★★★★★ | Literature | Print / Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
An absolute masterpiece. Totally gutted by the end. I can’t believe it took me this long to read it.
The writing is intricate and sometimes hard to follow, but beautiful too. Woolf deftly slips from character to character in a stream-of-consciousness style. The writing mimics actual distracted, unvarnished thought no matter whose eyes we’re looking through. The grumpy self-absorbed Mr. Ramsey is an oaf who fancies himself an intellectual, but has lately been having self-doubts, which is wreaking havoc on the entire household. Mrs. Ramsey is intellectually and emotionally superior to her husband, which feels autobiographical.
Mrs. Ramsey constantly worries over the shabby house and the bill coming due to repair the greenhouse, yet invites a dozen guests to stay and feeds and entertains them all. Guests seem put out that they’re forced to come to the Ramsey’s house. No one wants to be there, yet they come and stay from social obligation?
The way Woolf shifts the stream-of-consciousness point of view from character to character in the same long paragraph is incredible. The transitions somehow feel smooth and right. The way she repeats certain phrases again and again feels very much like the way we actually think when we’re fretting or obsessing over something. There is humor and irony in equal doses if you read carefully.
I love this line: “like the beak of a ship up a wave.” Mrs. Ramsey’s fascination with birds is a theme throughout the book.
I was gutted by the death of Mrs. Ramsey in the final third of the book. I did not see this coming, nor the death of the two children, nor the sad decay and decline of the house. The survivors have reunited at the beach house many years later and all they feel is grief and sadness at their loss (yet seemed annoyed when times were so good). This is the way of life.
Highlights
there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains for ever after. This would remain. Desire for Permanence
She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered; to detach it; separate it off; clean it of all the emotions and odds and ends of things, and so hold it before her, and bring it to the tribunal where, ranged about in conclave, sat the judges she had set up to decide these things. Is it good, is it bad, is it right or wrong? Where are we going to? and so on.
How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought, looking at her empty coffee cup. Mrs Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too – repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her.
As she walked along the Brompton Road, as she brushed her hair, she found herself painting that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the knot in imagination. But there was all the difference in the world between this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her brush and making the first mark.
What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs Ramsay saying ‘Life stand still here’; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) – this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs Ramsay said.
‘you’ and ‘I’ and ‘she’ pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint.
Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? – startling, unexpected, unknown?