To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
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Book Reviews of To the Lighthouse
Book Review: Stylish Nonsense
Summary: 1 Stars
Just how do you write a "stream of conscious novel?" It takes loads of talent to form words together precisely how one might think. I first encountered this style reading James Joyce's "A Portrait of and Artist as a Young Man," and later was amazed to see it perfected by William Faulkner in "The Sound and the Fury" I have to admit, this style of writing was starting to grow on me......that is until I read Woolfe's version of stream of conscious in "To the Lighthouse" which in my opinion is a failure of epic proportions. What makes it an even greater failure is the fact that some people consider this one of the greatest books ever written. To speak the honest truth, I can't remember I time when I have not enjoyed reading a book, as much as I didn't enjoy reading this one.
According to "expert" analysis, To the Lighthouse is supposed to use a mixture of symbolism in random thinking to show a portrait of characters that are searching for the meaning of life. The actual Lighthouse is a different symbol to each individual character. To the Lighthouse is also supposedly a dead on accurate view of gender roles and differences between men and women, and every character represents a different piece of this gender puzzle. I have read what the "experts" say, but I will let you be the judge.
The novel does have an original way of telling its story. It drifts from character to character without ever telling us when, and lets us know the thoughts they are thinking. These vague thoughts tell a story as they are strung along. I wish I could explain the plot, but there really isn't one. The story opens at the Ramsey's vacation home where we learn mainly about Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey, and their assortment of guests. Guests like the painter, Lily, and the sexist Charles, and the dignified Mr. Banks. The first half of the story brings us in and out of their minds. Your mind will wander more than the writing style as you desperately try to grasp what the hell is going on, and wondering if anybody really thinks like this in real life. The thoughts of these characters are borderline absurd, and the most amazing aspect of all is that by the end of the novel I didn't know a single thing more about these characters than I did when it started. All I know is the nonsense, abstract thoughts they think. I don't know a thing about their beliefs or character.
The only one I felt I knew a thing about was Mr. Ramsey. He wants others praise, and his son James wants to kill him. What else? Lily likes to paint....and Mrs. Ramsey likes to go to the market. Oh, and at the end of the story Mr. Ramsey finally takes his son to the lighthouse, which never happened in part one. Oh, we also learn that a few of the Ramsey's have died, in the "Time passes" sequence. Not that we care, we didn't know any of them anyway. Is this review helpful to you? Does it make sense? Probably not, but neither does a word of this novel.
This is without a doubt, the worst classic I have ever read. Even with all the explanations. I really want to meet the person who got something out of this mess and try to understand why in the world anyone would think it was great. I don't get it. I love stream of conscious books, but this one is a failure on a colossal scale.
If you like books about nothing, characters that are lifeless, books without plot, which are all about style and have no substance, than I think this might be the book for you. I wish I could tell you more of what it was about, but it really isn't about anything. I can picture a conversation I might have later in life about this novel and I think it might go something like this:
"So, did you ever read that book called To the Lighthouse?"
"I think so, I can't really recall." (Myself)
"What was it about?"
"You know, I don't really know, I don't think it was about anything really." (Myself)
It has been a day, and already these words ring true. This book will be forgotten faster than my dinner I am eating at the moment is digested.
Grade: D+
Book Review: One of these days you must go to the Lighthouse
Summary: 5 Stars
--"The subject of this brilliant novel is the daily life of an English family in the Hebrides." That's the copy description on the back cover of my edition of "To the Lighthouse." I found it hilarious. I laughed for five minutes.
--So it's an inadequate description of the novel?
--Inadequate is an inadequate word to describe just how inadequate it is.
--So what is "To the Lighthouse" about?
--Well that's just the thing. To say it's about a family vacationing by the shore, about the delicate relationships between them and their friends, about how time changes them and their relationships between each other...is to miss the point entirely even if it is perfectly accurate.
--As I understand it, this is a novel in which ten years passes in about fifteen pages, while the rest of the novel meticulously describes two days.
--Yes, exactly. Like Proust, Woolf begins with a childhood incident that will echo down through the years. Like Joyce, she concentrates on the epiphanic moment. Reading "To the Lighthouse" is a bit like viewing a painting in which the characters move...but very slowly. Woolf passes from character to character, inhabiting each of their minds in turn, seeing the world through their eyes. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their flawed but enduring marriage are the central bodies around which the rest orbit and Lily Briscoe, a spinsterish amateur painter, ostensibly stands in for Woolf herself, but it is hard to say that any of the characters are less or more important than any of the others--this is essentially the genius of Woolf's handling of psychological perspective. Everyone has a point of view and each point of view is essential to attain a vision of the whole.
--But it is a novel essentially about family relationships?
--And relationships between men and women, men and society, women and society, human beings and the inescapable fact of their mortality. Again and again, Woolf asks the question, "What does life mean? What is it for?"
--Does she have an answer?
--Yes. And no.
--It's ambiguous.
--It's provisional. But it's enough to help Lily make it through the dark storm of life to use a perfectly horrible metaphor. It's her lighthouse.
--Woolf has a reputation as a difficult author to read.
--And it's well-deserved. She is a difficult read for the majority of readers, who, let's face it, are awaiting Dan Brown's new novel as if it were a major event in world literary history. What happens in "To the Lighthouse," when anything happens at all, isn't as important as how it affects each character internally. That is to say, Woolf's focus is on the fleeting but all-important impressions that the world leaves on us and that ultimately make us who we are. Her greatest gift is to capture these gossamer-thin states in a language of exquisite accuracy--capturing in words the flavor of fleeting emotions seldom if ever described before, even as they evaporate on the tongue.
--You would have to love language, then, to fully appreciate her work.
--Indeed. Her sentences don't move the story forward; they move the story deeper. She writes a poetic prose that many contemporary readers might mistake for unnecessarily flowery and overwrought--when, in fact, it is sharp as a surgeon's scalpel and cuts to the heart. And yet for all its surgical accuracy, it is the sensuous prose of a writer for whom language is like a box of brilliant colors is to a painter, for whom sentences are like caresses to a lover, except that in this case what is touched are the most potently orgasmic areas of our brains--needles to say, the ones most difficult areas to reach.
--But Virginia Woolf reaches them?
--You might say she's a master masseuse.
--Ha ha. Does she provide a happy ending?
--No, not exactly. But it's a deeply satisfying experience all the same.
Book Review: Transience
Summary: 5 Stars
After reading some lighter fiction, I decided to delve into something deeper, a novel by Virginia Woolf. I located the tattered copy from my school days and took a deep breath. Here is another phenomenal book by Virginia Woolf. Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse broke new ground and Virginia Woolf emerged as the chief figure of modernism--and perhaps feminism--in England.
The book begins as Mrs. Ramsay, mother to eight children, speaks to her youngest child, James, age six, about his wish to go to the Lighthouse on the following day:
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark", she added.
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition bound to take place, and the wonder to which he looked forward to, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch.
~To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
However, Mr. Ramsay, as well as Charles Tansley, soon shatter the boy's hopes by saying that it will rain the next day, and that a trip to the Lighthouse is out of the question, which upsets both James and his devoted mother greatly. The setting for the story begins at the summer house at the Isle of the Skye during the summer, where the Ramsays entertain numerous friends in addition to their large family. Mrs. Ramsay tries to soothe the boy by saying that the weather may be fine, because she has a far greater understanding of her sensitive, gifted child than either her husband or his friend. Keenly aware of the beauty and brevity of childhood, she wants her children to be happy and hopeful, to be filled with light, in a world with ample darkness. The novel focuses on the intensity of childhood emotions, and highlights the impermanence of adult relationships and the transient nature of everything. The issue of the trip to the Lighthouse is brought up time and time again in the first section of To the Lighthouse, The Window, in which through repetition and stream-of-consciousness writing (Virginia Woolf's trademark style), the interior monologues of various characters are presented, seizing fleeting moods, feelings, thoughts, and insecurities, and the transient nature of things and relationships, giving permanence to these moments in the book, making them immortal--which seems to have been the author's goal. Like our own thoughts, which are often repetitious (and dare I say dull at times), the characters seem to tire of their own cyclical thoughts. At other times, their disjointed thoughts are featured. Virginia Woolf captures the dual reality of thought in To The Lighthouse, thought which is alternatively repetitive and disconnected. (Think about your own thinking--isn't it also this way?)
Just as in the story the painter Lily Briscoe tries to capture beautiful Mrs. Ramsay in a painting (although Lily is scoffed at, and the male belief was that women could neither paint nor write) the book attempts to make the impermanent permanent, and portrays these fleeting moments brilliantly, especially those between husband and wife. This is Virginia's Woolf's most autobiographical novel, and her husband, Leonard Woolf, called it a masterpiece. Virginia Woolf broke from tradition in this three part book, a novel in which there's not much action or dialogue, but instead much thought, about the ordinary as well as about time and the fleeting nature of life. One of the book's main themes is the ubiquity of transience. Is there an antidote for this often disturbing transience? Virginia Woolf suggests to women that while family and human relationships are important (although difficult sometimes), creative work may hold the key--meaningful work that will engage and may even outlive us. In this way, transience may be transcended to some degree.
(This review is from my blog about books, Suko's Notebook, suko95.blogspot.com.)
Book Review: A subtle, beautiful masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
Virginia Woolf's lovely, poignant novel based on her own family is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Basing the novel's central character of Mrs. Ramsay on her mother and Mr. Ramsay on her father, the well known philosopher Leslie Stephen, Virgnia Woolf strove to recreate artistically the mysteries and vagaries of time. The novel is divided unevenly into two sections, both of them dealing with possible or actual trips to the lighthouse in the vicinity of the Isle of Skye where the Ramsay family has a house that they use on summer holidays. Rarely in English fiction has the inner dynamics of a family been laid so completely bare as in this.
One of the most enjoyable things about this book is the way Virginia Woolf so probingly explores the personalities of the individuals, though three stand out above all others, the aforementioned mother and father, and the unmarried amateur painter Lily Briscoe. By the end of the novel, we feel that we know all of these characters on the deepest possible level, and while the two women are sketched more lovingly, it is the father, Mr. Ramsay, who is etched in his essence. Brilliant, but with striking emotional and intellectual limitations, he is both the head of the family and its bane. It isn't that the author dislikes him, but she is acutely aware of his vices and virtues (in her own life, Virginia's father despaired over his wife's early death, creating an atmosphere of gloom over Virginia's teen-aged years). The two women are plumbed less deeply, but we come away from the novel having a sense of their worth.
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE was revolutionary when it appeared as one of the first attempts to profit from many of the lessons to be taught English language fiction by the extraordinary work of Marcel Proust. Woolf had a love/hate relationship with Proust, on the one hand recognizing very early on that he was the great literary genius of the century (Joyce, on the other hand, the other titan of the century, she thought less highly of), but finding his work so brilliant as to paralyze her. She famously remarked that after reading Proust she felt incapable of writing anything. But the fact is that TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is in many ways a Proustian work. Like Proust and unlike almost no one prior in English literature (with the notable exception of Butler's THE WAY OF ALL FLESH), Woolf fictionalized her own life (she herself appears in the novel as the girl Cam) and produced a profound analysis of the nature of passed time. Also like Proust, she attempts to break down traditional narrative and present her story impressionistically rather than historically. While she may have felt that Proust kept her from writing, the fact is that she produced the first literary masterpiece following in the footsteps of Proust.
But in the end, what makes this most remarkable is the rich detailing, the marvelous nuances, the lush delineations. This is a book to be read slowly and savored, much as one would read a long poem. Indeed, this comes very close to being at times prose poetry, such as the wonderful section "Time Passes," that is sandwiched between the first section of the novel "The Window" and the final section "The Lighthouse."
After having confessed my love of this novel, I will add that I adore this book despite being less than overwhelmed by some of her other fiction. I love Woolf's nonfiction, but ORLANDO I sometimes regard as my least favorite work of fiction by a major writer. This novel, however, easily rates as one of my favorite twentieth century novels. I would urge anyone who has similarly found some of Woolf's other work unpalatable to give this one a try. I would be astounded if many will find it in any way less than brilliant.
Book Review: My Boeuf with Virginia
Summary: 4 Stars
Here is a small point with a larger purpose: Virginia Woolf does not know Boeuf en Daube. Or at any rate, Mrs. Ramsay, the heroine of "To the Lighthouse," does not, and there is no suggestion of any irony in her thought on the topic:"Everything depended upon things being served up to the precise moment they were ready. ... To keep it waiting was out of the question. Yet of course tonight, of all nights, out they went, and they came in late, and things had to be sent out, things had to be kept hot; the Boeuf en Daube would be entirely spoilt."
Well, if you know anything about the kitchen, you know that this is nonsense. Boeuf en Daube is probably the last thing that needs to be "served up to the precise moment ..." As Elizabeth David says in her "French Provincial Cooking:" "there must be scores of different recipes for daubes in Provence alone... essentially a country housewife's dish." And more to the point, per Ms. David:
"The daube is a useful dish for those who have to get a dinner party when they get home from the office. It can be cooked for 1 ½ hours the previous evening and finished on the night itself. Provided they have not been overcooked to start with, these beef and wine stews are all the better for a second or even third heating up."
I wonder how many English majors from the 1950s sold their souls for a good Boeuf en Daube (did Sylvia Plath have the recipe?) - and how much better off they would have been if they'd seen through it: understood that Mrs. Ramsay did not get the point, because Ms. Woolf did not get the point. Indeed, strictly speaking, the creation is not Mrs. Ramsay's at all, but you'd have to be a sharp-eyed reader to catch on: it is the servant who does the work and delivers the finished product and she, I suspect, knows better than her mistress how flexible and compliant it may be. There is an irony here and it is lost, I suspect, on the mistress and on the mistress' creator.
All of which leads to a larger point: Virginia Woolf does not know servants. Instance in particular her observation of Mrs. McNab, the old char who comes to reopen the summer house after long disuse. We get an elaborate set-piece description of Mrs. McNab, and it is not pretty: indeed, it is mean-spirited and dismissive in almost every way. Mrs. McNab "lurches" and "leers" She "was witless and she knew it;" she sings "like the voice of witlessness." Now, if this is true, it is inexcusably rude: one may want, for some artistic purpose, to show her lurching and leering for, but here it serves no purpose, unless you count its actual function in throwing light on the author. Anyway, the chances are it is not true. My guess is that Mrs. McNab has operated under far more constraint in life than either Ms. Woolf or Mrs. Ramsay ever dreamed of. Witless people do not survive under the iron whim of a Mrs. Ramsay; poor chars who do learn to survive will find that it takes all the skill one can muster.
I could go on, but I need to stay within Amazon's 1,000 word limit. The point is not that "To the Lighthouse" is a bad book. It's actually quite a good book; or at least it is a book full of good paragraphs, and Virginia Woolf seemingly cannot write a bad paragraph. It is as bad novel, because Virginia Woolf has little of the capacity for imaginative empathy that makes a really good novelist. They say that Shakespeare stands as a void at the center of his plays because he has poured every part of his being into his characters. Virginia Woolf takes almost all of her characters into herself. It is well done, but often we get to know more than we really want to know.