I’m happy to announce that I’ve finished the first book in my reading challenge - Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. It coincidentally was the book from which the oral exam test passage came from, wow!

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia WoolfTitle and Author: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Genre: Modernist fiction, historical

Unique features: stream-of-conscious narration, takes place in one day

Thoughts: I think Mrs. Dalloway is one of those books where we the readers either hate it or love it. Instead of a linear plot, it takes on the centre of consciousness of many of its over one hundred characters (though predominantly in the mind of Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, Lucrezia Smith, and Septimus Warren Smith) where action is replaced by thoughts and memories and advancement in the storyline is replaced by the passage of time. The language is densely packed with sentences as long as a paragraph and peppered with commas, colons, dashes, parenthesis, and semi-colons to emulate the fragemented and wandering consciousness of each character, which, more often than not, inadvertedly cross with that of someone else.

The themes of death, passage of time, and the sense of empire are constantly mentioned throughout the book. Objects and people who symbolize the mighty power of the British Empire are dramatically juxtaposed with those who lost their jobs, self-worths, and, in the case of Septimus Warren Smith, their lives to the traditions of the empire and the values of the upper-middle aristocratic society. Empathy is essential for the understanding of this novel; otherwise readers will no doubt agree with critics on the “frivolous, useless” nature of Virginia Woolf’s writing. There are points in the book where I, with the combination of the effects of the content and language, experienced something like a near-epiphany on the subjects of human life and behaviour and other points where I was exasperated at the drawn out and repetitive nature of Mrs. Woolf’s writing.

Favourite passage:

[Clarissa] had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything more. But [Septimus] had flung it away… Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evade them; closeness drew apart; rapture fades; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Now reading: The Story Teller by Mario Vargas Llosa

As for the 28 Books in 2008 Challenge, we just hit 20 participants, get on the bandwagon folks!

Popularity: 10%

Related posts: