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A great work not only of literature but of philosophy; Woolf shows an incredible penetration into the human mind, and an equally startling ability to invent literary means of expressing the ideas she develops.
Dalloway's past, has just returned from India and drops in on her during her party preparations. Possibly conceived as a rebuttal to James Joyce's Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway is for you. Dalloway is a "classic", by which I think they mean "period piece", not "a book that will always be enjoyed". She's distressed because her daughter Elizabeth is in the thrall of her history tutor, Miss Killman. Dalloway is milling around London running her errands, taking pleasure in the hustle and bustle of London, the soldier and his wife are walking the same streets, and he is overwhelmed and assaulted by it all.Mrs.
It's a day in which Mrs. However, it uses a "stream of consciousness" style and takes place over the course of one day. Dalloway, a privileged housewife, is hosting a party, and the action follows her from her errand in the morning for the flowers until the guests leave at night. The stream-of-consciousness style makes the book hard to get into. If you want to read a reader-hostile book about depressed people, Mrs. Whether it's just on this day or every day, Mrs. Dalloway is thinking about her young adulthood, her close friend Sally and Peter, the man she might have married.
Miss Killman is an unattractive, bitter university graduate who has embraced religion as an outlet for her emotions. Peter, the man from Mrs. Dalloway is not an educated woman and her thought process is more random than most. Dalloway is readable in comparison and much shorter in length. Meanwhile, a shell-shocked (that's WWI-speak for post-traumatic stress disorder, though this guy is mentally ill) soldier is visiting a specialist in nervous complaints.
Mrs. As her errands take her through the streets of London, the point of view floats from bystander to bystander and it's not clear whether these are characters or just random people. While Mrs. It's an interesting window into a different time, but not worth a read for pleasure.
I was bored. Being a lover of the classics I decided that I must read at least one Virginia Woolf book. Perhaps I picked the wrong book. I do not understand why it is a classic. I will not be reading any other VW books.
But, this work was still amazing and the technical skill involved in assembling it a ginormous feat.Virginia Woolf is an excellent writer, but I think think stream of consciousness style can be improved to be more palatable. Convention is at times an awful thing and capturing the spirit and soul in a novel is a lofty ambition. Having to flip back and forth between pages to wonder how I got from here to there made me frustrated and losing my place because of this made the reading exponentially more disjointed. I did not enjoy reading this and I don't just read novels so I can dissect them. It should not just serve as a backdrop to showcase a group of rich old men and women and a party they are all going to attend. Your stream of consciousness style does what you wanted it to: it maps out the characters' minds and takes us on a trip where we stop at each association and then are swept away by the next one. Writing about life as it is, and therefore writing about life as it happens in the mind, and employing the plot as a stimulant for your characters and not vica versa, is a clever move.
However, this makes the novel hard to follow and the pattern you use is not strong enough to make up for the messiness of life as it appears on paper. Sure life is disjointed but writing should be clear and focused. Oh Virginia, Virginia how I admire your skill and abhor your method. I can understand the ping-pong game going on inside of my head because it's mine, I understand it, and I've known it forever. That said, Clarissa's mind is foreign to me and I don't know where these associations came from , why they are there, and why I should be interested in them at all. There has to be an element of entertainment and some kind of significance to the plot. But she is undeniably a master of the English written language. She is a member of this give and take club- a slave to the other side of universal convention.
You are well equipped for the task. I give her four stars for her genius and magic with words alone. The writing does not need to mirror the internal state of the characters to such a dizzying extent in order to convey their inherent thoughts and feelings. If I were trying to show that the character was bored, I wouldn't make the reader bored, which is why you shouldn't heap all this rhythmic chaos on me because that's what's going on in Clarissa's head. Some authors overshadow their characters with the plot, others shine the spotlight on the characters and leave the plot hanging in the dark. Nobody could put something so impossible together.
I didn't really enjoy this book, mostly I think due to the writing style. I found it to be a really slow read and hard to follow.
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