oneofthejenns 's review for:

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

5.0

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This is truly a novel for the era of Einstein and Heisenberg. No one but Woolf depicts with such arresting precision the internal experience of time and consciousness. Time is always the present as an envelope containing memory, which, in its vividness, is nearly indistinguishable from the sensible world, and consciousness glides without hitch or pause from sensory impressions to reflections to memories and back: "I haven't felt so young for years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was, and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong window. But she's extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon's statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind . . . ." (51). The narrative voice slides as well from one consciousness to another, as if the world at any moment were a mosaic-whole of all consciousnesses and the narrator were a beam of light playing across it, barely resting on some individual tiles, lingering on others. Nothing much happens in the novel, yet all of life is present; the closest thing to a suspenseful plot belongs to Septimus Warren Smith, a character whose life is almost entirely tangential to Clarissa Dalloway's, yet intersects hers in a way known to her and in other ways she cannot know. This novel will frustrate anyone who wishes to read for the pleasures of plot, for the illusion of containment and resolution that many novels provide; it's a novel of the immensity and triviality that a day--not even a 24-hour period, only the waking day--can contain. Everything is partial, unresolved.