Mrs. Dalloway

Rating:
Summary: Experience
Review: I am 24. Had I read Mrs. Dalloway any time in my teens, or very early 20s, I am sure the experience would have passed me by and I would have dismissed Ms. Woolf as an overindulged, deliberately obscure, unneccesarily wordy author of irrelevancies.

Sometimes you have to be ready for a brush with genius. And I have no doubt that genius is what Virginia Woolf was. I read Mrs. Dalloway at the same time as Arundhati Roy's 'God of Small Things'. Now Ms. Roy is a fine writer. But the difference between the fine and the sublime is all the difference in the world.

I cannot praise Mrs. Dalloway too highly. Its virtues have been lengthily extolled elsewhere (and to some, those same virtues are faults), so I will not repeat them here. But to me, whenever I think of Clarissa and those who touched her, I am filled with an unutterably sad, yet joyful love for life and for who we are.

I do think you need to be ready for this book. As Virginia herself put it, the joy of age is not that you have experience, but that you can turn that experience slowly around in the light. If ever you feel like that, do read Mrs. Dalloway.

Rating:
Summary: The Mystery of Human Personality
Review: Although the time covered in this complex novel is only one day, Virginia Woolf, through her genius, manages to cover a lifetime unraveling and exposing the mysteries of the human personality.

The central character of the novel is the delicate Clarissa Dalloway, a disciplined English gentlewoman who provides the perfect contrast to another of the book's characters, Septimus Warren Smith, an ex-soldier whose world is disintegrating into chaos. Although Clarissa and Septimus never meet, it is through the interweaving of each one's story into a gossamer whole that Woolf works her genius.

The book is set on a June day in 1923, as Clarissa prepares for a party that evening. Unfolding events trigger memories and recollections of her past, and Woolf offers these bits and pieces to the reader who must then construct the psychological and emotional makeup of Clarissa Dalloway in his own mind. We also learn much about Clarissa through the thoughts of other characters, such as her one-time lover, Peter Walsh, her friend, Sally Seton, her husband, Richard and her daughter Elizabeth.

It is Septimus Warren Smith, however, driven to the brink of insanity by the war, an insanity that even his wife's tender ministrations cannot cure, who acts as Clarissa's societal antithesis and serves to divide her world into the "then" and the "now."

In this extremely complex and character-driven novel, Woolf offers her readers a challenge. The novel is not separated into chapters; almost all of the action occurs in the thoughts and reminiscences of the characters and the reader must piece together the story from the random bits and pieces of information each character provides. The complexity of the characters may add to the frustration because Woolf makes it difficult for the reader to receive any single dominant impression of any one of them. This, however, forms the essence of the novel and displays the genius of Woolf: It is impossible to describe any human being in a simple phrase or collection of adjectives. We are many things to many people, all of them somewhat different, none of them the same, just as we are many things to ourselves.

Throughout the book, the reader is constantly called upon to compare and contrast Peter Walsh and Richard Dalloway, the two significant love interests in Clarissa Dalloway's life. Compared to Peter, an adventurer, Richard Dalloway appears more than a bit reserved and dour. But, readers must constantly question this view of Richard as his personality seems to alter with his altering relationships.

Intimacy, particularly emotional intimacy, and the preservation of one's uniqueness are two of Woolf's continuing themes. We find that Clarissa married Richard, in part, to preserve her sense of self; Peter would have demanded far more of her than she was, perhaps, willing to give. Here, Clarissa and Septimus, so outwardly different, would find they share much in common. While Clarissa feels threatened by her daughter's tenacious tutor, Miss Kilman, as well as by Peter, Septimus feels threatened by his doctor. Each feels the others are asking too much. Septimus and Clarissa even agree on the subject of death: "There is no death," Septimus declares, while Clarissa, the atheist, secretly believes that bits and pieces of her will remain intact forever.

Although some characters in this book may, at first, appear to be one-dimensional, we soon learn that all are extraordinarily complex. There is Sally, impulsive yet considerate; Richard, bashful yet timid; Peter inhibited yet adventurous; Septimus, insane yet credible. And Clarissa? She is all of these things and more.

It is, however, Woolf's torrential stream-of-consciousness prose that makes this novel a true masterpiece. Even those who find the plot of little interest will be drawn in by the exquisiteness of Woolf's language. This is a complex, character study in the fullest sense of the word, one with no easy answers, for Woolf, in the end seems to be telling us that perhaps, at our essence, we are all unknowable, even to ourselves.

Rating:
Summary: heavy, tedious... relevant today?
Review: Virginia Woolf, one of the supposedly "complex" writers of modern fiction remains forever a mystery to me. I came to this book after reading Michael Cunningham's, "The Hours," which I really loved, and then found Woolf's to be a real disappointment. I find it a challenge to follow Woolf's stream-of-consciousness prose and because her plots are rather mundane (about average people in fairly average circumstances) She bores me. I recognize the 'greatness' that is Virginia Woolf, and perhaps others would think me a philistine because I cannot wax eloquent about her ability to capture whatever it is about people that reviewers find so captivating. Perhaps I find that I simply can't identify with any of the characters in her books and therefore have a hard time getting excited about what they are thinking and feeling, let alone doing. Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa, is presented in this book as the protagonist in the description of one day (in her life). The secondary characters, her husband, her sister and nieces and nephews, an old flame, and a horribly mad young man and his confused wife, are of limited interest as well. In any case, Woolf just is not for me... Perhaps she was all the rage in the 30s but she seems so out of touch and not at relevant to the world in which we live and exist today.

Rating:
Summary: a whirlwind of language
Review: I guess I came to this book through the back door -- first I read Michael Cunningham's pulitzer prize winning book The Hours (based on Mrs. Dalloway) which I LOVED, and then I decided to read the original. First off, I must say that Cunningham impressed me even more when I fully understood the references and parallels that he uses. As for Mrs. Dalloway, it is the language itself that dazzles. The plot is nothing to speak of -- it's similar to a Jane Austen book when lots of interesting and not-so-interesting people interact in their mundane lives. It's what Woolf does with the subtle interactions and her stream of conscious writing that makes this book so good. Having read maybe 6 of Woolf's works, my favorite is still To the Lighthouse. Maybe that's because Mrs. Ramsey is so much more human -- Mrs. Dalloway is always described as distant and cold. This book is a love story of sorts about how Clarissa turns down the true love of her life and instead marries a wealthy politician. Like Ulysses, the narrative jumps around the minds of various characters in their journey from morning in London when Clarissa goes to buy flours to the evening of her party. It is a bit difficult, but the language itself makes it worth the effort.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful example of modernism
Review: Touching characters and a beautiful narrative.

Rating:
Summary: I'm sorry...
Review: ...but this is, more or less, absolute rubbish. Mrs. Woolf really really wanted to be a great writer, and she had all these big ideas about tragedy and meaning and modernism and reality going around in her head (wow!) but she was just a spoilt upper class brat, who was unfortunately also pretentious and wanted to change the world, like the rest of the Bloomsbury mob. That's not to say that spoilt upper class brats can't come out with some good literature - T.S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov, for example, or Aldous Huxley - but compare this to Joyce's "Ulysses" (which she completely ignorantly called a "disaster") and there's nothing there. Slew through Joyce's painstakingly complex methods of experimentation and we find some hilarious, in-joke puns, brilliant psychological observations about ordinary people, true demonstrations of genius. Slew through Woolf's complexities and you find a few extremely unrealistic, unconvincing characters, and the message which Woolf brings across through them is full of prejudice and ignorance. Her insight into life and psychology is absolutely nil, and the emotional plot developments are deus ex machina at their worst, and completely unconvincing (especially the depiction of madness, and Mrs. Dalloway herself). The characters are a mixture of unconvincing descriptions and descriptions of unconvincing characters leading fake lives, but this includes the heroes and heroines, and she does not display any insight into their problems at all - her own values are equally ignorant and oh so sensitive. That's not a moralising judgement, just a factual one. Woolf is one of the many upper class British writers of the early 20th century who believed that money, education and delusions of grandeur made great literature - Waugh, Forster, Ford... the list goes on. Their legacy still remains and it's up to modern readers to filter out the period pieces like Woolf from the true geniuses. "Mrs. Dalloway" is in fact her worst novel (of the famous ones, at least), as "To the Lighthouse" and "The Waves" are a bit more poetic and so, while certainly mediocre, not concerned with the psychological areas in which she completely fails to have any insight whatsoever. As such, this is a perfect example of everything that was wrong with early 20th century Brit lit.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, Soaring, Poetic Prose
Review: Virginia Woolf's finest literary achievement.

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Summary: Ask not what the book can give to you. . .
Review: Perhaps the helpful remarks I can add to those above is that this dense little book does demand a lot of its readers. It is not a book for that airplane trip, nor is it a book for the beach. It is a book to be read amid quiet with no distractions, and only a few of us have managed to fashion such a place in our lives. If one has not, perhaps a different choice would be better.

Having said that, the stream-of-consciousness narrative is very accessible. Ms. Woolf has a knack for capturing the essence of many minor characters in very quick, brief sketches, giving the book a great deapth.

Clarissa is a more complex person than her passion for parties would indicate, complex in her sensibility and love of the beautiful, complex in those aspects of life that she has rejected. Septimus is a vivid study in madness, something which Ms. Woolf knew a great deal about. Then there is third principle character, Peter Walsh, about whom little has been said here. He is in his early fifties, was radical in his youth, a "failure" in middle life according to the estimate of the "successful," and plagued with women problems for a lifetime probably attributable to his constant love for the frigid Clarissa. Peter Walsh is a brilliant character study from the point of view of one similarly situated. Sally Seton, the only person whom Clarissa ever truly loved, is a vividly portrayed secondary character whom one runs into every day today--the aging hippie. All of these people move through a finely recreated London of that time.

I have to rate this novel a nearly perfect little gem.

Rating:
Summary: probably my favorite book of all time
Review: It captures the very essence of transcendence. It's a literary miracle.

Rating:
Summary: I tried, and I'll try again...
Review: I generally devour books, but it was a struggle to get through the first fifty pages or so of this novel. Primarily, I found the character transitions much too confusing. Perhaps I just am not a devotee of stream of consiousness, although I did enjoy Proust (but admittedly did not finish). I will try Mrs Dalloway again, but I am beginning ot fear this is a case of the Emporer's New Clothes...