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A review by sidharthvardhan
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
5.0
"To love makes one solitary."
This book seems to start in middle and end in middle. It goes over a single day in life of Mrs. Clarissa Dollasway, a women entering old age and ends up capturing all her life.
The day which forms the time span of the book is most ordinary one except that Peter Welsh, her old friend and ex-lover would come to meet her.
There are choices one has to live with - it is too late when one realizes it was a wrong time, or at other times one may never realize it and thus must live in doubt. Clarrisa's decision not to marry Peter Welsh and marry Richard Dollasway falls in later case. She is now married for years and has a daughter, and yet she keeps revisiting (for she can't help it) the question of correctness of her choice. She could remember only very silly small things of old times as she looks forward to her meeting with Peter Walsh after a long time. She keeps telling herself that she made a right choice; and more so during her meeting with him (where she provides herself reasons for believing same).
“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
She loves society and likes proper men with suits, and Peter Welsh, despite their friendship, was and still is rough when it comes to social skills. She doesn't have a lot of bookish knowledge and likes to give parties which invites the criticism from two of her best friends, Peter and Sally Setan. she had a strange crush on later - a hint at lesbian love?
“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
Peter, forced to live with an unrequited and never dying love has made a few bad choices and thus at this stage he has no house of his own, no money, no wife or family and still carries his old socially rough social habbits. Seeing Clarrisa is hard on him and he must tell her that he is still young (at fifty two) and may put his life to order.
It is in consciousness of these two that we spend most of our time -and consciousness is the word (their thoughts of their memories are mixed with things and noises happening around them). Though we do visit a few other characters and which brings a somewhat irrelevant side story that of a mentally ill husband and his wife, which touches the main story at like two places and that not too closely.
There you go, I have given up the whole story but you know what? it doesn't matter. As I told you the book is always in middle of things and it is more of a stroll in a park rather than a race from beginning to end (where you could have spoilers) - it is an effort to capture life at large of its title character (old best friends getting together, thinking of things they did and didn't do - that sort of thing) and the story, deceptively simple as it is, is simply a background detail.
The narration is so beautiful that words seems to be dissolving before eyes, making reading easy and manages to give a comprehensive view that one doesn't need to put in a lot of thought to look for hidden things.
Now this last quote simply because I love it:
“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”
This book seems to start in middle and end in middle. It goes over a single day in life of Mrs. Clarissa Dollasway, a women entering old age and ends up capturing all her life.
The day which forms the time span of the book is most ordinary one except that Peter Welsh, her old friend and ex-lover would come to meet her.
There are choices one has to live with - it is too late when one realizes it was a wrong time, or at other times one may never realize it and thus must live in doubt. Clarrisa's decision not to marry Peter Welsh and marry Richard Dollasway falls in later case. She is now married for years and has a daughter, and yet she keeps revisiting (for she can't help it) the question of correctness of her choice. She could remember only very silly small things of old times as she looks forward to her meeting with Peter Walsh after a long time. She keeps telling herself that she made a right choice; and more so during her meeting with him (where she provides herself reasons for believing same).
“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
She loves society and likes proper men with suits, and Peter Welsh, despite their friendship, was and still is rough when it comes to social skills. She doesn't have a lot of bookish knowledge and likes to give parties which invites the criticism from two of her best friends, Peter and Sally Setan. she had a strange crush on later - a hint at lesbian love?
“It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”
Peter, forced to live with an unrequited and never dying love has made a few bad choices and thus at this stage he has no house of his own, no money, no wife or family and still carries his old socially rough social habbits. Seeing Clarrisa is hard on him and he must tell her that he is still young (at fifty two) and may put his life to order.
It is in consciousness of these two that we spend most of our time -and consciousness is the word (their thoughts of their memories are mixed with things and noises happening around them). Though we do visit a few other characters and which brings a somewhat irrelevant side story that of a mentally ill husband and his wife, which touches the main story at like two places and that not too closely.
There you go, I have given up the whole story but you know what? it doesn't matter. As I told you the book is always in middle of things and it is more of a stroll in a park rather than a race from beginning to end (where you could have spoilers) - it is an effort to capture life at large of its title character (old best friends getting together, thinking of things they did and didn't do - that sort of thing) and the story, deceptively simple as it is, is simply a background detail.
The narration is so beautiful that words seems to be dissolving before eyes, making reading easy and manages to give a comprehensive view that one doesn't need to put in a lot of thought to look for hidden things.
Now this last quote simply because I love it:
“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”