Jacob's Room in The Virginia Woolf Reading Group

Apr 15, 2013 Moira added it · review of another edition

Notes toward a review, maybe, later....

Didn't rewire my brain as radically as Anne Carson, but I'll really have to think before saying anything about it. The Notes, the REASON I bought this damned edition, were completely terrible. I was very unfond of Jacob. I think that comes partly from reading 'Three Guineas' before this -- he represents so much she turns sharply against later. But even her later opposition to patriarchy and the wars it wages is here -- that wonderfully chilling passage in t Notes toward a review, maybe, later....

Didn't rewire my brain as radically as Anne Carson, but I'll really have to think before saying anything about it. The Notes, the REASON I bought this damned edition, were completely terrible. I was very unfond of Jacob. I think that comes partly from reading 'Three Guineas' before this -- he represents so much she turns sharply against later. But even her later opposition to patriarchy and the wars it wages is here -- that wonderfully chilling passage in the next-to-last chapter about the sixteen men, sunset colouring everything, darkness dropping like a knife. Is Jacob to stand for that Lost Generation? A "mute inglorious" Brooke? Tolkien's friends all being blown up? But he's too much a cipher, and his misogyny and pompous misunderstanding of Greece, culture, art, everything, makes him really unsympathetic. Especially compared to all the other living people in the book - his mother, Clara, Fanny (I loved Fanny), even Florinda and Bonamy. Sandra Wentworth Williams seems to have slithered her way in from an Elinor Glyn novel, tho. A surprising amount of cynicism about prostitution and sex, for stereotypically "frigid" Woolf. The book really is more a collection of gorgeous set pieces -- like walking past post-Impressionist paintings in a gallery.

But the writing, oh, my God, the writing. Absolutely haunting and wonderful, and I can't even start quoting because I would never stop. Amazing.

People still murmur over the last word said on the staircase, or strain, all through their dreams, for the voice of the alarum clock. So when the wind roams through a forest innumerable twigs stir; hive are brushed; insects sway on grass blades; the spider runs rapidly up a crease in the bark; and the whole air is tremulous with breathing; elastic with filaments.

Only here -- in Lombard Street and Fette Lane and Bedford Square -- each insect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey is treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the indescribable agitation of life. ...more

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