John Malkovich names his favourite book of all time
Actor John Malkovich has had an incredible career, performing in 70 movies, including The Killing Fields, Of Mice and Men, Con Air, Being John Malkovich, Burn After Reading and Juno. He has been nominated for two Academy Awards but has never quite managed to take one home.
Malkovich looks like he was always destined to be an actor, majoring in theatre at the Illinois State University before dropping out to join the William Esper Studio. At 23 years old, Malkovich joined the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago along with Joan Allen and Gary Sinise. A superb career duly followed.
In a Q&A session with The Guardian, Malkovich once named his favourite book “So many,” he admitted, “but certainly The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner. ‘No battle is ever won’ he said. ‘They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.’”
The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929, but it was not initially successful. Two years later, Faulkner released his sixth novel, Sanctuary, which was a commercial success. In fact, Faulkner later admitted that he had only written Sanctuary as something of a sell-out book for money. It was just as well, though, as following its release, The Sound and the Fury also began to garner critical admiration.
Narratively, the novel focuses on the Compson family from Jefferson, Mississippi, during the first part of the 20th Century. The Compsons are former aristocrats from the American South whose reputation has fallen by the wayside. The novel tells of the family’s struggle to come to terms with their new lower position in society.
The Sound and the Fury has a distinctive feature that would later become a standard in modernist texts. It uses multiple narrators to tell its tale and employs a stream-of-consciousness narrative. The fragmented story, with several jumps back and forth in time, makes the novel a challenging one but a work of a true literary master.
Faulkner’s novel is not the only literary love of Malkovich, though. As he mentions, there are “so many”, and one looks to be Kurt Vonnegut’s 1970 novel Breakfast of Champions. Malkovich provided his voice to read aloud Vonnegut’s book for the audiobook version. While he is an admirer of Vonnegut, when it comes to his true favourite, it’s hard for him to look beyond Faulker’s 1929 classic.
