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A review by chris_chester
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
5.0
These may be one of the finest works of literature I have ever read, and it's to Woolf's credit and my detriment that I believe I lack the creative faculties to accurately convey exactly why.
On its face, it's an incredibly simple story, or really no story at all. Woolf paints an incredibly high-resolution picture of the Ramsay family and their guests on two significant but nondescript days about a decade apart at their summer house off the coast of Scotland.
To describe the action itself -- a handful of conversations, a walk down the lane, a dinner around a table -- is to make it seem simple, parochial or even boring.
What gives the book its powerful current all out of proportion with the action itself is her description of the inner lives of her principle characters and their relations to one another. She captures swirling eddy of the conscious mind -- how one can feel a petty annoyance for one's spouse for an ill-considered remark to a child, then a swell of pity for the burdens he bears both from the world and the self-imposed, followed by a bursting feeling of love and loyalty. All that in a glance, all that in an instant.
To be able to capture that feeling with one character would be to demonstrate authorial aptitude, but to be able to flit from one character to another seamlessly, capturing the thrusts and flows of emotion that link one person to another within the silent, usually unspoken space that separates one mind from another is nothing less than mastery.
She conveys a feeling that, as adults, it seems to me we experience only intermittently, at least on a conscious level. As the character Lily Broscoe says:
This feeling of experiencing the present among one's family is formative for the children in the novel, shaping the symbols and relations upon which they will project their experience for the rest of their lives. For the adults, particularly the parents, these moments are precious and fleeting beacons that mark the passage of time. Happy points of memory. Returning to them virtually defining the contours of old age.
Indeed the way the novel is structured essentially lets you experience one of those beacons of transcendent experience both in the moment and in the shadow looking back on it years later.
I'd be lying if I didn't say that I prefer the warmth and light of the first half of the book to its pale reflection in the second, but latter is a necessary rebuke to the simplicity of the beauty of the first half --and the undercurrent of loneliness and melancholy always lurking beneath the waves.
Reality is not simple like that. Just as the lighthouse starts out as a symbol of possibility, then becomes a symbol of memory before finally assuming its own stark reality, the love and relationships between the Ramsays and their circle are never one thing. They shift and change through distance and the haze of memory.
That gets back to core of my impression of Woolf as an absolute master. Her characters are not any one thing. We see them through each others' eyes and with the benefit of the passage of time, so the already high-resolution depictions only became more complete and realistic the more ways she is able to depict them. This is art, and I think Woolf makes a convincing place for its power over morality and philosophy.
On its face, it's an incredibly simple story, or really no story at all. Woolf paints an incredibly high-resolution picture of the Ramsay family and their guests on two significant but nondescript days about a decade apart at their summer house off the coast of Scotland.
To describe the action itself -- a handful of conversations, a walk down the lane, a dinner around a table -- is to make it seem simple, parochial or even boring.
What gives the book its powerful current all out of proportion with the action itself is her description of the inner lives of her principle characters and their relations to one another. She captures swirling eddy of the conscious mind -- how one can feel a petty annoyance for one's spouse for an ill-considered remark to a child, then a swell of pity for the burdens he bears both from the world and the self-imposed, followed by a bursting feeling of love and loyalty. All that in a glance, all that in an instant.
To be able to capture that feeling with one character would be to demonstrate authorial aptitude, but to be able to flit from one character to another seamlessly, capturing the thrusts and flows of emotion that link one person to another within the silent, usually unspoken space that separates one mind from another is nothing less than mastery.
She conveys a feeling that, as adults, it seems to me we experience only intermittently, at least on a conscious level. As the character Lily Broscoe says:
It was a way things had sometimes, she thought, lingering for a moment and looking at the long glittering windows and the plume of blue smoke: they become unreal. So coming back from a journey, or after an illness, before habits had spun themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one's ease.
This feeling of experiencing the present among one's family is formative for the children in the novel, shaping the symbols and relations upon which they will project their experience for the rest of their lives. For the adults, particularly the parents, these moments are precious and fleeting beacons that mark the passage of time. Happy points of memory. Returning to them virtually defining the contours of old age.
Indeed the way the novel is structured essentially lets you experience one of those beacons of transcendent experience both in the moment and in the shadow looking back on it years later.
I'd be lying if I didn't say that I prefer the warmth and light of the first half of the book to its pale reflection in the second, but latter is a necessary rebuke to the simplicity of the beauty of the first half --and the undercurrent of loneliness and melancholy always lurking beneath the waves.
Reality is not simple like that. Just as the lighthouse starts out as a symbol of possibility, then becomes a symbol of memory before finally assuming its own stark reality, the love and relationships between the Ramsays and their circle are never one thing. They shift and change through distance and the haze of memory.
That gets back to core of my impression of Woolf as an absolute master. Her characters are not any one thing. We see them through each others' eyes and with the benefit of the passage of time, so the already high-resolution depictions only became more complete and realistic the more ways she is able to depict them. This is art, and I think Woolf makes a convincing place for its power over morality and philosophy.