Katie read and liked Bram's review of To the Lighthouse (Vintage Classics):

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Within the first 20 pages of To the Lighthouse, I fell head over heels in love. Gorgeous, fluid writing…the kind that gives me that buzz. You know that buzz. It was pure joy. There are passages here th...more 1
Within the first 20 pages of To the Lighthouse, I fell head over heels in love. Gorgeous, fluid writing…the kind that gives me that buzz. You know that buzz. It was pure joy. There are passages here that unlock memories and past smells; sounds; feels; the summation of which reaches a crucial liminal stage that, when crossed, offers that pinnacle of reading: the buzz, the click, whatever you want to call it. At least, that was my experience from reading ecstatic sentences like this:

She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

It’s not coincidental that with this joy I felt echoes of Proust reverberating in the prose of someone who, a couple years earlier, had gushed “Oh if I could write like that!” after reading Swann’s Way. Well, Ms. Woolf, you can. You most definitely can. In the first chapter, the dozens of semi-colons notwithstanding, the resemblance to Proust is most obvious, and it fades into something very much her own, razor sharp but equally beautiful, after the initial chapters. The beginning felt, in fact, like a condensed homage to Proust—there’s the reference to Turner’s painting, Vesuvius Erupting, the young male fawning over the middle-aged queen (the narrator with Odette vs. Charles Tansley with Mrs. Ramsay), and of course the over-flowing sentences which demand—and reward—two or three reads before moving on. Furthermore, Woolf, intentionally or not, takes up Proust’s “game” of reinventing his characters between volumes (see: Swann the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain all-star of Swann’s Way vs. Swann the bourgeois husband of Odette “quite-the-reputation” de Crecy of Within a Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way). Woolf, however, will present a character as worthy of hatred and ridicule in one paragraph, and as deserving of sympathy and respect in the next. While this extreme quantum characterization sounds difficult to pull off, she manages it flawlessly by utilizing a stream-of-consciousness emotion-processing style that, unlike many attempts by less-worthy authors, actually rings legitimate and true.

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At the heart of To the Lighthouse lie the dueling extremes of masculinity and femininity, and the question of whether they can be successfully joined in romantic pairings or, in Lily’s case, within the individual soul. Early on in the novel, Lily contemplates Mrs. Ramsay’s nature and whether she can incorporate these aspects into herself:

What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart?

But a moment later, Lily dismisses Mrs. Ramsay’s idolatry of motherhood and marriage, her manipulative designs to bring about proposals. Similarly, while remaining critical of Mr. Ramsay’s often demanding and callous behavior, she also reveres his intellect and adventurous spirit. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay represent then-current masculine and feminine ideals—ideals that include many subtle but deleterious flaws. Only the asexual Lily can see this and her epiphany, grasped initially during the first section’s climactic dinner but ultimately delayed a decade, is represented in her painting, through her desire to reach a middle ground where she can be herself, unmarred by the expectations of the Ramsays and, implicitly, society as a whole. The last lines of the book achieve a simple but satisfying resolution for Lily and the reader:

With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

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As the small group nears the lighthouse at the end of the book, I was a little disappointed with James for requiring affirmation in (seemingly) the same way as Mr. Ramsay, whose neediness in this regard ripples unpleasantly through book. But where Mr. Ramsay’s need is grasping, grabbing, taking—summed up perfectly in a sentence that functions tellingly as a full chapter:

[Macalister’s boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown back into the sea.:]

—James’ need is harmless and healthy; he requires only his father’s (Mr. Ramsay’s) recognition of his performance in steering the boat. It’s a “Well done!” that costs Mr. Ramsay nothing but makes James’ entire day, utterly dispensing his gloom and bitterness. And it’s Woolf’s brilliance in exploring these human emotions and motivations that makes this novel a magnificent gem to be continually explored and admired. (less) "