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Loading... Mrs Dallowayby Virginia Woolf
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. What a lovely read. . . if you're nervous to pick it up because it's a classic, don't be. ;) Reading this book is like walking down the street and being able to see the thought bubbles above everyone's heads as you pass by. You choose a few people that have the most interesting thoughts, and follow them around for awhile, observing their day and peering into their mind, too. Very readable, very enjoyable. (  ) jtho | Nov 6, 2009 |  A modernist book about memories, social roll play and the lonelyness we feel at never really being totally close to anyone. Beautiful colours, lively descriptions, interesting reflections. (  )1  ekebivibeke | Oct 27, 2009 | It's the kind of book I'd love to write, if I could. ( ) alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 | It's the kind of book I'd love to write, if I could. ( ) alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 | It's the kind of book I'd love to write, if I could. ( ) alissamarie | Oct 25, 2009 | 
 Among Mrs. Woolf's contemporaries, there are not a few who have brought to the traditional forms of fiction, and the stated modes of writing, idioms which cannot but enlarge the resources of speech and the uses of narrative. Virginia Woolf is almost alone, however, in the intricate yet clear art of her composition. Clarissa's day, the impressions she gives and receives, the memories and recognitions which stir in her, the events which are initiated remotely and engineered almost to touching distance of the impervious Clarissa, capture in a definitive matrix the drift of thought and feeling in a period, the point of view of a class, and seem almost to indicate the strength and weakness of an entire civilization.
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As Mrs. Dalloway prepares for the party she is giving that evening, a series of events intrudes on her composure. Her husband is invited, without her, to lunch with Lady Bruton (who, Clarissa notes anxiously, gives the most amusing luncheons). Meanwhile, Peter Walsh appears, recently from India, to criticize and confide in her. His sudden arrival evokes memories of a distant past, the choices she made then, and her wistful friendship with Sally Seton.
Woolf then explores the relationships between women and men, and between women, as Clarissa muses, "It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together.... Her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?" While Clarissa is transported to past afternoons with Sally, and as she sits mending her green dress, Warren Smith catapults desperately into his delusions. Although his troubles form a tangent to Clarissa's web, they undeniably touch it, and the strands connecting all these characters draw tighter as evening deepens. As she immerses us in each inner life, Virginia Woolf offers exquisite, painful images of the past bleeding into the present, of desire overwhelmed by society's demands. --Joannie Kervran Stangeland
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:15 -0400)
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