Mrs Dalloway

Had a beautiful morning finishing this book with a steamy cup of tea (the only way to read it, of course). This book is a classic for a reason so reviewing it seems trite. Instead I will just say, if you haven't experienced Virginia Woolf, you must. I love how it dips in and out of various lives, how they connect–and disconnect. I love the style. I could go on rapturously and talk about all the ideas and thoughts this book inspired, but instead I will say: read it. I am glad I did.

Such an interesting novel. The stream-of-consciousness writing style was hard to read at times (it required immense focus), but it was also really well done. It felt like reading people's *actual* thoughts—in the disjoint, uncontrolled manner in which they actually occur. I definitely want to reread this book; I know that I'll get more out of it.

I'm a classics fan but I've never been particularly drawn to Virginia Woolf. I picked up a copy of Mrs. Dalloway because the cover was pretty. I hadn't the faintest idea what it was about. When the Audrey app chose this as one of their listen-alongs, I figured now was as good a time as any to read it.

Some classics are wasted on people... this one was wasted on me. I wanted to like it so much given the time it was written and the portrayals of PTSD and mental health disorders. By the time I got to this point, I was painfully bored and cared nothing about the characters. Personally, it was not a good time to read it, either.

Whether it's a matter of the wrong place, the wrong time, or the book itself, it wasn't for me. I know I'm in the minority here but even lively discussion couldn't draw me in. It only made me ask if I was really listening to the same book as everyone else.

As I was going through the book, it suddenly dawned on me that I'm dealing with a writer of extreme intelligence, wit and understanding who at the same time is completely unapologetic for her craft. I've dealt with clever writers in the past, but never in so condensed a form. Her ever flowing stream of consciousness presents thoughts and feelings of various characters, never taking sides, never judging, never blaming. You would expect her to wholeheartedly support her protagonist and blame men for everything that has happened to her but instead she is objective, she presents Mrs. Dalloway's weaknesses and the choices she made willingly while at the same time presenting most beautifully and painfully Septimus's shell shock symptoms (in a time that many still considered men with these symptoms simply cowards). When I read the first sentence I just wanted to touch a bit of another famous writer but by the time I was reading the last sentence I was certain that I want to return in the future and follow Woolf's rivers of words in her other works.

I understand the literary merit and significance of this book and my rating in no way is meant to imply I don't think this wasn't a good book for a certain reader.

But my experience of listening to the stream on consciousness writing style as an audiobook was not enjoyable. I didn't care about anything I was listening to and probably should have DNF'd

It's worth checking out to see if you vibe with it. The concept is really intriguing, it just didn't work for me.

This was a lovely read. A stream of consciousness storytelling and I just loved the way Woolf wrote it.

Nothing is clear but rather a blur, no distinction between direct and indirect speech and the mode of narration changes a lot. I like how one moment you were with one character and then the next you're somewhere else because that character remembered something, for example. The way you slowly get to know their history and their stories. And keep returning to the present and then back to the past.

I really enjoyed this although it took me a while to read it and it was a very slow read.

This book was like the Log Ride
at Astroworld...once you climb
in, you can't stop. Virginia
Woolf seems to try to be as
honest and true as she can,
even when what she writes is
horribly painful.

One day in the heads of Clarissa Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith, and the people surrounding them. Woven together with inner monologues: the past and the present, some regret, some doubt, and the minute details of the every day that produce joy and distraction.

At part I felt lost in the monologues, lost track of narrator and/or if we were currently in the past or the present (blame the audio-book for making multitasking possible). But Woolf's melodic, very British, simple yet dazzling prose creates a tapestry of the complexities of human feelings and human relations, and you just go with the flow, get pulled into the life of characters that at the beginning may have seemed dull.

“A marvellous discovery indeed ‰ЫУ that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes on horses‰ЫЄ heads, feathers on ladies‰ЫЄ, so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.”

This is the only Virginia Woolf piece that I have read and not loathed entirely, which says something by itself. However, I still find myself almost entirely unmoved by Virginia Woolf and her rambling, ridiculously long sentences. She is lauded for her skill at crafting sentences and describing things and yet I think it's ridiculous that someone who insists on saying an entire paragraph's worth of thought without once using a period is considered brilliant for it rather than... well, ridiculous. It gets to the point sometimes in Woolf's writing where I am jolted entirely from her prose because the beginning of a sentence and the end of it are on separate pages and the original thought is lost among the rambling, forcing me to go back and reread.

I cannot stand that.

Again, I liked this better than all the other Woolf I've read, but I can't say I'm a fan. I would never have read this had it not been required for class and I have to say I resented the teacher a bit for assigning it after I finished trudging through the mess of it all.

I fully understand that Virginia Woolf is an icon of modernist writing, but I cannot read her writing. Despite only having a reading length of about 5 hours, it felt like six months. Her style of writing is so rambly, and while I understand that being rambly is a part of the stream of consciousness model, it's done in a way where it feels unauthentic and without purpose. Jean Rhys also used stream of consciousness in Voyage in the Dark, and it worked very well, it's one of my favorite books. I can only assume that Virginia Woolf's writing just isn't for me. That being said, one of my biggest pet peeves in writing is definitely meandering around points rather than using smaller points to reach the main point, and Woolf's writing resides in the former category (from my point of view). There were bits and pieces I really enjoyed, but they were so far apart between the pages and pages I skimmed as I got bored that I can't give this book more than one star. I was initially going to give this book two stars because I thought Septimus' story was interesting, but his conclusion was so incoherent that it made me laugh.