Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a bold piece of work, partly because the style of writing differs drasti­cally from the mainstream, and also because it leaves in the reader’s mind, a feeling that Woolf is more inter­ested in capturing the thought, the idea and the essence of the moment than in impressing the reader with the narra­tive. The latter obser­va­tion can be contested, but the former cannot be denied.

The reader will soon realize that the events in the story are immate­rial. In fact, events are an inter­rup­tion to the flow of thought, and it is through this flow that the reader becomes a part of the fantasy world. The charac­ters themselves are more impor­tant than what they do, for what they do is a mere reflec­tion of their state of mind at that instant. Under­standing the charac­ters is the impor­tant thing; all else is secondary.

Woolf makes this task of under­standing easy, by flitting from one character’s mind to the other. Every fleeting moment stretches across minutes, and every thought lingers for sometime on an object, and then makes its way through deeper roads. Every­thing is connected to the past, and the past is, in a way, more real than the present itself.

The style of writing needs some getting used to. There is nothing linear about a person’s thoughts, and this non-linearity is reflected in the writing. To keep track of what is going on requires a good deal of effort.

In the copy that I had borrowed from the library, somebody had scrawled after the last line of the book -

“All these people only feel, feel, feel, but do nothing.”

- which was right, of course! Woolf coaxes the reader to live the story, become a part of it, and trans­form the ordinary into the extraordinary.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 09:58 and is filed under Book Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.