Reviews

Gita al Faro by Virginia Woolf

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hagwife's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

The short of it is I understand why To the Lighthouse and Woolf are important, the middle section “Time Passes” is astonishing, and the book is an incredibly challenging read.

And now for the long of it.

The first thing that I think is really important about To the Lighthouse is that it’s not a novel, an opinion that is not borne solely out of its unconventional plotting but out of both the content and shape of the book. To the Lighthouse is a writing exercise focused on eliciting emotion, exploring memory, and reflecting on the visions we have of other people. Once you’ve read it, you can see how it changed the genre and how it has continued to influence writers.

The middle part - or middle panel of a triptych, as described by Mark Hussey - is astonishing, and, for me, provokes more emotion than the other two panels. It’s like watching your life from the perspective of your favourite toy from childhood. All of the minutia are important and intense, the grander happenings of the world far away and impersonal. It’s not just that time is passing, it’s how the time is passing, and what is changing as time passes. A house seems so inconsequential a thing until it’s a solitary vessel valiantly struggling to hold onto its contents, defying the elements and time for no other reason than it still stands.

As mentioned, this book was an incredibly challenging read for me as the abstract plotting and language choices are very in character with the High Modernist era of writing (often characterized by the works of Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner). I definitely felt like I had to retire my brain and work out that the book was an exercise and not a novel before I started to really make progress.

Hussey also makes a point in the introduction that books are rediscovered for each generation, that the To the Lighthouse of Woolf's time is not the To the Lighthouse of ours. I am so far removed from the culture and society of the time that Woolf was writing in that I don’t really believe in the way her characters process and think. Assuredly, our opinions of other people and our reactions to other people and the nuances making up our decisions hinge on a million million little factors spread out across our prior experiences. Yet I do not believe that, for the most part, we are consciously aware of this thought process, nor engage in it on a daily basis. The depth and complexity of the characters internal monologues, sometimes convoluted by sudden shifts in perspective, are far different than the way I think and the way I believe most people living now think. It can be exhausting to trudge through pages upon pages that themselves skitter across years only to realize that about 10 minutes have passed in real time. It’s like distance versus displacement - we’ve gone somewhere and accomplished something but we haven't moved and we’ve done nothing. This also makes her characters feel more like archetypes to me than actual people, thus making it difficult for me to buy into the emotional journeys of the characters.

Yet, everything about Woolf’s construction is meticulous, and so the impact of scenes like the dinner party or the entire second panel wouldn’t exist if the style and form of the book had been changed. Because we’ve spent so much time with each character’s psyche, time seems to slow down, allowing for rapid fire interchanges and processing that is no less complex than elsewhere, but happens all at once. If we saw the scene from the outside, we might see expressions or body language change, perhaps an exchanged glance or two, but we wouldn’t truly understand the interactions. Similarly, in order for the bracketed portions of “Time Passes” to land, we needed the length and density of the first piece. Changing anything about the form of the book completely unravels its impact, and that is an extraordinary feat.

That being said, I don’t know that I enjoyed reading this book; at least, not all of the time. It’s definitely not my everyday reading material, nor close to what I do pick up in the nonfiction section. If you're interested in reading it, I definitely recommend carving out some time and having a few references on Woolf and her work handy!

ralen356's review against another edition

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*sigh*
The writing truly irked me. I can wholeheartedly believe that there are gems in here, but the execution is atrocious. That is why I'm looking through the SparkNotes summary and calling it a day. Truly, less is more. I don't need all this extra internal monologue. So much telling, no showing. The pizazz does not help create the ambience that I'm expecting. It's just there to look pretty without any functionality. Even in poetry, you can't just write pretty stuff for no reason. The writing is supposed to make you feel something, learn something, and as the cherry on top, wow you. Without the sustenance of the induced emotion, the wow factor lacks so much. Maybe if I could find an abridged version, I would give this a second go.