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Title: To the Lighthouse (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics S.) by Virginia Woolf, Eileen Atkins ISBN: 0-14-086162-9 Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks Pub. Date: 01 June, 1997 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 2 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (120 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Woolf wouldn't find pleasure in nationalism... she pioneered
Comment: I feel it's only fair to say I consider Virginia Woolf to be a visionary artist who transcends genre, time, gender, and nation. As to the "idea" that Faulkner and Joyce employed "Stream of Consciousness" to better effect than V Woolf I feel entirely the opposite. In the woman's work, good old V. Woolf, we find the "Stream" perfected.
May I recommend another Virginia Woolf book "A Room of One's Own" as a companion piece. "To The Lighthouse" champions the feminine principle in a way that many women nowadays don't seem to recognize as important and yet the mild, internal workings of a book that has most obviously been written by a woman still seems to set men's teeth on edge and the women that haven't learned to recognize themselves in print appear reluctant to look at themselves in Virginia Woolf's mirror.
TTL is a book for the yin/female principle on the planet which celebrates the yang/male principle as well. It's so sad that many readers fail to grasp the importance of this synthesis. I might even venture to call Virginia Woolf a mystic, although not in the conventional way. TTL is a masterpiece.
Rating: 5
Summary: To the Lighthouse
Comment: I just finished Virginia Woolf's TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, and I am not sure what to write about it, except that it's a brilliant, fulfilling read, very rich and layered and nuanced and wonderful. It's a singular work that facilitates new understanding and insight, and makes the point effectively that the drama-rama of the human mind can supercede or at least equal the drama of the world around us.
The Ramsay family is the center of the story, and it is at their home in the Hebrides that the first section takes place, "The Window." In fact, this section, which covers only part of a day in time, comprises 125 pages of the 209-page book. In a way similar to that of MRS. DALLOWAY, Woolf switches the perspective among the Ramsay family and some of their guests, Lily, an indepedent single woman, the Ramsay children, and Charles Tansley, a student of Mr. Ramsay, a philosopher.
There are threads of the issue of femininity in the book. What do the differing ways in which Mrs. Ramsay, mother of eight and supportive wife, and Lily, single woman, painter, enact their feminity mean? How do they deal with and understand and love each other? What forces do they unleash on each other?
The book deals skillfully with the perception of the passage of time, as "The Window" deals with that short bit, focusing, I found, the book's most amazing and engaging section on the dinner party that night. The second section, "Time Passes," is merely 20 pages, but covers ten years, and the final section, "The Lighthouse" is one morning. There are all kinds of
reminders of the fluidity of time in the text, a skull of an animal on the wall in the children's nursery that causes them to be unable to sleep, as well as Mrs. Ramsay's glance back into the dining room at the end of the party and her realization that the success of the evening, which was somewhat hard won, is ephemeral and over, already in the past.
The second section has a different view of time, almost looking at the house from nature's point of view as time ravages the house through the war when the family isn't using it. It's very meditative. Major events in the lives of the people who attended the dinner are enclosed in brackets, as side notes, for the passage of time and the entropy that ensues is the major drama here. We see the lives and deaths of the characters as small things, part of a greater cycle that winds on and on in a more eternal, less fleeting, way.
What Woolf begins in the first section, she deals with more strongly in the third, I think, and that is that the validity of each person's differing perception of the others is equal. Two of the Ramsay children, James and Cam, go with their father and a fisherman and his boy to the lighthouse in the sailboat. James despises his father, while Cam sees his weaknesses and loves him for his vulnerabilities. She knows how James feels and feels drawn to protect James, too, but she knows a different father than James does.
I think that was what struck me the most about the book, the way the characters' combined perceptions assemble a greater truth and understanding than each of them singly has.
Woolf has a great insight and beautifully descriptive and engaging way of writing about thought as dramatic and intimate. Woolf writes about such things, the pleasure of picking up a pleasant and soothing thought so elegantly, that it doesn't seem to be writing on a page, but access to another's mind, and the part of the truth he or she holds.
And overall the writing is simply stunning.
In the first section, one of the characters loses a brooch on the beach, and they discuss going back to look for it the next day. By the time the book ends, the lost brooch seems so far away, in some deep and distant memory. I think this one detail is a mark of the beauty and success of the book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Here and now
Comment: So here we have Mrs Woolf masterpiece, her great achievement at grasping time. This is a book for those that like a challenge in reading. It is not passive reading, Virginia needs your whole attention throughout the novel, and if you are lucky and get inside you will hace a wonderfull experience, you will be there with her and the characters, reading with a dim light, saling towards the lighthouse, painting, the air will brush your face and you will smell salt and sea and be dizzy after lunch. I do not Know if what she tells really interested me because it was jus something you experiment. Good chance
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Title: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf ISBN: 0156628708 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 24 September, 1990 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, Mary Gordon ISBN: 0156787334 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: December, 1989 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: The Waves by Virginia Woolf ISBN: 0156949601 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: June, 1978 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Moments of Being: Second Edition by Virginia Woolf, Jeanne Schulkind ISBN: 0156619180 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: August, 1985 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce, Seamus Deane ISBN: 0142437344 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $9.00 |
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