A Haunted House And Other Short Stories in The Virginia Woolf Reading Group

Nov 06, 2019 Brent Woo rated it liked it

Shelves: woo-woolf

I like short story collections since they can be little experiments of crazy styles or unusual techniques that the author isn't usually associated with. I also like it because when you find a 'canonical' short story, you can recommend that to others who might not want to start off with a whole novel. This is no exception, where you see a variety of surprising styles, but all of them are still definitively Woolf, with a thin plot and people slightly overthinking things.

"Solid Objects" is fantasti I like short story collections since they can be little experiments of crazy styles or unusual techniques that the author isn't usually associated with. I also like it because when you find a 'canonical' short story, you can recommend that to others who might not want to start off with a whole novel. This is no exception, where you see a variety of surprising styles, but all of them are still definitively Woolf, with a thin plot and people slightly overthinking things.

"Solid Objects" is fantastic. The plot is summarized thusly: "man walks on the beach and collects stuff", but it ends up almost a bit terrifying. It's full of tiny reflections that I love, that show she looks at the world differently:

the glass... had its place as a natural stopping place for the young man’s eyes.

China is seldom thrown from a great height... you have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse ...

Her obsession with sighs, coming out in force, with this disturbing line:

Now a sigh disturbed him— profound, final, making him aware

Why is it disturbing? It's his sigh...

"The Mark on the Wall" is bizarre and utterly classic Woolf. I would direct people to this one as a starting taste of her general style. I often have this feeling when my thoughts spiral out of control, spurred by misperception or looking at something and thinking, "that's weird, I could've sworn...". "The String Quartet" is super interesting in that I don't recall much of her writing really lively party scenes with lots going on outside the character dialog. I was reminded of some of David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which was my whirlwind introduction to that virtuoso, where he depicted a thrilling and high-stakes (I think it was) billiards scene by interspersing dialog with the shots in the game and the balls careening around. But of course in Woolf there's something else going on and the story is about anything but the string quartet. "The Legacy" is probably the most straightforward thing of hers I've ever read. The ending is a punch to the gut. "The Lady in the Looking-Glass" is also the classic Woolf mood, of a brooding, mysterious Downton Abbey Pride n Prejudice woman sitting a dark room with mirrors, it's probably thunderstorming out, the servants are preparing some lunch. Jane Eyre comes to mind, though I've never read it.

Not sure why Haunted House is the headliner. Although all the stories have the sense of haunting or people with numerous closet skeletons, there's no perceptible theme among them. Which is fine.

One other thing I thought was cool was there are so many threads or references to other works of hers. I'm not sure the chronology here. But the Dalloways (both Clarissa and Richard) make several appearances, as do beachwalks (harking back To the Lighthouse). One of the stories is literally called "Moments of Being", which is an important phrase for Woolf and was picked for the title of a memoir-graphical essays (Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing). She also pre-empts Steven Pinker's book "...any object mixes itself so profoundly with the STUFF OF THOUGHT..." (82). But the line is also a good description of these stories and her works as a whole. They aren't neat, compact packages. They're threads of atmosphere that work their way into the stuff in your thoughts. ...more

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