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To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

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What Members Thought

Jan 04, 2020 Antonio Gallo rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: in-italiano, autore, narrativa, psycho, letteratura, scrittura, vita, classici, mente, arte

Sintesi: un'isola, un gruppo di villeggianti, un tramonto di settembre, un progetto di gita che sfuma per il cattivo tempo e si verifica soltanto dieci anni dopo. Tutto qui, sembra, uno dei romanzi più interessanti del Novecento.

Distinta in tre tempi la storia si sviluppa come da un buio, pacifico e vertiginoso scorrere del tempo. Al di là dei fatti che formano la trama, ridotti in poche battute, una conversazione, un pranzo o il lento scorrere delle ore, viene alla luce una storia di persone e ...more

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Sep 16, 2019 marianne rated it it was amazing

Shelves: chez-moi, favorites, ebooks

[In which I attempt to use the English language to capture how brilliantly and uniquely Virginia Woolf manages to cast a spell using that very same English language in To The Lighthouse.... A fool’s errand, I know.]

I loved this book and I consider it some form of genius.

The story centers around the Ramsay family and takes place over the course of a noncontinuous twenty-four hour period. It starts one afternoon just a few years before the Great War. The Ramsay family and their friends have conve [In which I attempt to use the English language to capture how brilliantly and uniquely Virginia Woolf manages to cast a spell using that very same English language in To The Lighthouse.... A fool’s errand, I know.]

I loved this book and I consider it some form of genius.

The story centers around the Ramsay family and takes place over the course of a noncontinuous twenty-four hour period. It starts one afternoon just a few years before the Great War. The Ramsay family and their friends have convened at their summer home on the Isle of Sky, as they do every year. The book opens mid-conversation; Mrs. Ramsay is promising her youngest child, six-year-old James, that they will sail to the lighthouse the next day.

This first section is called “The Window” and reflects the painting that Lily, the family’s thirty-something au pair, is trying to put the finishing touches on. It’s an abstract work showing Mrs. Ramsay reading to her son, through a window, and it mirrors Woolf’s narration style; abstract and changing. We get to spend this part of the book entirely inside the minds and hearts of its characters, seamlessly passing from one character’s stream of consciousness to the next, sometimes within the same sentence. Peering into their minds, we see their desires, their fears, their obsessions, questions, their quirks and neuroticisms… And through them we learn the issues surrounding the men and women of that era, conflicts between father and son and husband and wife, the different forms of love and passion. It’s all there. And it takes place all over the course of an afternoon and evening.

Mrs. Ramsay is no doubt the centerpiece of the group. Everyone has eyes on her, and for her, whether it’s her youngest son, to whom she is spending much of the afternoon reading, or her husband’s student, who feels oddly drawn to her even if he can’t entirely wrap his head around her. Like the lighthouse she has promised to take her son to, she is a bold and warm beacon of light that attracts all those around her, whomever they may be.

When night falls, the novel transitions into an impressionistic sequence called “Time Passes”. This is a shorter passage which beautifully covers the ensuing decade, a decade that is marred by turmoil, decay and loss as England suffers unimaginable loss throughout WWI. The Ramsays too experience tragedy during this time. The prose is mostly centered around descriptions of the vacation home as it changes throughout the years. This is when I really fell in love with this book. The writing is completely magical and thinking about it gives me goosebumps, every single time. There is a sort of timelapse of the house’s organic changes through time as nature begins to reclaim it, all intertwined with news from the war and the Ramsays. It transcends whatever it is I normally think of as “prose” and if you can imagine the equivalent of a Monet or Picasso on paper, in the English language, that’s what this section felt like to me.

As with most things, there is rebirth on the other side of change. The war ends, the country begins to bounce back, and a few years later the Ramsays have decided to revisit their old vacation home. The house is hurriedly cleaned up, and the family and their friends soon arrive. A decade has passed since their last summer vacation at the house.

“The Lighthouse”, the final section in the book, begins one morning as the Ramsay family is setting off to the lighthouse, the trip that all those years ago Mrs. Ramsay had promised James, now a young man. Lily stays behind at the house and, having found her old unfinished painting, spends the morning making the final changes. Like “The Window”, this is again a stream of consciousness that is passed along from one character to the next, like a game of hot potato, except with grace and fluidity. All the while, Lily is working on her painting, adding the final touches, just as Woolf herself is tying the various elements of the book together and wrapping up the story.

I happened to read Mrs. Dalloway before To the Lighthouse, and I couldn’t have picked a better way to do it. It seems like Woolf took the techniques she had developed in Mrs. Dalloway - stream of consciousness across several characters’ inner dialogs and the idea of setting a book across a full day - and popped them into a new dimension.

This might just be my favorite novel ever… a true masterpiece.
...more

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Dec 15, 2011 Daisy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: house, england, to-re-read, classics, audio-library-books, knitters-mentioned, scotland

I listened to this wonderful narration but now I want to turn right around and read it, have it again.

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Nov 10, 2016 Tanya rated it liked it

Shelves: format-audiobook, list-1001-btrbyd, list-1001-btrbyd-2006, list-1001-btrbyd-core, 2016

I enjoyed this on audiobook, especially Mrs Ramsey and I thought it was effective heading the characters thoughts intermixed with the dialog. This was a 3.5 rating as I wanted to keep listening and spend a little more time with the characters.

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