Mrs. Dalloway in The Virginia Woolf Reading Group

Sep 21, 2014 qtasha rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction, classics, modern-classics, 20th-century-lit, brit-lit, euro-lit, modernism, books-for-writers, psychology

This book gets easier,with more readings. I see things in the text I didn't read the first time. Virginia Woolf, Like William Faulkner, Toni Morrison are not easy reads and take more readings to understand them. The book jumps to character to character you have to be careful to keep up which character you're reading. This is a book for readers who like a challenge in their literature. Give this book a try but remember, read this book three or four or even more chances before writing a rating. P. ...more

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Mar 28, 2017 Brent Woo rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: in-the-brain, favorites, woo-woolf

This might be one of my favorite books this year. Freewheeling interior thoughts, overlapping and confusingly merged with outer life, drama and intrigue built up by slow revelation of the past. How do you even create characters that have such minute psychological details and reactions? Scenes are depicted in a way I've never seen, unexpectedly cerebral but elegant:

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china wal

This might be one of my favorite books this year. Freewheeling interior thoughts, overlapping and confusingly merged with outer life, drama and intrigue built up by slow revelation of the past. How do you even create characters that have such minute psychological details and reactions? Scenes are depicted in a way I've never seen, unexpectedly cerebral but elegant:

The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The body must constract now, entering the house, the lighted house, where the door stood open, where the motor cars were standing, and bright women descending: the soul must brave itself to endure.

The whole book sums up my favorite parts of Knausgaard, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Joseph McElroy, which is called something like 'experiencing thoughts and consciousness through fiction'. I love reading other people's brains. Knausgaard is 3,500 glorious pages of his brain, and I can't get enough. Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go has this great scene, "the pencil case", where very little happens, except one character is deciding whether or not to rat out a friend, her inner dialog vacillating, justifying, raging. One of the reasons that I picked this up because was that I was reading essays to try to understand McElroy's Plus, the inscrutable brain-in-space drama. In "Socrates on the Beach", McElroy writes that a lot of philosopher-cum-novelists start by picking some idea in philosophy, then build a novel around it. Classic allegory. For example, as if Abbott said, I want to novelize the idea of multiple dimensions, and came out with Flatland. McElroy calls this Philosophy Dramatized in Fiction. He then brings up Virginia Woolf, mentioning Mrs Dalloway and The Waves, and praises her to the sky, saying: "I'm changed by what Woolf did so much more than by Philosophy Dramatized in Fiction." I agree. Woolf was highly educated but probably wouldn't consider herself a philosopher, yet this one little book got my hamster wheel spinning in ways I didn't think were possible. ...more

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Apr 07, 2017 C. Woolf rated it really liked it

With Mrs. Dalloway Woolf transforms her readers into a fairy flies. We buzz lightly from head to head, listening to unfiltered thoughts of various characters of the book. We see how the rich and overflowing inner life of the mind—filled with memories, regrets, ruminations, and judgments—is filtered through the mouth, offering only tightly regulated words and thoughts to the world of society. Or sometimes no words at all (Richard Dalloway wants to say that he loves Clarissa, but in the moment of ...more

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Dec 28, 2015 Zachary Diaz rated it it was amazing

The MOST breathtaking book I have ever read. Full of stunning prose and I will say it, outright poetry -- so much of this book was amazing that I underlined a lot. The end especially was moving, especially the scenes which describe Peter Walsh and London at dusk/evening/night. I want to read it again and again forever.

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May 30, 2015 Fluencer rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites

This is such a precise description of human beings. Virginia Woolf puts her finger on the Existential Crisis we go through everyday, and the life of unhappy souls who have to live with the knowledge of mortality.

Love is not romance. It is small things, the ease of one soul with another soul. Woolf leaves no confusion about that in this book of hers as well.

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Sep 18, 2014 Camila rated it it was amazing

Shelves: english-irish, 2016

No es lo mismo leer a Woolf en español, pero sigue siendo indescriptible. Magnífica narrativa, fluidez, complejidad. Una novela que no necesita hechos para ser sumamente interesante, estos se difuminan en las mentes de los personajes, y, aún así, cada instante es tan nítida , como sólo Virginia sabe hacerlo.

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