Monday, July 30, 2012

Book # 71 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

When Lucinda first suggested this website part of the idea was that we would also have to research a little about the author of each book. Nothing big, just a reading of the author’s Wikipedia page or something like that. Another purpose was to force each of us to read books out of our usual comfort zones and broaden the scope of what we read. So with that in mind I chose Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as the next book to read. Well what did I learn? That I won't be counting myself as a fan of Virginia Woolf. This book will NOT be making my top 50.

Basically the book is about the day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway as she gets ready to throw a big party. That’s it. Not much exciting happens except that one of the people she runs into earlier in the day commits suicide. From what I read about Virginia Woolf, she and Mrs. Dalloway have many similarities... both are unhappy society types that don’t have any major problems that are interesting to me.

I will say that the style of the book is interesting but also quite frustrating. The narrative continually shifts between characters and gives the reader insight to everyone’s inner thoughts and opinions. However, these thoughts are usually uninteresting, stuck up and boring. Plus everything is told in the most complicated way possible. A sample sentence:

“People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water and garden lilies, and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.”

That’s one sentence. Now just imagine 200 pages of that where nothing happens and rich people just complain about their lives. Snooze…  There is one character, Septimus, that is interesting and suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome while doctors keep telling him that nothing is wrong with him. If the novel focused on him a bit more I’d probably have enjoyed the book, but overall I just couldn’t connect with Mrs. Dalloway (much like how I couldn’t connect with the movie The Hours which is sorta related to the book). Anyway, the style is innovative for the time and specific passages are nice, but really nothing happens… B-

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