Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

A very distinct work of Modernism, even though I found it extremely difficult not to compare this to Ulysses, another obvious Modernist reference point. The taking-place-in-a-single-day conceit, the stream-of-consciousness aspect, the side-paths and digressions, all of those techniques are also here, but instead of Ulysses' ocean of references, puns, and illusions, this is more like a flood. It took me a while to get into it, as I struggled through the various currents of memories, perspectives, and thoughts, but eventually I came to enjoy Woolf's almost absurd interest in the most minute details of life. I always respect writers who can bring out the drama of everyday things, and her almost determined whimsy took what could have been a terminally dull anecdote about a woman's adventures planning a dinner party and revealed a surprisingly large world beneath the surface, even if ultimately I didn't find the novel all that pleasurable on a visceral level.

You can learn a surprising amount just from looking at the very first sentence, which on the surface doesn't seem like a very promising candidate for a famous opening line. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." It doesn't have a philosophical insight like Anna Karenina, it doesn't hint at the unusual like 1984, it contains no striking language like Gravity's Rainbow, it's subtle and understated and just straightforwardly ordinary - a normal woman doing something normal. But after you've made your way through the increasingly absorbing streams of narrative, as you come to appreciate Woolf's talent for depicting the complicated fluid dynamics of the mind, it sticks out at you and makes you appreciate how much can be contained in something so small. That's especially when compared against some of her more epic sentence- thoughts later on:

"So she sewed. When she sewed, he thought, she made a sound like a kettle on the hob; bubbling, murmuring, always busy, her strong little pointed fingers pinching and poking; her needle flashing straight. The sun might go in and out, on the tassels, on the wall-paper, but he would wait, he thought, stretching out his feet, looking at his ringed sock at the end of the sofa; he would wait in this warm place, this pocket of still air, which one comes on at the edge of a wood sometimes in the evening, when, because of a fall in the ground, or some arrangement of the trees (one must be scientific above all, scientific), warmth lingers, and the air buffets the cheek like the wing of a bird."

There's a lot in there about how people see life, a mixture of observation, rumination, and fantasy, and if nothing about that paragraph on its own screams classic, you've haven't really gotten her rhythm, which moves from graceful to gale-force in an instant. She repeatedly enters the heads of the characters of the novel and enlarges their skulls to reveal their loves, manias, and depressions. And, much in the same way that Pynchon was able to give the reader subtle hints as to exactly whose insane hallucinations the reader was currently enduring by subtly modulating the tone and language of each scene, Woolf's effervescent energy is actually underwritten with careful skill. No two character's reveries are quite alike, Septimus' quiet agony as he copes with shell-shock after the horror of World War I most notably.

I will say that I did not find her to be very strong in terms of humor. The novel makes much of social standing and customary proprieties, like you would expect for its setting in the particular place and time of interwar England; this settings interests other people more than it does me, so it's due to the tremendous power of Woolf's writing style that its extreme inward focus isn't deadly dull. Clarissa is focused on her dinner party as a way to block out the unpleasantness of life beyond, but even when you take that as a meta-commentary, as she reacts to the news of the suicide in the final dinner party scene, the novel can be somewhat wearying to read unless you're really into the setup and delivery. If she weren't so observant this book would be almost unreadable, so absent are Wodehouse-type jokes, but luckily she reaches so deeply into the characters of Clarissa, Septimus, Peter, and all the rest that the lack of humor is usually not felt so strongly.

I find it interesting that so many people seem to have loved this novel right away, since it took me a while to get into. It seems determinedly trivial but it isn't: life is made up out of all of these reminisces, the way that small things make you think of large things, the way that your thoughts zoom in and out and move in circles. My issue with it was that I didn't really care, at first, about these parties, marriages, divorces, personal connections and disconnections, but ultimately I was won over by Woolf's ability to almost literally force you to care about these characters. By the end you almost agree with Peter the ex-lover, who sums up Clarissa, and Clarissa's world, in the most appropriate way:

"'I will come,' said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?

It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was." ( )

Nearly impossible to sustain the meteoric thrill of the first third, a novel assembling itself in an almost evolutionary process; Woolf's confounding sentences are made up of discrete, microbial fragments, bonded with a generous infusion of punctuation and some admirably sneaky transitions. Settles into a lovely, if more conventional meditation on age and memory. I have very little use for the final scene, which ties things off with a pretty rote interior climax. Rote, of course, within the context of Woolf's achievement, which is its own astonishing invention after all. Musing over it now it's still surprising that the vivid descriptions of Septimus's madness can exist in the same novel that eyes tea cakes with such petty jealousy. ( )

More of a 3.5 than a 4, but I enjoyed it. It is a rich, deep, dark, complex text that I am still coming to grips with. I look forward to the eventual and possibly soon reread of it. ( )

This dyslexic really enjoys Virginia Woolf whilst at the same time struggling to read it due to the complexity of the sentences, the layers and nesting and shifting viewpoints.
I find it exhausting to read as I have to pay so much attention to it and can't simply relax and float along with it.

5* for literary magic.
1* for dyslexic accessibility ( )

Like whiskey. Packed full of flavour - but it's all a bit much for me. Preferred the Austentatious flirting to the existential crises - and the passages of similes stacked upon metaphors stacked upon similes stacked upon... ( )