Community Reviews
After this, I've read almost all of Woolf's fiction now - the only remaining omission being Night and Day. I've re-read Jacob's Room and Mrs Dalloway multiple times. She is my favorite author.
But I have to say I feel a bit conflicted about this book. It has more in common with the Victorian Novel than her more experimental works. I still vastly prefer those.
I still love her style and her themes. This book has both of those in spades. She spends time on the ephemera of consciousness in a way that I find fascinating and never get tired of. Her ideas about the complicated and multitudinous and luminous and indecipherable and un-sum-up-able nature of human consciousness speak so much to what I personally experience. And the last chapter in particular has a ton of that.
She is also a master of subtlety. Sometimes I think she overplays that hand a bit. Given the length of this book and the number of characters - especially that - I didn't feel like the connections between the different time periods were really fleshed out enough. And the years before the war were a bit overemphasized compared to the during and after. I feel like her original plan for the novel - an interposition of fiction with nonfiction essays - and the eventual decision to abandon the nonfiction, perhaps distracted or detracted from the possibilities if she had the eventual form better in focus from the start. Who knows.
I still enjoyed the novel. It has that sort of Victorian society feel of a lot of that fiction, but in a way more readable form than any of the originals because her style is so clean, acrobatic. I don't think I would have enjoyed it if I wasn't already familiar with both Woolf's style and with so much of early 20th century English culture and history, most of which I know from studying Woolf, reading Dalloway, studying Bloomsbury and Forster and all that. It meant I didn't have to struggle as much to know what she was getting at.
But I think in the end there were just too many "main" characters for the novel to really sing. Eleanor and Sara and Martin and Kitty turned out great throughout. North turned out well in the last chapter. But a lot of the others, especially Morris, Maggie, are still a bit of a blur for me. I would highly recommend to anyone starting to read this that they keep some notes on characters to help them keep track.
But I have to say I feel a bit conflicted about this book. It has more in common with the Victorian Novel than her more experimental works. I still vastly prefer those.
I still love her style and her themes. This book has both of those in spades. She spends time on the ephemera of consciousness in a way that I find fascinating and never get tired of. Her ideas about the complicated and multitudinous and luminous and indecipherable and un-sum-up-able nature of human consciousness speak so much to what I personally experience. And the last chapter in particular has a ton of that.
She is also a master of subtlety. Sometimes I think she overplays that hand a bit. Given the length of this book and the number of characters - especially that - I didn't feel like the connections between the different time periods were really fleshed out enough. And the years before the war were a bit overemphasized compared to the during and after. I feel like her original plan for the novel - an interposition of fiction with nonfiction essays - and the eventual decision to abandon the nonfiction, perhaps distracted or detracted from the possibilities if she had the eventual form better in focus from the start. Who knows.
I still enjoyed the novel. It has that sort of Victorian society feel of a lot of that fiction, but in a way more readable form than any of the originals because her style is so clean, acrobatic. I don't think I would have enjoyed it if I wasn't already familiar with both Woolf's style and with so much of early 20th century English culture and history, most of which I know from studying Woolf, reading Dalloway, studying Bloomsbury and Forster and all that. It meant I didn't have to struggle as much to know what she was getting at.
But I think in the end there were just too many "main" characters for the novel to really sing. Eleanor and Sara and Martin and Kitty turned out great throughout. North turned out well in the last chapter. But a lot of the others, especially Morris, Maggie, are still a bit of a blur for me. I would highly recommend to anyone starting to read this that they keep some notes on characters to help them keep track.
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.