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[Edited, pictures added 10/5/22]

Almost more poetry than prose, critics have called this Woolf's greatest work and also the most “difficult�� one. It’s written in dreamy paragraphs creating an atmosphere but with little plot. I struggled with it, having trouble keeping the characters separate, even trying mnemonics at one point. Then I caught on. The book follows six people from when they were tots to old age; three men, three women; one of the men dies. You have to accept that five-year old kids playing on the lawn think complex philosophical thoughts.



If I were to pick a typical paragraph, I’d say one like this:

‘Yet we scarcely breathe,�� said Neville, ‘spent as we are. We are in that passive and exhausted frame of mind when we only wish to rejoin the body of our mother from whom we have been severed, All else is distasteful, forced and fatiguing. Jinny’s yellow scarf is moth-colored in this light; Susan’s eyes are quenched. We are scarcely to be distinguished from the river. One cigarette end is the only point of emphasis among us. And sadness tinges our content, that we should have left you, torn the fabric; yielded to the desire to press out, alone, some bitterer, some blacker juice, which was sweet too. But now we are worn out.��

Italicized paragraphs about nature (flowers, streams) act as chapter breaks as the characters move from one stage of life to another. The six meet periodically over the years, usually for dinner.

It’s Virginia Woolf so we expect and get great writing. Some of my favorite passages:

[a train]: "There is the very powerful, bottle-green engine without a neck, all back and thighs, breathing steam."

"Louis, glancing, tripping with the high step of a disdainful crane, picks up words as if in sugar-tongs."

"Nothing should be named lest by doing so we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I, for one instant, steeped in pleasure."

"The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice."

Like Nabokov, you have to have your dictionary on hand. A few I looked up were emulously (emulating); assegais (spear); guillemot (type of tern); charabanc (bus); conglobulated (just what you think �� clustered); nacreous (pearly, iridescent).

I will definitely read this book again. It’s more a book that you “absorb�� than read.



Top image: Painting by Peter Barker, Rolling Breakers, Pentreath Beach on mallgalleries.org.uk
The author (1882-1941) from newyorker.com