To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
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Book Reviews of To the Lighthouse
Book Review: On First Reading Virginia Woolf
Summary: 4 Stars
When I read a poem I generally have to read it several times before I can fully (hopefully) absorb its meaning. To The Lighthouse (TTL) reads like a prose poem, a text that also needs more than one reading. You read it slowly, and intently, and then reread passages. This being the case it is somewhat gratifying that the book is only 200 pages long for if it went beyond that it could become a sizable reading project.The reader becomes a spirit flitting between the minds of the novel's characters. Their thoughts become the substance of the story. The plot is minimal; the action insignificant. In fact, the most physically active participants of TTL are the sun and the wind which prowl through a decaying house in the book's mid-section. Here Ms. Woolf becomes particularly poetic in describing the effects of the elements on a house that has been abandoned for ten years.
Mrs. Ramsey is a strong woman who is married to a professor who is well grounded in Victorian views about women. Her role is to serve her family, and to praise and feel sympathy for her husband. A physically attractive woman with eight children she still has ways of wielding power over people. Lily, on the other hand, is a single woman who values her independence, but doesn't seem -to me- to be achieving anything. The male characters are generally weak men who compensate by being arrogant. And it is not what these characters say that matters as much as what they think, and that is something you are privy to throughout the book.
The first 100 or so pages portray a one day scene in the lives of the Ramsey's and their guests in their seaside vacation home. Around thirty pages of the book are devoted to a dinner scene in which most everyone is bored. I must admit that the boredom was convincing as I began to be suffused with the same feeling. I am sure, however, that if I read this section one more time I will view it in a different light.
This stream of consciousness novel should be read by everyone interested in reading their way through the literary canon. Although it is a 1920s experiment in form it is still highly accessible to the average reader.
Book Review: Quite possibly the worst book I have ever read.
Summary: 1 Stars
This book is quite possibly the worst book I have ever read. If you ever took a literature class in college you will remember that there are a variety of ways to critique a book. Most classifications include basing your critique on how well the work teaches true principles, the form of the work, the background and ambience of the work and the author, and how well the work stands the test of time. This work fails abysmally in all of these areas.
First of all this is a book about nothing and nothing happens. There is no plot and the author does not say anything worth thinking about or reading twice to get the meaning. Some critics claim that this is why the book is so good. Some even claim that Woolf is trying to say something about hum-drum life, family structure and even, absurdly, male and female roles. Don't believe it! Don't waste your time reading this.
Secondly, this book has no form, no climax, no denouement, no nothing. I suppose you could say that this means the form is that literary word used to describe books that make you want to commit suicide when they are assigned in an English course taught by some spinster Lesbian - stream-of-consciousness. Well there's no stream and no character in the book is conscious. Obviously the author did carefully construct the inner and external dialogues so it is emphatically not stream-of-consciousness. Read Joyce and then this garbage and you will see the difference.
Thirdly, there is no point looking into the life and ambience of the author and period of writing if this is the best book she wrote. (And it is generally considered the best book she wrote)
Lastly, this book fails the test-of-time standard. It is becoming more and more irrelevant.
Now you may ask why did I read this then? Because it was assigned reading. This book is the written equivalent of strychnine. Every page is so utterly bereft of anything of value that your mind and intellect writhe in agony as you force your abused eyes to read the next sentence. Be kind to yourself and tell your literature teacher you would prefer self-immolation to having to read this.
Book Review: Stunning, if You're in the Mood for It
Summary: 4 Stars
Take my word for it--if you've not read Virginia Woolf before--you need to be in the mood to read her. I think her books can be unbearable otherwise. However, I was in the mood for "To the Lighthouse," and I thought it was terrific.I've been much more intrigued by Virginia Woolf after Michael Cunningham's "The Hours," (and the subsequent film) brought her back into the limelight. She was fascinated with the degree to which everyday, seemingly trivial details of life can seem to be matters upon which the state of the world hinge in the lives of those experiencing them. Therefore, in Virginia Woolf's world, the decision as to whether or not a vacationing family will visit a lighthouse on the following day becomes the focus of everyone's thoughts--to a little boy, it seems as if his world will end if he doesn't get to go; to the father, his ability to determine whether or not they will go gives him a sense of power and authority over his wife and children.
And at the center of all this non-drama is Mrs. Ramsay, wife and mother, who is the foundation upon which the family is built. Woolf is expert in communicating the influence Mrs. Ramsay has on those around her. Everyone is struck by her beauty, her bearing, her very existence. It's this quality in her that makes so many wives and mothers the center of their respective families, which gives "To the Lighthouse" a sort of universality that resonated very strongly with me.
There has been a lot of literary study on the psychology of the novel (especially Freudian), which has become somewhat less interesting as Freud has become commonplace. I would instead appreciate it for the utter mastery of language exhibited by Woolf, and the insights she has into male/female relationships.
"To the Lighthouse" is one of those books that left me feeling incredibly sad in a very satisfied way, and I can't even tell you why. I don't always enjoy such ethereal writing (I don't even enjoy other books by Woolf) but in this case I enjoyed every word.
Book Review: Good, but tough to understand
Summary: 4 Stars
I thought that this book was incredibly well written, but while i thought that it was well done, and it was certainly reflective of the time in which it was supposed to represent, I thought that it was very difficult to understand. I found myself re-reading passages over and over again, just to get the meaning that Woolf was trying to convey. I thought that the author was trying to express a stoic look at the snobbishness of the Victorian era. While Mrs. Ramsay is the guiding light in the entire book, I thought that she was also the one that really made it difficult to understand. I also thought that Mrs. Ramsay was the one that referred to the lighthouse the most. I recognized the lighthouse as a symbol for the goals that everyone that was vacationing there had, but also for everyone that was visiting the Ramsays. Also, reflective of the era, is the way that Mrs. Ramsay looked at love. She liked the concept of being in love, but she didnt nessacarily love who she was married to. Or rather, she did, but she chose to question it. I am still not sure what the whole deal is with the Ramsay adults. The Ramsay children, however, are the idealistic symbols for the future--they symbolize the promise of what is possible to come for the family and the rest of the world.They thought taht the lighthouse was the answer to all of their problems--and in reality, it was the creator of most of them. And, of course, while the Ramsays were a huge part of the story, Lily Briscoe and Charles Tansley were the two characters that epitomized the entire theme of the novel. They are the abstract, just like Lily's paintings, and they are the ones that really understand the world and what is going on. They are the ones that will still survive when the society that everyone knows crumbles to the ground. All in all, I thought that this novel was well written, but I thought that Woolf could have explained things a little better.Book Review: Challenging but edifying
Summary: 5 Stars
"To the Lighthouse" reads like a dream. By that, I mean Woolf's writing has a dreamlike, impressionistic quality that uses little dialogue. The novel is about several English people who spend their summers in the Hebrides, islands northwest of Scotland. The lighthouse mentioned in the title is located on one of the islands and symbolizes a goal or an ideal to which several of the characters aspire in one way or another.The most prominent characters are the Ramsay family, whose internal conflicts form the basis for their existence, much like any other nuclear family. Mr. Ramsay is a philosophy professor, an imperious man who dreams of being remembered for his work and enjoys laying down the law with his children. Mrs. Ramsay's love for her husband has dwindled to the point of her not being sure why she ever fell in love with him in the first place, but she is enamored with the *idea* of being in love, always looking forward to her single friends getting married.
The central character, however, is a woman named Lily Briscoe who paints canvases of an apparently abstract nature. Her conflict appears in the form of a character named Charles Tansley, an unsociable chauvinist who admonishes her that "women can't paint, women can't write." Lily Briscoe's efforts to paint represent the difficult, introspective process of artistic creation.
In combining the themes represented by Lily and the Ramsays, Woolf portrays the problems of being a woman artist in a society that discouraged women to be artistic or creative (the discouragement represented by the voice of Tansley) and therefore having to deal with the disappointment and frustration of conflicting with social mores (illustrated by Mrs. Ramsay's discontent in her marriage). However, Lily triumphs in completing her painting at the end, as Woolf triumphs in completing her novel.