Reviews - Al faro | The StoryGraph

6.39k reviews for:

Al faro

Virginia Woolf

3.79 AVERAGE

colemcdougall's review against another edition

3.0

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.

simpmor's review against another edition

4.25

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."