To the Lighthouse (1927)

The middle chapter (Time Passes), in which light moves through a room when we're not there, is what did it for me. The way someone can transform before us simply as we move and walk and be. I didn't realize words could do what they did here for Woolf. ( )

NA

"It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment."

Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse is different and brilliantly so. It demands your full attention and each of your emotion. It knocks on your door, persuades you to let a room to it in your mind, set a comfortable bed, and welcome its stay then embrace its hovering presence once it decides to leave. It is a wonderfully-crafted introspection that broods and muses within different lives link — the comings and goings of the ideas, the rushing and disappearing of the waves by the shore — by a Lighthouse (Woolf wrote the word 'Lighthouse' as a proper noun), by a woman who seemingly serves the same purpose: to guide, to enlighten, to comfort.

The wrath and peace of perception tear this novel apart and put it back together. Memories and thoughts are hives the characters protect and destruct their selves in over and over again. The ordinary is extraordinary, the extraordinary is ordinary. There is no lesson here. Death does not change anything although it changes everything. Life continues to flow, to happen and it is grief and absence that painstakingly, persistently impact these characters, these people we may find a common ground with. Nothing is left out with Woolf be it a glance, a touch, a gesture, a sigh; their weight is conspicuous; they lose, contradict, and fight themselves in this eminent passage of time.

"She had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy — there — and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it." (p94)

There is no doubt that the mind flies inside the paragraphs of To The Lighthouse, it traverses every nook and corner, sweeps its every floor of thought and opens a window to an array of interpretation. It lingers on regret, yearning, anger, and affinity. Here, nothing happens yet everything does. It is a loyal servant of mood rather than a narrative pleaser. It is a food for thought, a home for sentiments. It nudges to question and to ponder on women's societal roles, demands of marriage, a sense of career failure and dissatisfaction, and most importantly life's purpose whilst stimulating the smell of childhood and sketching the complexities of adult relationships accompanied by a bleak summer backdrop.

After closing this book at once, I knew that it doesn't end there. It will show itself, every now and then, on empty plates, busy harbours, passing empty moments, words on random book pages, some thoughts I thread, some thoughts that insist, and some people I part with and encounter.

"Sitting alone (for Nancy went out again) among the clean cups at the long table she felt cut off from other people, and able only to go on watching asking, wondering. The house, the place, the morning, all seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt, no relations with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen, a step outside, a voice calling ('It's not in the cupboard, it's on the landing,' someone cried), was a question, as if the link that usually bound things together had been cut, and they floated up here, down there, off, anyhow. How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup." ( )

I found this really enjoyable but really heavy going.
It's all twisted and mixed about and layered and zig-zagging and I found myself unable to keep up with what I was reading. Not something to read when you're tired or ill or hungover.

I think it would easily get 6 stars from me if I read it again when I have lots of energy, time and wakefullness, so it's on the to try to read again pile. ( )

I am not sure that I finished it because everyone was talking, or I should say thinking, all at once. I got confused. I got lost. I finished it. I think.
Kudos to those who liked it and gave 5-star reviews.
Reading this book is a little like riding a bronco. You either manage to ride it to the end or, like me, keep falling off. ( )