Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by bethanechol
The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
3.0
This is Woolf's first novel, and I picked it up as part of the "women writers" mood I was in immediately following my surgery. Of course due to its length, its difficulty, and my schedule, it took me twice as long to read The Voyage Out as it did to read Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Agnes Grey, and My Antonia combined. I enjoyed it because I enjoy Woolf - even the most boring plots with the most endless passages and the most elusive meanings will keep me transfixed with her poetry and her occasional moments of perfect, crystallized clarity. My favorite of these, by far, was the poetic and perfect description of a girl dozing in her study on a sunny afternoon, for I read it with half-open eyes lying in a sunny hotel room - possibly one of the more relaxing moments of my life.
The book is about youth and the confusion of understanding and naming young emotions and identity, and it's about the inevitable distance and misunderstanding between people. The dialogue is hard to follow and the characters almost impossible to understand - but it seems to me like this is Woolf's purpose. I think it works - I like her enough that instead of becoming entirely frustrated by an inability to comprehend, I see the characters like shadows moving around almost out of sight and hearing, and I just grasp at whatever glimpses and snippets of understanding that you can.
Overall, not the Woolf I'd recommend (that would be To the Lighthouse for beginners and Orlando for the adventuresome), but a fine piece of her work nonetheless.
The book is about youth and the confusion of understanding and naming young emotions and identity, and it's about the inevitable distance and misunderstanding between people. The dialogue is hard to follow and the characters almost impossible to understand - but it seems to me like this is Woolf's purpose. I think it works - I like her enough that instead of becoming entirely frustrated by an inability to comprehend, I see the characters like shadows moving around almost out of sight and hearing, and I just grasp at whatever glimpses and snippets of understanding that you can.
Overall, not the Woolf I'd recommend (that would be To the Lighthouse for beginners and Orlando for the adventuresome), but a fine piece of her work nonetheless.