The Sound and the Fury
Faulkner gave four narrators (including one severely cognitively impaired) their own prose registers to tell the same story of a Southern family's disintegration. Chronology is dismantled. The difficulty is the point. Modern Library ranked it sixth; it won Faulkner the first of his two Nobels in spirit, if not on paper.
The opening section drops you inside a mind with no chronology and no signposts, "dropped into a chaotic, emotional whirlwind with no map," and readers reach for Cliffs Notes to work out who is speaking. Time shifts "forward and backward by decades even within a single sentence," marked by italics that some editions fail to preserve. The dialect compounds it, "a nearly impenetrable mass of old school southern dialect," and audiobook listeners fare worse. What waits at the end of the work is a family nobody warms to, readers reporting "a difficult time having any empathy for any of the Compson family." One finished "so confused that your brain starts to ooze out your ears."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
