Book Review: The cover of Mrs. Dalloway states that this "is the portrait of a single day in a woman's life," and it's not that at all. It's a story of lost loves and youthful follies, of lives ruined by a hideous war, desperation, broken hearts, regrets, hopes and dreams, all the cliches of life then and now, irresistibly told. Woolf uses stream of consciousness to reveal the inner clockwork of many characters, showing the complexity of mind, disjointed feelings, thoughts about others, remnants of decisions made both in the past, and throughout that day. No character is wholly good or bad; generally, no character thinks of any other character as wholly good or bad. Woolf's narrative technique in Mrs. Dalloway works brilliantly to show the ambivalence and multifaceted thinking behind faces presented to the world, then just as we do now (it was written in 1925, but seems modern in style). The book is beautifully written: at the start I wondered if Walt Whitman would've written this way if he'd written prose; there were points near the end when I wondered if Dylan Thomas had read Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway is a book on which one could profitably write a dissertation. Although the streams of thought seem jumbled and haphazard, actually it is carefully written and plotted. If you want to have some fun, mark or highlight each instance when the time is given or a clock rings out. That is the central organizing device, but there are others if one cares to study the book: e.g., Woolf has stated that the characters of Dalloway and Smith are doubles. The writing style makes for slow reading, just as I suspect it made for slow but passionate writing. In the midst of reading Mrs. Dalloway, I found I often had to go back half a page and start again to catch myself up on where I was. When I came back to the book after a break, I had to do the same. Quickly enough the reader picks up on the style and the reading becomes easier, just as tracking the jumps from mind to mind (no signposts here) will gradually become second nature for the reader. In fact the challenge of the style added to the book's enjoyment. If possible, the reader will want to try to read in long stretches -- this isn't a book that benefits from being put up and down frequently. Two other notes, first Woolf likes semicolons even more than I do, and second, if it helps, try to think of the writing style as an impressionist painting. So much more to say about this, but better to just let you go read Mrs. Dalloway. [4.5 Stars]
No comments:
Post a Comment