Mrs Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway –a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance–infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life–Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. (www.goodreads.com)

This was a very chaotic story. I rarely had the immersion I usually have while reading early 20th century novels. This one seemed a bit unhinged, which made it difficult to follow every perspective. I suspect I skimmed a lot of passages for being 'all over the place', in which I could've found some ulterior motive or theme for this novel.

The novel turns the subject of 'lost love' over and over again, to show it from different angles, making it unique in some ways but with a common theme..  love  lost between a man and a woman, because of choosing someone else, love lost between friends because of different life styles, love lost between a married couple because of illness, love lost between a mother and daughter because of different views on the worlds. All this loss is shown against a scene, a party, which is invoked to portray a certain hope, but feels hopeless nonetheless.

It isn't the first novel I've read of Virginia Woolf.. other novels seemed a bit more structured, in which every character gets the space to voice its fears, hopes and general outlook towards the past, present and future.
In Mrs Dalloway all these people are trying to speak at once, or so it seems, which just makes for a lot of noise. That's exactly how I felt when I skipped some parts, trying to leave a noisy room to clear your head. Of course life doesn't wait turns, and it's the feeling that Woolf wanted to invoke, but it did damage the reading experience for me.

I stuck with it though, mainly because I know she writes well. Mrs Dalloway lost a bit of its momentum towards the end, leaving more room for reflection, but for me it was too little too late, although the very last sentence did pack a punch.

Night and Day

I’ve read other work of Virginia Woolf before, so I knew I had to expect a quiet contemplative novel, which focuses more on the emotional state of its characters instead of upon acts happening to, through or because of them.

Night and Day delivered what was to be expected.

I got to meet Katherine Hilbery, a young, beautiful, but serious young lady who is occupied with finishing a novel about her grandfather while secretly wishing to spend more time to unladylike mathematics. Ralph Denham is also instantly introduced as he is oddly at home at Mrs Hilbery’s table, where Katherine tries to make him feel at home. She doesn’t succeed, because Ralph detects that she is just playing the good host, without much feeling. When she gives him a tour of the relics left behind by her grandfather, a famous poet, he can’t help from antagonizing her and they part feeling slightly blighted and confused.

Next William Rodney and Mary Datchett enter the stage. William, an inspiring poet and play wright, who is very fond of Katherine. Mary Datchett, a self-sufficient woman, trying to come to terms with loving Ralph and not being sure if her love is returned by him. Ralph seems to be a very good friend to her, as he is found to ask her opinion on various subjects.
Katherine is being introduced to Mary at one of William’s parties. They feel a connection, even it they don’t exactly like each other. Mary feels daunted at first at the elegance and quiet fortitude that Katherine exudes, but tables turn when Katherine lets loose on her emotions.

There are a few small roles handed out for Katherine’s mother and father, her niece Cassandra, in the extent to help Katherine understand something about life and love and to set a genuine scenery in which she does this inner contemplation.

When the novel starts out, Katherine is a fairly closed off young woman, going through life thinking she isn’t one to feel much, as she lives her life very practical. When William asks her to marry her, her life changes instantly, because she needs to confess to herself what she is feeling. Drawing the wrong conclusions, the most part of this novel is spend to setting there faults right. As I told already, Virginia Woolf is very good at analyzing and dissecting a very peculiar situation of an engagement between two people who don’t love each other in a time when these sort of arrangements weren’t lightly broken. She dwells more in the inner sanctum than out, which makes this a typical Victorian novel in my opinion, where not even a kiss is shared, but we get to know the characters on a much deeper level, a more profound one, albeit harder to interpret.

Reading this novel was hard work, but I liked it. The ornamental language is unique in these novels, that I’m bound to slowly paint a picture of the scenery, the characters and their struggles, which even happening more than a hundred years ago, don’t differ much from what is still going on right now. Overthinking things is still a hot topic. 

A story about To The Lighthouse

Only five days left..

I try to make a choice here, how many pages do I still need to read? Can it be done?

Only four days left.. 

I feel the pressure of having to fit this novel into my evening, but I'm reluctant to give in easily. There's so much I still want to do beside reading. Winter feels like so many things, that reading has been shoved to the sidelines for a while now. Or maybe it's the novel itself, it isn't a very engaging one, at that.

Three days..

Trying to read as much as I can before I turn my light off and go to sleep. Beside me I hear the familiar noise that comes with someone falling asleep. Everything seems more deeper, more relaxed, that's why I could never fool anyone pretending to sleep when I was little. Only fifty left.

Two days. The day after tomorrow I need to be bringing this novel back to the library, no more excuses left. Either I start reading or it's left unfinished, but running has made me tired and watching telly has made me lazy. 

One day left.. Tonight's the night. I begin reading as soon as the little one is shoved into dreamy sleep, but I keep being interfered with exciting things happening around me. 

But finally, in bed, after rubbing sleep from my eyes repeatedly I get to the end of this mountain of a novel of 226 pages. 

It's a little thing, really, not weighty in touch, but burdening in emotion.
Virginia Woolf paints a picture how a mother, a father and their childs go through their lives. Instead of a novel packed with events, it decides to let us peek inside the restless sea we all feel inside. Family life is rarely content, as each of us struggles to keep faith in our choices, to keep the feeling we might have had better if we chose differently at bay. Virginia Woolf gave it a good try, because, especially in the first part of the book I felt I could relate even though the book is set decades from now.

Near the half the book tends to flutter onto more poetic phrases which didn't hold my attention. Those pages felt like butterflies in the wind. Beautiful to look at, but in the end soon forgotten.

In the end it focuses back onto the people you met in the first half and you get a sort of wrapping up. It might have been a strange ending, but I felt it could've been better if the book ended with the dinner party instead of taking the leap of several years.

Life doesn't provide the answers, it doesn't give you a look into what may have happened, so in my opinion it might have given the story more substance, because it leaves the reader to ponder what might have happened. You feel that the dinner party is a hinge in future things to happen, a doorway into an unknown abyss, yet people clinging to each other by upholding conventions not all of them believe in, makes them unite as a family.

Beside the inner emotions in a family, this novel also depicts the ruin of the victorian age. The age of free will and thought is entering the world and as we say goodbye to some of the characters, in the end we're truly saying goodbye to a past that's already dead and buried, yet still carried along by some.