( 22 reviews )
-
Posted: Aug 8 2009
The plot of this book on the surface does not seem necessarily like it would engender a classic: a family with a caustic father, a loving mother and a youngest son who despises his father and in this particular instance wants to visit a lighthouse out in the ocean, a desire his father opposes. However, Woolf infuses this story with her fabulous (I think) writing style and a breadth of insights and observations that leave one fascinated and thinking throughout. Her writing style includes long sentences and a flow consciousness that some might find too burdensome. Somehow her writing reminds me of Sylvia Plath, with that same brilliance of wordplay. Quite simply it is a great book.
-
( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Apr 22 2009
--"The subject of this brilliant novel is the daily life of an English family in the Hebrides." That's the copy description on the back cover of my edition of "To the Lighthouse." I found it hilarious. I laughed for five minutes. --So it's an inadequate description of the novel? --Inadequate is an inadequate word to describe just how inadequate it is. --So what is "To the Lighthouse" about? --Well that's just the thing. To say it's about a family vacationing by the shore, about the delicate relationships between them and their friends, about how time changes them and their relationships between each other...is to miss the point entirely even if it is perfectly accurate. --As I understand it, this is a novel in which ten years passes in about fifteen pages, while the rest of the novel meticulously describes two days. --Yes, exactly. Like Proust, Woolf begins with a childhood incident that will echo down through the years. Like Joyce, she concentrates on the epiphanic moment. Reading "To the Lighthouse" is a bit like viewing a painting in which the characters move...but very slowly. Woolf passes from character to character, inhabiting each of their minds in turn, seeing the world through their eyes. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their flawed but enduring marriage are the central bodies around which the rest orbit and Lily Briscoe, a spinsterish amateur painter, ostensibly stands in for Woolf herself, but it is hard to say that any of the characters are less or more important than any of the others--this is essentially the genius of Woolf's handling of psychological perspective. Everyone has a point of view and each point of view is essential to attain a vision of the whole. --But it is a novel essentially about family relationships? --And relationships between men and women, men and society, women and society, human beings and the inescapable fact of their mortality. Again and again, Woolf asks the question, "What does life mean? What is it for?" --Does she have an answer? --Yes. And no. --It's ambiguous. --It's provisional. But it's enough to help Lily make it through the dark storm of life to use a perfectly horrible metaphor. It's her lighthouse. --Woolf has a reputation as a difficult author to read. --And it's well-deserved. She is a difficult read for the majority of readers, who, let's face it, are awaiting Dan Brown's new novel as if it were a major event in world literary history. What happens in "To the Lighthouse," when anything happens at all, isn't as important as how it affects each character internally. That is to say, Woolf's focus is on the fleeting but all-important impressions that the world leaves on us and that ultimately make us who we are. Her greatest gift is to capture these gossamer-thin states in a language of exquisite accuracy--capturing in words the flavor of fleeting emotions seldom if ever described before, even as they evaporate on the tongue. --You would have to love language, then, to fully appreciate her work. --Indeed. Her sentences don't move the story forward; they move the story deeper. She writes a poetic prose that many contemporary readers might mistake for unnecessarily flowery and overwrought--when, in fact, it is sharp as a surgeon's scalpel and cuts to the heart. And yet for all its surgical accuracy, it is the sensuous prose of a writer for whom language is like a box of brilliant colors is to a painter, for whom sentences are like caresses to a lover, except that in this case what is touched are the most potently orgasmic areas of our brains--needles to say, the ones most difficult areas to reach. --But Virginia Woolf reaches them? --You might say she's a master masseuse. --Ha ha. Does she provide a happy ending? --No, not exactly. But it's a deeply satisfying experience all the same.
-
Posted: Apr 10 2009
One of my favorite novels. It's dense and provocative and profound. So many passages say so much so well that I found myself constantly re-reading passages to get the meaning. At times Woolf lays it on a bit thick and it felt like reading through molasses. I kept longing for a letup that never came, like driving a winding road where you wait for a straightaway so you can recover. Demanding but worth the effort; disturbing and unsettling too. Not the best bedtime read. Overall, a beautifully-written and an intense search for meaning. Becomes even more poignant when you consider the tragic fate of Woolf herself.
