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3.79 AVERAGE
3.79 AVERAGE
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
Strong character development:
N/A
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Exquisite
A great novelist's greatest novel - staggeringly good. The structure is a triumph, the narration skipping freely (sometimes mid-sentence) from interior voice to interior voice; before zooming out into a devestatingly detached omniscience for that wrenching middle section. But unlike some of the modernist classics, that formal inventiveness doesn't come at the expense of any emotional weight. There's an incredible amount packed into this relatively short novel - a meditation on aging, accomplishment and regret; on the nature of time itself and the way it distorts and can be distorted; a philosophical exploration into the predicament of perception - and concurrently, the impossibility of art to adequately capture life; a questioning of the purpose of art itself; and of course all this scaffolded by the intricate and deeply human relations between a family and friends. This is an all time favourite of mine - subjectively and objectively a masterpiece.
still processing it but definitely one of the best books i have ever read
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Woolf’s stream of consciousness writing style is something I was not used to and so it definitely took me a bit to grasp what was going on. There is next to no dialogue and no real plot either, but I still found myself wanting to continue reading. This book was more about exploring the emotions of a large family and why sometimes people can’t find the right words to say to people around them. Despite the lack of any action, the detailed writing style kept me interested and I could see myself re reading this in the future and enjoying it more.
Beautiful prose as ever. This is one of those books that you continue to think about long after you finish, perhaps even more so than while you're reading it. It's not that there are memorable action scenes, nor even especially memorable characters, rather the ideas that it sets in motion keep churning. I did lack slightly the emotional connections I felt to Mrs Dalloway or Orlando - or even A Room of One's Own - which means I'm only giving four stars here, but I also think I may have read it at a bad time, while my mind was restless, whirring a little too frantically. I might come back one day at a more peaceful moment to fully absorb the philosophy and lose myself in the rhythms, and properly appreciate what Woolf achieved here. Nevertheless it was a wonderful reading experience and I found many passages to savour and commit to my notebook. Amongst the best was Lily's struggle with the artistic process:
"She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's fight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself - struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: 'But this is what I see; this is what I see,' and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her."
"She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's fight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself - struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: 'But this is what I see; this is what I see,' and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her."