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Title: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty (Introduction) ISBN: 0-15-690739-9 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: December, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.85 (114 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Tedious - loved by Eastern critics; hated by readers
Comment: I knew I was in trouble when I read the L-O-N-G run on sentences that clogged up reading flow in just the first two pages. No one talks like that. No one thinks like that. And no one writes like that except for pretentious authors beloved by academics who have no idea what interests people outside of moldy ivory towers. Virginia Woolf committed suicide. All the more reason to avoid this book lest the contagion of her world view infect your mind and depress you. This is a dated, pretentious, dry, irrelevant novel. I am asuming that it is being pushed because it is poilitically correct to have at least one female author in the great books list. Unfortunately, this is a dead author whose works should have been allowed to die with her rather than be immortalized. In fact, while Woolf was contemplating suicide, she should have destroyed her work along with her life in a big bonfire. That would have spared us this novel that I wasted money on.
Rating: 5
Summary: An Elegy to the Moment
Comment: I just reread what I think of as Virginia Woolf's finest book and my personal favorite. Even if one isn't too fond of Woolf, I don't know how any serious reader or lover of great literature could fail to be impressed with the sheer beauty and timelessness of this radiant novel.
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is a portrait of the Ramsay family; a portrait "taken" as they are vacationing at their summer house on the rugged coast of Scotland. This is a very interior portrait, though, the most interior I've ever encountered in any book to date. For me, at least, this book transcends the barriers of time, culture and all else and speaks straight to the soul, from the soul, something few authors have ever been able to do.
This is also the most profoundly human novel I've ever had the pleasure of reading. The Ramsays face tremendous challenges in TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, but the book's focus isn't on the challenges per se, but on how the Ramsays react to those challenges and how they are affected by them.
There are probably as many interpretations of this novel as there are readers, and I think that's a great tribute to Woolf. One of the novelist's main jobs is to touch the heart of her readers and TO THE LIGHTHOUSE certainly does that. What makes this book a masterpiece, however, at least in my opinion, is the fact that the Ramsay family act as a microcosm of all humanity; in the Ramsay's we can find something of all families. In the Ramsay's we can find something of ourselves.
Some people have told me they found the inclusion of Lily Briscoe extraneous. I don't think there's one extraneous thing in this book and certainly not Lily. She loves the Ramsay family yet she isn't a member. She's the one character who's able to step back a little and see the family as a whole, with love, yet without becoming overwhelmed. I think Lily is as essential to this book as is the Boeuf en Daube or even the lighthouse, itself.
And why the focus on the lighthouse? Will the journey to it really change anything? Will it really add to or subtract from the life of the Ramsays, especially when so many other factors threaten to disrupt and tear them apart? For me, the lighthouse represents constancy in a world of change. A point of reference to which the Ramsays can cling. The journey out to the lighthouse, for me, at least, represents the promise that one can go home again, even if that home has greatly changed. If the journey to the lighthouse is made, and the promise is fulfilled, then life can go on, even if it is as storm-tossed as the rocky Scottish coast.
I remember feeling awed the first time I read this book and subsequent readings have only increased that feeling a hundredfold. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is Virginia Woolf ar her very finest. This book is one of the greatest masterpieces of 20th century fiction. It's radiant; it's miraculous; it's triumphant. It's a book no serious reader, or lover of life, can afford to miss.
Rating: 1
Summary: Quite possibly the worst book I have ever read.
Comment: 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.
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Title: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Maureen Howard ISBN: 0156628708 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 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: The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham ISBN: 0312305060 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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