Review: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

title: Mrs. Dalloway [purchase here]

author: Virginia Woolf

published: originally 1925; my edition 1953

genre: literary fiction

pages: 296

source: my parent's bookshelf and now mine :)

GENERAL SPOILER ALERT:  If you've never read Mrs. Dalloway, and would like to discover it with no previous knowledge of the plot, I suggest you stop here.  Since it was published in 1925, I'm writing with the assumption that I'm the one late to the party (which is usually the case with the classics) and many of you lovers of literary fiction have probably either read it already or are super familiar with the plot.  So, if not, stop.  Now.  You've been warned. 

"So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying 'that is all' more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all.  Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking." (page 58-59)

My parents are in the midst of a remodeling project (they're adding french doors that open onto a deck off of the dining room), and a crucial part of any home project is the purge, the figuring out of what to get rid of and what to keep.  On the chopping block was a bookshelf full of vintage books, mostly classics, that they'd acquired over the years.  With the exception of my recent splurge at Strand, I've been willfully resisting bookstores, so I'm excited for the shopping bag full of books that I'll be taking home to NYC bit by bit over my next several visits.

The first book from my haul I dove into was Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, chosen because it was referenced multiple times in Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest, and I wanted in on the references.

This copy was my mom's, evidently for a class in college.  I LOVED reading her notes in the front and back of the book (doesn't she have neat handwriting!?!), and it was pretty fascinating to see how they were teaching the tome when she was in college, though I wish I had read the notes after I read the book.  I kept looking for evidence of Clarissa's latent lesbianism and kept waiting for Septimus to finally crack.

I really enjoyed Woolf's narrative style.  It reminded me of a clean, steady continuous shot in a film, where the director is able to jump from one character's perspective to another seamlessly.  The shift between each characters' perspective seemed effortless and Woolf was able to weave the central characters' story lines together in a way that made sense and didn't seem forced (which is an issue many authors have when they try to compose a coherent novel comprised of multiple interconnecting stories).  

Like Joyce's Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway takes place on a Wednesday in June (the entire 700+ pages of Ulysses takes place on June 16th, 1904), and like Joyce, Woolf is incredibly focused on the interior life of her characters, on the innumerable thoughts, experiences and impressions that collectively make up how an individual experiences the world. However, Woolf succeeds where I've often felt Joyce fails, in that her purpose seems to be communication whereas Joyce many times seems content with incomprehension and inaccessibility for the common reader (ex:  Finnegan's Wake).  To be fair, I haven't read Ulysses yet (I will!  It's on the list and is coming, along with a Bloomsday Reader, in that same shopping bag full of books from my parents!), but reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in high school left a bad taste in my mouth.  Even though both Woolf and Joyce are exploring the interior lives of characters, Joyce's exploration seems masturbatory and personal whereas Woolf's feels open and communicative.  Maybe I'll change my mind after spending more time with Joyce...

Balance and counterbalance seem to factor heavily into Mrs. Dalloway.  Woolf is constantly balancing two oppositional forces (desire v. duty, coming together v. falling apart, masculine v. feminine) and these conflicts serve to unify all the disparate action occurring over the course of the story: Clarissa pulling herself together at her dressing table in preparation for the evening's party balanced against Septimus' slow descent and unraveling to the point of suicide; her desire for Peter Walsh balanced against her dutiful marriage to Richard Dalloway; the vibrant Sally Seton of Clarissa's youth (with whom she shared a passionate kiss) balanced against the woman Sally becomes post-marriage to Lord Rosseter; women who feel deeply yet pull themselves together and press on balanced against the men, acculturated to feel nothing, who give up and fall apart.  There is just so much going on in terms of detail and imagery but it was all essential and working toward the common unifying themes.  Such a tight piece of writing!  Mrs. Dalloway is a master class in revision and paring down a lengthy piece to just the purely essential.

And the semi-colons!  Recently, I listened to UC Berkeley Professor John Bishop via iTunesU discuss Mrs. Dalloway, and he pointed out that her use of semi-colons were another example of coming together v. falling apart:  semi-colons take two sentences/ideas and bring them together, making them one sentence.  Pretty damn clever, Mrs. Woolf.  

Bishop also pointed out some interesting parallels between Woolf's life and that of her central characters of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, which I hadn't realized because I haven't read much on Woolf's biography.  Woolf was a central member of the Bloomsbury Group, and often hosted parties and gatherings for those involved, so, like Mrs. Dalloway, a part of her life concerned the bringing of people together.  Woolf later committed suicide by filling her pockets with stones and drowning herself, allowing herself to come apart like Septimus.  Crazy how life imitates art.

Rubric rating: 9. I loved it and I'm excited to explore more by Woolf.  In fact, To The Lighthouse is on my nightstand...

Top 10 Most Difficult Books? Oh, it's ON, Publisher's Weekly!

Last week, Emily Colette Wilkinson & Garth Risk Hallberg of the "Difficult Books" series over at The Millions selected ten of the hardest of the hard tomes for Publisher's Weekly.  Two were works of philosophy, but here are their picks for fiction:




1.  Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
I'd never heard of Djuna Barnes until earlier this week, when I read a piece over at BookRiot on women writers as bad ass or more so than Hemingway.  According to Scott Beauchamp, "Nightwood, Barnes’ best novel, has the distinction of being the only lesbian-themed Modernist gem to garner praise, and an introduction, from arch-conservative T.S. Eliot. Before writing it, Barnes was born in a log cabin, raped as a teen, and lived as a Bohemian journalist in Greenwich Village. She was ahead of her time in just about every way possible, even pioneering the kind of New Journalism that wouldn’t catch fire until mid-century. A poet, novelist, playwright, and illustrator, Barnes exemplified both the glory and isolation that come with being a perpetual outsider. Hemingway wouldn’t have known what to make of her."  I'm intrigued!

2.  Women and Men by Joseph McElroy  
Apparently, this is a postmodern mega novel on par in terms of complexity with Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.  

3.  A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift
A religious satire.  Allegory.  Written in the late 1600s.  All things that scream "find a copy with an awesome introduction and some thorough footnotes!"

4.  Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson
According to Wikipedia (so take it with a grain of salt) this is the longest real novel in the English language.  I still haven't finished Infinite Jest and I LOVE me some DFW.  So check in with me when I'm 40 and I'll let you know my thoughts...

5.  To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
I just finished Mrs. Dalloway, and I've really enjoyed my time with Woolf so far!  This reminds me of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but was a far more enjoyable reading experience.  Bring it on!

6.  The Faerie Queen by Edmund Spenser
An incomplete epic poem? Sign me up?

7.  The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
An epic chronology of a two fictional families interspersed with insights on the writing process itself.  Let's do this.

8.  Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
Oh Joyce.  You are not my favorite.  And he actually made up a language from other languages to write this book.  Probably the only book on the list I can't imagine every willfully picking up.

Now, I'm one of those really obnoxious people who takes pride in doing the intellectually challenging, and doing it well.  Lists like these do nothing to deter me.  In fact, I read them like personal challenges. So the gauntlet has been thrown down.    To the Lighthouse and Nightwood are both now on my holds list. 

Review: The Mystery Guest: An Account by Gregoire Bouillier

title:  The Mystery Guest: An Account [purchase here]

by: Gregoire Bouillier

translated by: Lorin Stein

pages: 120

genre: memoir

source:  New York Public Library

I have needed this book several times over the past six years without knowing it.

The Mystery Guest is Bouillier's true account of what happened when the love of his life, who, without any warning, literally walked out on him five years prior, calls him out of the blue and invites him to be the "mystery guest" at a birthday party for an artist he's never met, where he ends up (unknowingly) participating in an uncomfortably personal piece of performance art.

The first half of the book is dedicated to Bouillier processing what happens when someone he cared for deeply inserts herself back into his life as abruptly as she withdrew years before.  Reading his processing was incredibly cathartic for me, as I've been the person abruptly dropped several times in my romantic past:

• Six years ago, months into what I considered to be developing into a pretty strong connection, K called on a gorgeous Friday afternoon to end things with me as he ran his errands. I had been napping (I was in my first year of teaching first grade at the time, and by Friday afternoons, I had given all of the energy I had to my little kiddies and desperately needed to recharge) and through the fog of newly abandoned sleep, all I caught was something about dry cleaning, that he felt he could only pursue something serious with me, that he wasn't in a place to be pursuing anything serious right now, and that he was about to lose the connection as he was getting on the subway.  It was an elevated, delicate variation on the "it's not you, it's me" theme, and seemed an inaccurate, incomplete picture.  The blow took three minutes to deliver and weeks to recover from.
• Five-ish years ago, I had been dating S for several months and had met his friends and his father (which is a story in and of itself! His father makes for epic storytelling, and I mean that in the best possible way...), when he disappeared.  Poof!  Gone.  Two or three weeks went by when I finally got word that he was very busy at work but could spare half an hour to meet me for a drink, during which I basically broke up with myself because he was too exhausted/burnt out/wasn't present enough/didn't care to say what needed to be said.  I left him in the bar with 25 min left in his 30 minute break.  It's surprisingly easy to end things with yourself when you're the only one doing any of the talking.

Bouiller and I share many parallel experiences.

Like Bouillier, I like clarity.  I'm not good with ambiguity.  My mind wanders into a zone of over-analysis that can, at its worst, be crippling and excessively annoying to those I'm closest to.  Almost against my conscious will, I replay conversations, moments, interactions over and over again trying to pinpoint the exact moment when something shifted, so I can figure out what exactly I did wrong (so I never do it again!).   I vacillate between giving the other person a benefit of the doubt far more generous than any reasonable person would allow, to inditing them as the coldest, most unfeeling man to have ever encountered, and pause everywhere in between, searching for WHY?????.  But the gods of circumstance shined on Bouillier, and he receives his answers in the most perfect manner for a writer.  On page 93, he writes "And just when you think you've thought of everything...you forget the book sitting right there on the bedside table."  Without giving too much away, I envy Bouillier in that he finds some sort of explanation in the pages of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. He gains some (wonderfully artistic and perfectly literary) insight into the ever elusive WHY?????, can take it in and move on.  If all human behavior were that simple, and if all answers could be found in the book on the bedside table...

Like Bouillier, I have also been woken from a dead sleep by an unanticipated voice at the other end of the line.  His offered a hello, mine a goodbye.  Of this moment, he writes: "I could hear how soft and gummy my voice was, how drowsy-sounding, and without even giving it any thought I realized that she must under no circumstances be allowed to know she'd woken me up.  That was crucial, even if it meant sounding cold and detached--and why on earth did she have to call...when I was fast asleep and at my most vulnerable, my least up to answering the phone...In real life, it goes without saying, the ideal situation eludes us, and no doubt that's a good thing for humanity in general, but just then I'd have done anything to keep her from guessing that she'd caught me sound asleep in the middle of the afternoon." (page 6).  In my situation with K, the last thing I wanted, when I was about to be cast aside, was to appear at any more of a disadvantage than I already was, and Bouillier's fear of being perceived as weak completely resonated with me.

Like Bouillier, I've had long lost lovers reappear out of nowhere.  S asked me to lunch last summer, for no other discernible reason other than that he was in town.  K found me on Facebook a few weeks ago and messaged me to find out if I were still teaching.  Personally, I prefer the past to stay there, unless there's a compelling reason that benefits us both for their reappearance. It's as if they only considered how they would feel talking to me, and gave no thought to the fact that I would experience some sort of emotion having to, in turn, talk to them.  They certainly felt some urgency years ago to put distance and silence between us, so why reach out now? And the WHY?????? reappears...WHY???????  I hate the WHY?????

And like Bouillier, I've felt compelled to change something about myself when finding myself suddenly by myself.  Bouillier goes through a lengthy turtleneck phase post-breakup.  Of it, he writes:  "Since I'd always hated turtlenecks worn as undershirts and despised the men who wore them as the lowest kind of pseudo-sportsmen with, as they say, the lamest kind of collar, I started wearing turtlenecks as undershirts the moment she left.  Basically, I never took them off.  No doubt this was magical thinking on my part (if I never took them off, nothing would ever take off on me); at any rate, these turtleneck undershirts erupted in my life without my noticing until it was too late and I was under their curse.  You could even say they'd inflicted themselves on me, so that now I hardly remembered the wind on my neck, which is the very feeling of freedom itself." (page 18).  I thought a lot about this idea of the "freedom" he was trying to gird himself against, and upon reflection I realized that several of my tattoos have come about post-heartbreak, but for the opposite reason.  My method of self-protection seems to be to race toward that "freedom," to get back on the horse as soon as possible, to show myself and the world that I'M FINE, so then maybe I will be.  The idea for the tattoo has usually been percolating for months and has nothing to do with the relationship at hand, but there's something about finding myself alone that lights a fire in me to get it NOW.  My first tattoo came on the heels of K, and my most recent came after H  (about a month ago, H, the Chekhov enthusiast I mentioned previously, made his hasty unanticipated exit).  It's almost as if I'm subconsciously (as Bouillier was no doubt conversely doing with his turtlenecks) trying to reassure myself that life is continuing and I'm actively participating in it.  I'm evolving.  I'm changing.  And the person who walked away doesn't know the person I am now, at this moment, anymore.  That they'll never know that I've changed is irrelevant. It's the act of moving forward where I find comfort.

I'm absolutely going to purchase a copy of this book.  It was (and is) reassuring to know that there's someone, somewhere, as neurotic and overly-analytical as I am when it comes to affairs of the heart, who has been dropped and has lived to tell the tale.  I'm sure this is a book I'll come back to again and again, as my romantic history unfortunately tends to repeat itself, but next time at least I'll know to look to the book on the bedside table. 

Rubric rating:  9.  

Where Writers Slumber...

Courtesy of Apartment Therapy, peek inside the boudoirs of some famous writers:

Ernest Hemingway's bedroom in Key West

True story:  the small chair at the bottom left (our left) of the bed is a birthing stool!

Virginia Woolf

Truman Capote

LOVE the reds. Can absolutely see this as his space.

Victor Hugo

Red.  Brocade. Walls.

Marcel Proust

Since he spent a HUGE amount of time in bed, I expected a bit more...