WILLIAM FAULKNER AND THE POWER OF SPACE

It's been a well known aphorism in writing that fiction tends to emerge out of the environment in which it's written. Could magical realism a la Garcia Marquez have happened anywhere but in Colombia? Could the stiff, emotionally repressed, but psychologically probing work of Anita Brookner have come from any other city but London? Perhaps, but nowhere is the case clearer than in Faulkner that place is everything. The slow, languid pace of the backwater of Mississippi, spanish Moss, ruined plantations, the ineluctable smell of the vanquished permeate every page of his work. I recently read As I Lay Dying for the tenth time, and it held up. If place is all, this is as good as it gets.