-mythical nature, in a plot of formidable power - that mysterious power that is the unmistakable marchio del grande scrittore.
