Take a photo of a barcode or cover
sisteray 's review for:
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
It's a strange thing to love a book without caring one fig about the characters or what happens. This book is such a gorgeous examination of thought and human reaction. The whole story bounces within the collective headspace of all of the characters. It's all ideas and attempts at understanding. The characters are conditioned by society; the men insecure finding their place to make a mark, the women searching for their true roles despite feeling bound by the roles that are expected of them.
Where something like Ms. Dalloway is endearing and entreats you to experience her life with fondness, I feel that Woolf was more interested in using character perspectives as a vehicle to make a larger critique, with little interest in having you feel fond of anyone. She even goes so far as to examine what it even means to like someone any why anyone does it.
The disconnectedness is the entire point. To be surrounded by people figuring out how to even connect with them; the fleeting nature of those moments and our capability to feel anything other than isolation. The whole thing has a certain irony that loneliness and disconnectedness would be so pervasive in a story with a collective conscious narrator.
The book feels like you are milking the synapses firing off in response to all of the various triggers that others create. The surface of the story so mundane, yet in contrast the writing and the process of telling the story is intensely thoughtful.
To the Lighthouse is broken into three sections of a dinner party, an abandoned house, and the return; life, decay, and death. The prose feels like watching a painter fill in mysterious spaces to have them all come together as a masterpiece. The tangents and flourishes make the piece work as a whole.
The subject and subjects are dull as rocks, but the execution is incredible. I highly recommend it.
Where something like Ms. Dalloway is endearing and entreats you to experience her life with fondness, I feel that Woolf was more interested in using character perspectives as a vehicle to make a larger critique, with little interest in having you feel fond of anyone. She even goes so far as to examine what it even means to like someone any why anyone does it.
The disconnectedness is the entire point. To be surrounded by people figuring out how to even connect with them; the fleeting nature of those moments and our capability to feel anything other than isolation. The whole thing has a certain irony that loneliness and disconnectedness would be so pervasive in a story with a collective conscious narrator.
The book feels like you are milking the synapses firing off in response to all of the various triggers that others create. The surface of the story so mundane, yet in contrast the writing and the process of telling the story is intensely thoughtful.
To the Lighthouse is broken into three sections of a dinner party, an abandoned house, and the return; life, decay, and death. The prose feels like watching a painter fill in mysterious spaces to have them all come together as a masterpiece. The tangents and flourishes make the piece work as a whole.
The subject and subjects are dull as rocks, but the execution is incredible. I highly recommend it.